Month: February 2019

Product News | October 11, 2021

The recipe for a great DOOH campaign

“Tell an amazing story.”
To get people engaged, and to give your campaign another life, Ric Albert, creative director at Grand Visual, thinks a solid story is a must. This is how a piece of digital out-of-home content goes from a simple advertisement to having a true impact on people’s lives.
Ric took part in our Broadsign Summit Creative Panel this year at ISE, along with Keith Nilsen from voodooh, and Oskar Op de Beke from Kinetic Worldwide, to chat about how creativity and dynamic content are the building blocks of a successful digital out-of-home campaign. If you haven’t done so yet, be sure to watch the panel, and check out our Q&A with Ric below, where we pick his brain to see why he thinks is a creative DOOH campaign is important for brands to tell their stories.

Q&A with Ric Albert

Why should a brand add DOOH to their marketing mix?

Digital out-of-home has a different type of reach than any other medium at the moment. With digital signage, we’re able to create real-life experiences and interactions that aren’t quite possible in the world of print and online. Out-of-home can evoke emotions and can add contextuality and relevancy, much of which is lost with other channels.
Digital out-of-home is still a fairly new medium and is showing impressive growth. It’s less saturated than other media channels and has yet to encounter the same ad-blindness and scroll-past effect that online channels are currently struggling with. Out-of-home is a great tool to cut through ad clutter and is a smart addition to a multi-channel campaign.

What is the recipe for a great digital out-of-home campaign?

There is one main ingredient for a DOOH campaign to be amazing, and that’s a great creative concept. The technology or anything else involved in the campaign is merely a tool to build a story that will truly engage the audience. They are what help the story come to life.
At Grand Visual, we craft stories that lead to a valuable end-experience for the user, and that’s whether we’re working on a campaign for a few people walking by or a group of people gathered in Times Square. No matter the screen, the goal is to create something that the audience wants to interact with.
We often see DOOH campaigns that are too focused on the tech aspect, not really thinking about how the creative concept will fit in. For a campaign to be a success, you need to first consider the story that needs to be told. Then you need to think of how the technology will bring you there.
Now once you have your story settled, another ingredient necessary for a successful campaign is collaboration between all different media partners. This can be a large list, from screen media owners to in-house creative agencies to developers, so it is important to select partners that are all aligned with the campaign vision.
The best campaigns are those where you don’t necessarily notice how it’s built or why it’s built – they just leave you with a smooth, creative and interactive campaign. And if you have a campaign that engages people, you’ve done what you needed to do.

How do brands determine the goal of their digital out-of-home campaign?

As with any channel that doesn’t provide a clickable link, having purely quantitative numerical results can be a bit difficult with digital out-of-home. While the launch of a campaign can definitely be correlated to values like sales uplift, an increase in store foot traffic or website visits, it’s also important to have goals based on how successful the campaign was at storytelling or audience engagement.
As one of the media channels showing the most growth, brands clearly understand the value DOOH brings. With its reach and storytelling potential, DOOH is particularly strong for brand awareness and retention campaigns.
Of course, campaign goals have an impact on the type of story you want to tell with a DOOH campaign. Do you want to use your DOOH campaign to create social media buzz? Do you want participants to interact with the screen in the moment? Do you want to amplify a multi-channel campaign? These will all influence the storytelling approach you take.
The main thing brands need to do here is work closely with their DOOH creative agency or team to determine the appropriate messaging for their needs. DOOH is definitely not one size fits all and each campaign should be unique in its strategy and resulting campaign creative.

How does digital out-of-home work in a multichannel campaign?

What’s interesting about DOOH is that it can be a bit of a chicken and the egg situation. Which comes first? A great DOOH campaign that gets shared on social media or makes the news? Or a cool social campaign that drives dynamic DOOH content?
At Grand Visual, we’ve worked on campaigns from both of these angles. Whether we’re creating an original piece for DOOH, or working with existing content from TV or online, the key here is to make sure messaging is consistent across all channels, but at the same time tailoring it for DOOH.

What are some of your favorite digital out-of-home campaigns?

I love campaigns that can evoke a reaction or some sort of emotion. As an industry, we should collaborate and celebrate everyone who pushes the creative limits of the medium, from media owners to tech platforms to creative agencies.
One of my favourite campaigns in the last year was by Spotify. The campaign was dynamic, clever and used user-generated data.l. They were able to create a story that was completely localized in each country, and delivered to DOOH screens around the world ensuring a global impact.

I also loved the campaign for Spider-Man, Into the Spider-Verse, where visitors at Times Square were able to transport themselves into the movie’s animation style in real-time. There’s something so exciting about thousands of people interacting with a campaign. An advertisement that really becomes part of someone’s life is one that truly has strength.

About Ric


Ric Albert is the Creative Director of Grand Visual, an award-winning production and creative technology company that is driving dramatic evolution across the Digital Out of Home Landscape.
Ric has been the driving creative force behind many of Grand Visual’s ‘Media First’ campaigns which have gone on to win Cannes Lions, D&AD’s and Creative Circle awards. Ric has directed AR tigers along London’s Oxford Street for Pepsi, orchestrated a dance-off with Mickey Mouse for Disney Parks, ensured the Oreo eclipse was the stand-out celestial event of the year and delivered large-scale Digital Out of Home campaigns for over 45 Warner Bros. films globally.

Product News | October 11, 2021

How 75Media increased its fill rates by 15% with the Broadsign Platform

2024 was a record-breaking year for out-of-home (OOH) advertising in the United Kingdom (UK). Total OOH revenue for the region grew 7.7%, pulling in a record-breaking £1.4 billion in revenue. While spend is expected to cool down slightly in 2025 at 7.2%, the medium will grow through technological innovations like dynamic digital billboards, interactive displays, and programmatic advertising. 

Digital OOH (DOOH) now dominates the OOH landscape, accounting for 67.1% of total spend as brands seek the flexibility and creativity that digital offers. That being said, demand for static OOH – also known as classic OOH–  isn’t going anywhere, remaining an effective medium for long-term brand-building campaigns. 

With both formats offering distinct benefits to advertisers, the most effective campaigns combine both. This is where UK-based media owner 75Media comes in. As one of the leading providers of large-format static and digital roadside billboards in the region, 75Media makes it easy for brands, big and small, to tap into the power of OOH with the flexibility, scale and simplicity that modern advertisers need today.

How 75Media makes out-of-home simple for buyers

Wanting to provide brands with national reach through large-format, high-impact roadside billboards, 75Media’s sites are strategically positioned in high-traffic locations across the UK. These include key commuter routes and busy city centres, with placements carefully chosen for their proximity to gyms, shopping centres, supermarkets, and other points of interest. 

Through a series of strategic acquisitions, 75Media has exponentially grown its network, going from 140 to nearly 1,300 digital and static billboards across the UK in just five years. Today, with just over 1,000 large-format static billboards, 75Media’s hybrid network is about 75% static and 25% digital. 

75Media’s static and digital roadside billboards

In addition to their wide-reaching network, advertisers choose 75Media’s network because they make OOH measurable and efficient without compromising on quality. Wanting to deliver real audiences to clients as quickly as possible, 75Media focuses on minimizing the back-and-forth typically needed to book OOH campaigns. 

75Media’s network attracts a broad mix of advertisers and campaigns, including major brand campaigns, fast-moving consumer goods promotions, as well as ads for local businesses, the public sector and charitable organizations. On the digital side of its network, there’s exciting momentum toward dynamic creative optimization (DCO) campaigns. Collaborating with their data partners, DOOH.com, Veridooh and Artbot, 75Media has been unlocking new ways for brands to engage with their audiences in real-time. 

One notable dynamic, data-driven campaign that ran on 75Media’s network was Nike’s campaign featuring renowned Norwegian professional footballer Erling Haaland for the promotion of its new Mercurial football shoe. Leveraging the dynamic triggers available on the Broadsign Platform, the artwork and messaging of the DOOH ad would dynamically update whenever Haaland scored a goal during a match. 

How Broadsign makes it easy for 75Media to run its network

One platform to efficiently scale, manage, and sell their digital and static out-of-home inventory

75Media has been using the Broadsign Platform since day one. Operations Director Alex Simpson—one of 75Media’s founding directors—had previously used Broadsign at his former company and saw first hand how reliable and effective the platform was. So when 75Media launched in 2020, continuing that partnership was a natural choice. And with their significant growth plans, they needed a platform that was capable of seamlessly scaling alongside their business. 

In addition to the platform’s robustness and reliability, 75Media chose Broadsign for its content and network management capabilities. The manual work typically tied to campaign scheduling, booking and execution is now automated, freeing up the team’s time to focus on enhancing advertisers’ experience with OOH.

Moreover, managing their static and digital assets through the Broadsign Platform not only kept things efficient and organized, but also provided them with seamless workflows to plan, execute, and monitor static and digital OOH campaigns without unnecessary complications. 

“The reporting capabilities provided by the Broadsign Platform for our digital and static assets allow us to be totally transparent with our clients. Being able to show brands exactly how their campaigns are performing in-flight is invaluable.”

Alex Simpson, Operations Director, 75Media

How 75Media optimizes fill rates with Broadsign’s flexible campaigns

Another key capability that 75Media has been leveraging is Broadsign’s flexible selling tools for their DOOH campaigns. This gives them access to our flexible campaign types, which are goal-based and data-triggered, allowing you to deliver more targeted results. In fact, 80% of DOOH campaigns that ran on 75Media’s network in 2024 leveraged flexible campaigns.

The most widely used flexible campaign type was the Campaign Average Share of Voice (SoV). This allows advertisers to define the average percentage of screen time their ad should get over the campaign’s duration. So what makes it flexible? The SoV on each screen can vary day-to-day to accommodate other campaigns requiring the same screens, but the target average SoV across all screens over the campaign’s duration will always be met. 

This is made possible by Broadsign’s rebalancing feature, which leverages our optimization engine to modify the pace at which a campaign is delivered to guarantee targets are met. Since adopting these new flexible capabilities, 75Media has seen an increase of 15% in its screen fill rates and has strengthened its client relationships by offering more flexible solutions. 

“Broadsign’s rebalancing feature helps deliver our campaigns efficiently while allowing us to maximize the space across our inventory. It’s particularly useful in ensuring everything runs smoothly without daily intervention from our delivery team.”

Alex Simpson, Operations Director, 75Media

The Campaign Average SoV campaign type is particularly useful for markets where flexible buying has not been widely adopted. Buyers can maintain the same fixed results typically obtained through slot-based campaigns while providing you with the operational flexibility to fill your network optimally.

What we can expect from 75Media in the near future

While 75Media will continue to invest in new digital and static sites to extend its coverage and reach, its focus in the near future is to become the most efficient OOH operator in the market. It plans to do this by investing in new technology and automation, removing the medium’s preconceived pain points, and providing the quickest way to buy OOH. 

Additionally, as programmatic capabilities continue to evolve, advertisers will grow more confident in data-driven OOH. With demand expected to rise, 75Media is actively exploring new audience analytics and multiple data integrations to enhance targeting and boost campaign effectiveness. 

Product News | October 11, 2021

Revolutionizing Broadsign’s Programmatic SSP: AI creative assistance and extended brand safety

According to GroupM’s 2024 End-of-Year Global Advertising Forecast, digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is projected to account for 42% of total out-of-home (OOH) ad revenue by the end of this year. One key factor of growth for DOOH is the integration of programmatic technology, allowing for real-time bidding and dynamic content delivery, enhancing targeting capabilities and operational efficiency. 

As programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) only continues to grow in importance, we’re excited to unveil groundbreaking enhancements to Broadsign’s programmatic Supply-Side Platform (SSP), designed to modernize workflows, maximize revenue, and reinforce brand safety for our media owners. The introduction of our patent-pending AI Assistant, Broadsign Header Bidder Pro, and enhanced Competitive Separation features, is going to revolutionize the way you sell, manage and deliver programmatic DOOH campaigns.

Your AI Assistant has arrived

Unveiled at our annual customer summit, Broadsign Connect, in Barcelona, Spain, back in January, Broadsign’s AI Assistant is a patent-pending tool designed to reduce the time media owners spend on repetitive tasks. This includes reviewing, categorizing, and approving incoming ad creatives from programmatic bids sent through demand-side platforms (DSPs). 

In 2024 alone, Broadsign media owners received between 32,000 to 43,000 unique OOH creatives each month that need to be manually reviewed and categorized. With that number expected to double this year, Broadsign’s AI Assistant will provide significant time and cost savings. As ad creatives are submitted to the Broadsign SSP, the AI Assistant sends an automated email with category and approval suggestions. 

To ensure that it integrates seamlessly with your current review and categorization process, Broadsign’s AI Assistant learns your network’s unique categories to organize and review creatives. It will continue to learn and evolve over time, and you get to decide whether to use the AI Assistant to fully automate the process or to continue providing recommendations only. 

By automating the categorization process, Broadsign’s AI Assistant can minimize common misclassification errors and quickly identify sensitive content that could hinder brand safety efforts. For instance, ads featuring alcohol on a screen near a school, or an ad that violates local laws like displaying a political ad next to a polling location, would be flagged by the AI Assistant with recommendations to reject the creative.

Priced-based auctions are now available with Header Bidder Pro

As part of the evolution of our Header Bidder offering, we’re excited to introduce the Broadsign Header Bidder Pro. As a refresher, we introduced our Header Bidder in 2022, which consolidates demand from multiple supply-side partners. This one-to-many programmatic approach allows media owners to simplify ad operations, maximize yield value, and increase fill rates. 

With Broadsign’s Header Bidder Pro, you now have the ability to run price-based auctions, helping you get the most out of your programmatic campaigns through higher yields and fill rates, not to mention a simplified auction process. A key advantage of header bidding, or mediation layers, is the ability to consolidate your programmatic demand into one slot, freeing up valuable space on your network. You also get access to better content controls, creative caching, and synchronization capabilities that aren’t possible with container-based setups. 

The combined benefits of Broadsign’s AI Assistant with Header Bidder Pro

As Broadsign’s AI creative assistant can categorize creatives more accurately, Broadsign’s header bidding solution will be able to easily match the right inventory with the right demand, resulting in higher-quality ad placements, improved buying satisfaction, and increased competition for premium inventory. Moreover, the combined features will facilitate the alignment of creatives with the varying compliance requirements across demand sources. 

Enhanced brand safety for programmatic out-of-home campaigns

Broadsign media owners have long been able to set competitive separation criteria for directly sold campaigns. With this release, we’re excited to extend that capability to programmatic campaigns. More specifically, categories created in the Broadsign CMS will now sync with Broadsign programmatic and platform interfaces. 

So, how does it work? Let’s say you have two fast food restaurants, neither of which want their ad to play next to each other. If these campaigns are booked directly, you can easily separate the campaigns with the existing capabilities mentioned above. However, if one – or both – campaigns were booked programmatically, there would have been no way to guarantee that the programmatic slot would not play next to the directly booked slot. 

With Competitive Separation for programmatic campaigns, that’s no longer the case. The system will make every effort to prevent these two campaigns from playing one after another, regardless of channel: directly sold or programmatic. However, It’s important to note that competitive separation is only available for other SSP creatives if you are running Header Bidder Pro.

The combined benefits of Broadsign’s AI Assistant with competitive separation

With Broadsign’s AI Assistant, creatives can be categorized at a more granular level, identifying not just the brand but also its competitors and associated categories. The AI Assistant will also be learning directly from your existing categories and can apply your custom taxonomy onto your creatives, saving you time when approving creatives and automating the competitive separation process from programmatic back into your player. 

It can also adapt and learn over time, recognizing nuanced relationships between brands and subcategories, such as differentiating between an “energy drink” and a “soft drink.” Moreover, as the AI creative assistant can enforce these competitive separation rules more effectively, advertisers will perceive your network as the more reliable option when it comes to protecting brand visibility and exclusivity.

How these enhancements will help you stay ahead in the rapidly evolving programmatic landscape

While these features were designed to solve a specific pain point at different steps of the pDOOH workflow, the real value comes from having these features work hand-in-hand for more efficient programmatic workflows, reduced errors, and to future-proof your programmatic revenue. 

Broadsign’s AI assistant helps automate time-consuming tasks like categorizing creatives and identifying competing ads, allowing for faster decision-making within header bidding frameworks. Combine that with competitive separation, and you can guarantee strategic and compliant ad placements to advertisers. 

Furthermore, failure to ensure competitive separation or effective creative categorization can lead to possible compliance violations, rejected bids, or damaged buyer relationships. Having all three features work together simultaneously can help minimize errors, ensuring a smooth and compliant workflow. 

Finally, integrating these features into how you sell and manage pDOOH campaigns ensures that you stay ahead of the competition in today’s rapidly evolving programmatic landscape. Combining AI-powered categorization, header bidding, and competitive separation creates a robust ecosystem that drives revenue, enhances buyer trust, and delivers a superior user experience – all while operating at scale and with greater efficiency. 

Learn more about Broadsign Programmatic SSP here.