Month: June 2019

Product News | October 11, 2021

How Starlite Media elevates the shopping centre experience with DOOH

Across America, shopping centres anchored by grocery stores, big box stores, pharmacies, and other businesses draw tens of millions of consumers each day. These consumers are a group prepared to transact on location, but who are likely also growing accustomed to information-rich shopping experiences in the online space.

For brick and mortar stores, one of the keys to maintaining or establishing strong connections with this audience is to meet, in real time, its demand for information on available products and services. With its growing network of intelligent digital out-of-home screens placed at and around shopping centres, Starlite Media believes it has found a solution that will do just that.

Toward a digital future

Since starting out in the out-of-home space in 2003, Starlite has built up a strong stable of static inventory and locations at outdoor shopping centres. Around 2014, however, the company began to focus on the future of digital and the opportunities that could come from replacing static inventory with dynamic, intelligent tools for communicating with audiences. Beginning in 2019, Starlite began replacing signs in its most prominent locations with digital screens.

A test conducted with the help of Nielsen has shown this migration to digital to be an excellent choice. In mid-2019, Starlite placed digital and static advertising for a national cereal brand in Starlite’s locations, comparing resulting sales lift between the formats. Where static achieved a solid 8% lift, digital’s lift reached even higher, to 14.5%. According to Nielsen, both outperformed in-store, TV, radio, and online advertising.

With an expected count of 500 screens deployed in New York and other critical markets within the next 12 months, and several thousand more on the way within the next couple of years, the company is eager to build on its early success in digital and deliver new opportunities to retailers at its locations.

There where people transact

Every one of Starlite’s screens is at a shopping centre that includes a grocery store, as well as pharmacies, restaurants, and other sorts of retail establishments. With Starlite’s screens given prominent placement at these shopping centres, it offers media buyers an enhanced ability to connect with shoppers right before they go to make a purchase. The screens are a great way to deliver valuable information about products and services through a compelling medium, making it easier to raise awareness and even fuel impulse purchases.

Better still, with the vast majority of shoppers heading directly home after going to the grocery store, memorable advertising on Starlite’s displays can lead to a quick turnaround for at-home searches, or even online transactions. Brands around the world are seeking out multichannel marketing opportunities that incorporate both DOOH and mobile or online advertising, and Starlite’s unique market means it is in a good position to benefit.

The sights and sounds of DOOH success

With its move into digital, Starlite is hard at work ensuring its network delivers on all the features advertisers want. The company’s screens all offer full-motion video, some up to 4k, and audio playback capability. It’s a feature set that holds a great deal of appeal for advertisers of all kinds, but the company also foresees the entertainment industry, and particularly companies in the film space, being particularly drawn to the multimedia potential of these screens for trailers and other ads that incorporate sound.

For all the benefits of that sort of flashiness, it’s the potential beyond the display that Starlite finds the most exciting about the DOOH space. Audience analytics features and detailed campaign reporting are must-haves for the national and global brands that typically advertise on the company’s displays. By ensuring its data are accurate and third-party verified, the company is seizing its opportunity to provide the data-driven insights that advertisers crave, and to build a sterling reputation within the industry.

Given time, they believe that this approach will help win them and other forward-thinking DOOH networks a large slice of the ad budgets commonly devoted to online advertising today.

Starlite and Broadsign

Wanting to ensure its entry to the DOOH space was done correctly, the company spent years evaluating software options before settling on adopting the complete Broadsign platform. This includes Broadsign Control for content management, Broadsign Direct to manage sales and inventory, Broadsign Reach to enable programmatic transactions, Broadsign Publish to enable local content management and Broadsign Control Live for instant control over network health and playback.

By adopting this suite, Starlite is enabling putting in place all the pieces it needs for a successful, aggressive DOOH expansion. Critically, intelligent playback will help ensure the right content is played on the right screens at the right times, while integrated sales and inventory through Broadsign Direct drastically reduce time spent on RFPs and inventory management. The company will also be able to attract new buyers and different kinds of campaigns by enabling data-driven, programmatic transactions through Broadsign Reach.

Finally, Broadsign’s compatibility with a wide array of services, like the Quividi audience analytics platform, ensures Starlite can bake all the intelligence and features they want into their network. As the company’s network grows, it will be empowered to maintain the high levels of efficiency and quality that will set it apart.

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.