Month: November 2020

Product News | October 11, 2021

Managing programmatic yield with Broadsign Reach

Managing network yield is a perennial issue, a nut that owners are anxious to crack in order to maximize inventory revenue. We know that transacting programmatic in an open bidding process, rather than just sticking with private deals, is one big step to take. What else?

Our Broadsign Reach product owner, Matthew Mercuri, laid out the process in a recent talk. Have a watch, or else read on for the details below.

Step 1: Ask yourself these questions

Before making any moves to upgrade your network or make significant changes to your programmatic strategy, it’s important to take stock of where things stand. Ask yourself a few questions to get a better picture of the current state of your business. Better still, write the answers down in a document you can reference in the future.

Why do buyers purchase my screens?

If you’re selling media on your network (and we’ll presume that you are), it’s because you’re meeting somebody’s needs. Who are they? Are you appealing primarily to buyers in a particular industry – healthcare, automotive, technology – or to buyers with broad target audiences? And what is it about your screens that makes them desirable to your buyers

Don’t just go with your gut – check your actual sales numbers. It’s possible you’ll be surprised by what you uncover.

What’s my fill rate?

Depending on your fill rate, you’ll want to approach developing your programmatic business a little differently. Is your fill rate a stone’s throw from 100%, or is it hanging out closer to 50%, or even lower? Take a note. We’ll have tailored advice for your specific position down below.

How do I price my non-programmatic deals?

Pricing can already be a complex thing in direct sales, and programmatic has the potential to make things a little more complicated just by its nature. That’s why it’s important to lay out exactly how you price your non-programmatic inventory and use that as kind of a guideline for what comes next.

What is your floor price? What are your CPM rates? What are some other factors that might influence your pricing? This is a critical question, so make sure you spend some time thinking about it.

Who is part of my audience?

One of the core concepts behind programmatic is that it allows the buyer to target audiences rather than just screens. For buyers, it’s a chance to reduce “wasted” spend on unintended audiences. For sellers, it presents an opportunity to charge a slight premium for a more targeted buy. Everybody wins.

Who sees your screens? Does it vary substantially by location, time of day, or other factors? Take the time to determine who your network reaches.

Understanding your audience is a key element of identifying the strengths of your network

Step 2: Go for the “easy yield money”

Quick wins are a great way to build some momentum and start making the best use of your inventory sooner. To help you achieve a few of these, we’ve identified some of the key areas that publishers can quickly improve to bring in more revenue.

Speed up your content approval process

Through the first three quarters of 2020, more than 83 million loss notifications were fired in Broadsign Reach. These notifications are indicators to the DSP of why it is losing a bid, and had just half of them actually been successful bids, each publisher could have made an additional $12,000. Not a huge amount, but every little bit helps.

Close to 40% of all these loss notifications came because the creative was not approved, and with an average time to approval of about 5 hours and 30 minutes, that’s no surprise. Buyers may just shift their bids to a different screen where the creative is approved, just to get their ad out there. These typically won’t be your screens.

The way to staunch this bleeding is to lower your approval times. This can can done by setting up auto-approval for trusted DSPs, seats, or advertisers, allowing certain types of media to be auto-approved, or even auto-approving any creative that your team doesn’t review within a certain time frame.

These can be pretty significant actions to take, but they can also make a big difference in driving down content approval time. Only adopt any measures you are comfortable with having on your network.

Finding ways to peed up your content approval can help you snag more deals

Use your screen’s fill rate to inform programmatic strategy

Your fill rate is a great, simple tool to gauge current supply and demand for your network, so be sure to use it to guide your next steps in programmatic.

If a screen’s fill rate is over 80%, it’s a good sign that you’d benefit from increasing programmatic supply to take advantage of demand. Alternatively, you might think about raising floor prices to capitalize on that demand instead.

On the flip side, if a screen’s fill rate is consistently below 50%, it’s probably time to consider reducing programmatic supply, or else dropping floor prices. Just be sure to keep your programmatic floor price at or above the same level as your direct floor pricing, or else you risk significantly devaluing your inventory.

Step 3: Take a look at bid range and adjust if needed

By and large, DSPs want to pay the lowest price possible, and they’ll use strategies like bid shading to arrive at a cheap, accurate price for a given bid. Our own Campsite DSP is an example of one DSP that employs this strategy.

If the bid ranges are small, you have a good opportunity to move your deal floors higher. The algorithms should follow your pricing up quite easily.

Alternatively, if your bid ranges and bid density are wide, you’ll need to be a bit more careful about moving floors. Moving the floor upwards could price some of the buyers on the lower end out of the inventory, ultimately reducing density and CPM both.

Review your bid ranges and ensure they’re set to maximize the value of your inventory

Step 4: Make use of the waterfall

Smart automation is key to success in programmatic, and the waterfall is a great way to use automation to your advantage. The waterfall allows you to assign different levels of priority to different kinds of deals, and then give preferential access to programmatic inventory based on the types of deals “competing” for a slot. For example, you might have a lucrative private marketplace deal targeting specific screens set to your top priority level, followed by slightly less lucrative private deal targeting all screens, and then maybe a relatively low-CPM open auction deal targeting remnant screens at the bottom of your waterfall.

Right now, about 70% of all publishers in Broadsign Reach only use one type of deal for their programmatic transactions. Nobody in Reach is using the waterfall just yet.

It’s a big missed opportunity. In addition to establishing general rules for what should constitute P1, P2, etc. deals in Broadsign Reach, you can also create parameters to promote different kinds of deals over the others if it is to your advantage to do so. For instance, a P1 PMP deal might be worth a guaranteed $80,000, but if you’re presented with a P2 private programmatic offer valued over $100,000, that P2 deal can automatically be promoted to top priority.

Take the time to communicate with buyers to make sure they understand what is possible. Ideally, you should tailor your offerings to your buyers’ preferences and needs, and find creative ways to price your media to everyone’s mutual benefit. It will maximize the value of your inventory and keep your buyers coming back for more.

Work with buyers to find creative pricing arrangements that work for everyone

Step 5: Act Like a DSP

DSPs are useful for picking out good screens and then triggering a transaction whenever the conditions a buyer is looking for are met. If a DSP is unable to do this job for a given transaction and you step up, that’s added value that should be accounted for when pricing the deal.

Broadsign Control’s preemptible slots, which allow ad spots to appear within a loop under specified conditions, are a good example of a tool that can help you deliver on the kind of targeting a DSP would offer. Additionally, you could sell by data signals like the presence of analytics technology, information about visibility based on where screens are compared to the direction of the sun at a given time, or just the specific venues a buyer might want to reach.

These kinds of offerings are the kinds of things that buyers crave. If you opt to offer them up, you can charge a premium on your inventory for doing so.

Give buyers additional tools for reaching their audience and you can charge a premium

Step 6: Get DSPs to support features that enhance your business

There are a bunch of features within Broadsign Reach that can make life easier and more lucrative for your business. Trouble is, not all DSPs have adopted them on their side. By taking some time to convince them to onboard some of our APIs, you can unlock hidden value in your programmatic business.

Here’s a look at some of the benefits that can be realized:

  • Publisher API: DSPs that use this API include 40% more publishers in their campaigns, dispersing money more evenly
  • Screens API: Leads to a 12% higher CPM floor vs DSPs who don’t use the API
  • Audience API: Offers a 20-30% greater likelihood of the DSP hitting the original spend goal
  • Deals API: Creates a 35-40% higher change of a campaign activating on time

Communicating the value of these integrations is an ongoing process for us at Broadsign, and a little help never hurts. If you’re interested in realizing these types of benefits through your DSP, talk to them and help convince them to bring all of our features to life. There’s a lot to be gained in doing so.

Looking to get a great start transacting DOOH programmatically?

Request a free demo to see how Broadsign Reach can help!

Product News | October 11, 2021

Digital out-of-home for holiday marketing: How to win high-intent shopping moments

A busy two-level shopping mall atrium with shoppers gathered along the upper-floor railing. A large digital billboard dominates the center, displaying a SportChek holiday advertisement beneath a glass skylight.

If your holiday marketing strategy is still built around the same playbook from a few years ago, you’re already behind. 

In 2026, consumer trends point to a more deliberate, hybrid holiday shopper: one who starts deal hunting months before decorations go up, takes more time to research and compare options, and routinely moves between mobile devices, AI tools, and physical stores before making a purchase. As a result, the path to purchase is becoming longer and more fragmented, creating dozens of high-intent micro-moments where brands have an opportunity to inform or influence what shoppers do next.

As agencies and marketers seek ways to connect digital discovery with brick-and-mortar purchasing behaviour, digital out-of-home (DOOH) inventory offers them a unique opportunity to reach consumers at key moments throughout their IRL holiday shopping journey. And with programmatic making campaigns faster and easier to launch and adjust, DOOH can play a vital role in an omnichannel holiday strategy — with the flexibility to meet campaign needs as they evolve.

Why holiday shopping micro-moments matter in 2026 — and how DOOH can help

Major sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain at the centre of the holiday shopping calendar, but they represent just a few moments in a purchase journey that now starts earlier and moves fluidly between digital and physical touchpoints. According to new Microsoft research, the average holiday conversion journey now takes 52 days, with 63% of U.S. shoppers starting before Halloween. That journey is also increasingly hybrid: per Salesforce, 42% of shoppers visit stores to buy products they previously researched online, while 79% use smartphones while shopping in-store. 

It’s within this extended, omnichannel journey that holiday shopping micro-moments occur: reflexive, high-intent windows when consumers turn to a device or their surroundings to act on an immediate need, like:

  • Comparing gift ideas or researching products
  • Looking for a nearby store or point of sale
  • Seeking inspiration for holiday hosting, decorating, or gifting
  • Checking local product availability, promotions, or seasonal offers
  • Making a last-minute purchase

For advertisers, these moments create opportunities to reach shoppers with messages that reflect what they need in that moment. And because DOOH combines broad reach and repeated exposure with the ability to deliver relevant messaging in real-world contexts — often close to the point of purchase — it’s particularly well suited to making those moments count.

Chanel campaign displayed on Simon Media’s DOOH inventory at The Galleria in Houston, Texas

Strategy #1: Leverage advanced targeting to reach holiday shoppers at high-intent moments

Use advanced DOOH targeting to activate screens in and around the physical locations where your target customers are most likely to be — particularly when proximity to a store, venue, or other destination signals stronger purchase intent.

Depending on the campaign objective, advertisers can narrow their inventory using:

  • Location targeting: Go broad with nationwide or city-level campaigns, or get more granular with zip codes, POIs, custom geofences, and individual screens. A retailer promoting a Black Friday sale, for example, could prioritize screens within walking or driving distance of its stores.
  • Audience targeting: Use first-party data and third-party audience segments to identify screen locations where target customers are most likely to be present — whether that’s parents shopping for toys, beauty buyers looking for gifts, or travellers heading home for the holidays.
  • Venue and asset targeting: Match placements to the activity happening around them, from gift shopping at malls and stocking up at grocery stores to dining, celebrating, and travelling over the holidays.
  • Dayparting: Adjust when ads appear to align with relevant shopping and travel behaviours throughout the day.
  • Layered targeting: Combine multiple signals to get more precise. For example, target mall-adjacent inventory within a specific New York City geofence during peak afternoon and evening shopping hours.

De’Longhi recently put this kind of high-intent targeting into practice with a programmatic DOOH campaign promoting its Eletta Explore coffee machine during the competitive holiday shopping season in Poland. By activating inventory in high-traffic shopping malls, reaching gift-seekers close to the point of purchase, and using dayparting to align ad delivery with peak shopping hours, the campaign ultimately drove a 121% lift in brand preference and a 190% lift in intent to interact with the brand or visit its website.

For holiday campaigns focused on purchase-ready micro-moments, targeting can extend all the way into the store. According to Salesforce, 77% of consumers plan to shop in physical stores this holiday season, making in-store advertising a particularly valuable way to reach shoppers when they’re most likely to make a purchase. The same targeting principles still apply: advertisers can prioritize the stores, audiences, locations, and times most relevant to what they’re selling rather than treating all retail foot traffic equally.

Cineplex Media DOOH screen at CF Carrefour Laval in Quebec, Canada, directs shoppers to nearby Bell stores

Strategy #2: Use dynamic creative and contextual triggers to match DOOH messaging to the moment

Targeting can help put a holiday ad in the right place at the right time. Dynamic creative in DOOH takes that relevance a step further by adapting the ad itself based on what’s happening in that moment. Using signals like time, weather, location, proximity, product availability, or other live data, advertisers can automatically serve the creative variation that best fits the current context. 

For holiday campaigns, that opens up practical ways to make creative more useful and timely:

  • React to the weather: Promote coats, hot drinks, delivery, or indoor activities when temperatures drop, then switch creative as conditions change.
  • Make proximity useful: On screens near a store, dynamically show the closest location, distance, or a directional call to action.
  • Adapt as shipping deadlines approach: Shift from standard delivery messaging to expedited shipping, pickup, immediate availability, or digital gift cards as Christmas gets closer.
  • Build urgency around key sales moments: Use live countdowns to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, promotional deadlines, or other limited-time offers.
  • Respond to inventory levels: Feature products or offers based on what’s currently available at nearby locations rather than promoting something shoppers can’t buy. 

The most effective dynamic DOOH creative strategies are built around signals that meaningfully change what’s useful or relevant to the shopper, allowing advertisers to adapt messaging at scale without manually building and trafficking every possible variation. 

READ ALSO: What marketers need to know before launching their first dynamic DOOH campaign

Strategy #3: Pair physical DOOH exposure with mobile activity to extend reach and drive action

Mobile plays a major role in holiday commerce, with eMarketer projecting that nearly 60% of online holiday purchases will happen on mobile devices in 2026. That makes mobile and DOOH a natural pairing, with each channel reinforcing the other across the shopping journey. OAAA research also found that 74% of mobile users took action on their devices after recent exposure to DOOH ads, while an Ocean Neuroscience study found consumers are 48% more likely to engage with a mobile ad after seeing the same campaign on a DOOH screen.

For holiday campaigns, advertisers can use that relationship in several practical ways:

  • Location-based retargeting: Extend a DOOH campaign with follow-up mobile ads served to audiences who were near campaign screens. A shopper who encounters a holiday campaign while out shopping, for example, could later see a mobile ad featuring the same product or promotion. 
  • Mobile push notifications: For opted-in app users, use location signals like geofencing or beacons to deliver relevant notifications when they’re near a store or campaign location — for example, alerting loyalty members to an offer nearby.
  • Interactive QR codes: Give shoppers a direct path from a DOOH ad to an offer, coupon, product page, store locator, or other mobile experience. Dynamic QR codes are particularly useful on screens where consumers are close enough — and have enough dwell time — to scan.
  • In-app AR experiences: Use DOOH creative as an entry point to augmented reality experiences on a shopper’s phone, like virtual product try-ons, interactive holiday experiences, or content designed for social sharing.

The best approach depends on what you want the shopper to do next. QR codes, push notifications, and AR can encourage action while a shopper is still nearby, while mobile retargeting can reinforce the message later in the purchase journey. 

Read more: 3 reasons why you should combine digital OOH and mobile advertising for maximum impact

Ready to make the most of this year’s holiday shopping micro-moments? Explore our inventory catalog to discover premium digital screens in high-impact locations.

Product News | October 11, 2021

How VAST Billboards is redefining out-of-home in New Zealand

VAST digital billboard beside a busy roadway in Christchurch, New Zealand, displaying the VAST Billboards logo.

In a market long shaped by a handful of dominant players, VAST Billboards has carved out a distinct identity as New Zealand’s independent, Kiwi-owned out-of-home (OOH) network. Headquartered in Christchurch, VAST has built its growth story not by trying to out-scale the biggest networks, but by complementing the broader OOH landscape with a strong presence across regional cities, suburban corridors, and strategically important locations.

We sat down with Gary Rosewarne, Head of Growth Strategy at VAST, to talk about the company’s rapid growth, its programmatic ambitions, and why Broadsign has become a core part of how VAST runs its media operations.

A network built on purposeful growth

VAST’s strategy is built on a simple but deliberate idea: the network doesn’t need to be the whole plan — it needs to be the right complement to it. “We don’t believe VAST needs to be the whole plan,” Rosewarne explains. “In Auckland, for example, we can provide a complementary layer around established networks; in Christchurch, we have significant strength across suburban and arterial environments; and regionally, we give brands access to audiences across a growing number of markets.”

That positioning shapes where VAST builds inventory and how it prices and packages it, with a focus on keeping the network competitively priced and easy to buy. Its predominantly digital, large-format footprint extends beyond New Zealand’s largest cities into regional markets including Tauranga, Hamilton, Napier, Hastings, Taupo, Nelson, Blenheim, Timaru, and Invercargill, across both landscape and portrait formats.

“The objective isn’t simply to accumulate screens, but to add locations that create useful geographic spread, strengthen coverage and give advertisers access to audiences they may not be reaching elsewhere,” says Rosewarne. “That combination of metro, suburban and regional inventory is really what defines the VAST network.”

VAST digital billboard on Ferry Road in Christchurch, New Zealand

Serving national brands and local businesses alike

The company’s advertiser base spans national agency clients, major brands, and local direct advertisers. In 2025, its network saw strong growth across these segments, becoming an increasingly important part of national campaign plans while maintaining its strong connection to businesses looking to reach audiences in their local communities.

VAST has also used its own network to experiment with new ways of engaging audiences and demonstrating the potential of OOH. One example is Bill Is Bored, a campaign that used curiosity-driven billboard creative to capture attention and encourage people to continue the experience online. More recently, the Win A Grand – Your Region, Your Voice campaign invited New Zealanders to share what matters most in their local communities. The responses helped inform Beyond the Big Three, a research study examining the scale, value, and audience opportunity of regional New Zealand beyond the country’s three largest cities.

Together, these campaigns have given VAST a way to test ideas, gather audience insights, and demonstrate what OOH can achieve beyond simply delivering impressions. “These projects let us test ideas on our own network, learn from the response and build evidence that can ultimately help advertisers use OOH more creatively and effectively,” Rosewarne says.

That combination of clarity of purpose and consistent execution earned VAST recognition as Beacon’s 2026 Sales Team of the Year—one of New Zealand media’s leading industry awards, and a notable achievement for a relatively small team competing against some of the most established names in OOH.

“In 2025, VAST grew revenue at 5x the pace of the broader market, but the story was bigger than the numbers,” Rosewarne says. “We stopped thinking about ourselves as simply selling billboards and became much more focused on solving planning problems.”

Central to that shift was the “complete, not compete” philosophy, helping agencies see where regional and suburban audiences could add incremental value. Being a smaller, independent player also gave VAST room to move quickly. “Being small probably helped as well: we could be nimble, authentic, try things, have some fun and respond quickly when an opportunity emerged.”

VAST roadside screen in Ashburton, New Zealand

Why VAST chose Broadsign

As both the network and ambitions have grown, so has the need for technology that can scale alongside them. That search led VAST to the Broadsign Platform.

“For us, Broadsign came down to trust, reliability and fit,” Rosewarne says. “We wanted an established platform with deep expertise in OOH, rather than something we would potentially outgrow. As we scale, the technology sitting underneath the network has to be dependable, but it also has to give us the flexibility to keep evolving how we package, manage and monetise inventory.”

Broadsign’s position within the programmatic DOOH ecosystem and its established relationships with major trading platforms and partners were other deciding factors, particularly as programmatic became a larger part of VAST’s business. “Broadsign brings experience, expertise and an established ecosystem that we can grow alongside.”

Programmatic as a new route to market

Programmatic buying has shifted how the media owner thinks about its inventory, moving the conversation beyond locations and weeks toward a more dynamic view of audiences, availability, and demand. “It creates another route into the VAST network and makes it easier for advertisers who may already be buying other digital media programmatically to include OOH within that ecosystem,” Rosewarne explains. “For a challenger network like ours, reducing that friction is particularly valuable.”

That shift has also prompted VAST to rethink how it values and packages inventory for programmatic buyers, treating it as a distinct buying pathway with its own use cases rather than a variation of direct bookings. Just as importantly, programmatic expertise has been embedded across the sales team, helping ensure the right buying approach is recommended for each campaign.

Looking ahead

VAST’s long-term vision centers on purposeful growth, not expansion for its own sake. Rosewarne describes the goal as building “a highly useful independent OOH network that has a clear role within the New Zealand market”, one that continues to strengthen its regional footprint, protect its position in Christchurch, and selectively add metropolitan inventory that creates genuine new audience opportunity.

Looking at the broader industry, Rosewarne sees OOH becoming increasingly measurable, connected, and flexible, with programmatic adoption and audience measurement both continuing to mature. “Our job is to combine those capabilities with the things that still make OOH powerful: great locations, simple creative, local relevance and real-world visibility,” he says. “If we can keep doing that while remaining independent, nimble and easy to work with, we think there is a very exciting future for VAST.”

Ready to scale your network without scaling your workload? Learn more about the Broadsign Platform here.

Product News | October 11, 2021

How Canadian Tire achieved a 64% lift in store visits with programmatic DOOH

Canadian Tire Canada’s Garage and Triangle Rewards digital billboard displayed in a busy downtown office building.

To support its next phase of service-led growth, Canadian Tire, a staple in the Canadian retail landscape, launched a high-impact programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) campaign to reach its target audience at scale. Specializing in essential mechanical care and seasonal maintenance, the brand sought to strengthen its position as a premier automotive service provider and drive measurable foot traffic to its stores across the country.

Objective

The campaign aimed to drive measurable foot traffic to Canadian Tire Auto Service Centres nationwide. To achieve this, the campaign targeted Canadian car owners, with an emphasis on growth segments including Gen Z, Millennials, and Newcomers to Canada, by highlighting that consumers can both earn and redeem Canadian Tire Money on automotive mechanical services.

Strategy

Partnering with Broadsign, Talon and Touche, the campaign deployed programmatic DOOH alongside Canadian Tire’s national TV, digital, and social media channels. Ads were activated programmatically on digital screens near Canadian Tire Auto Service Centres to reach drivers when vehicle maintenance was a priority.

The campaign ran across multiple placement types, including billboards, transit shelters, shopping malls, fitness centres, and campus environments, to remain highly visible throughout the day. Layering these location and venue parameters with contextual triggers and Canadian Tire’s first-party audience data maximized efficiency, ensuring the messaging reached high-intent drivers in real time.

Results

The campaign delivered a 64% net lift in store visits compared to the unexposed lookalike control group, achieving a 100% confidence level.

Want the campaign highlights? Check out the infographic below.