Product News | October 11, 2021

How Elevision enhanced its sales strategy and media operations with the Broadsign Platform

With the ability to easily reach large audiences in unique and impactful ways, out-of-home (OOH) advertising has been widely adopted in the United Arab Emirates. Regularly included in major media plans, ad spending for OOH in the region is projected to reach AED 1.6 billion (USD 435 million) in 2024.

Static out-of-home advertising remains the dominant format, providing unparalleled visibility in cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, characterized by active highways, high-traffic streets, and vibrant commercial zones. That said, digital out-of-home (DOOH) is rapidly gaining traction in the region. This shift is fuelled by technological advancements that meet advertisers’ demands for more dynamic and eye-catching formats and the increased use of data and analytics to deliver more targeted and contextually relevant ads to intended audiences.

With DOOH ad spending expected to grow annually at a rate of 9.5% by 2028, media owners who digitize their networks early stand to gain a competitive edge. One company leading the digitization of OOH in the UAE is Elevision. Founded in 2011, the DOOH native media owner’s network includes both elevator and large-format screens, totalling 1920 screens across 575 locations. Its combined network provides advertisers with over 850,000 daily viewers, totalling 14.5 million daily impressions.

Advertisers choose Elevision for their premium audiences and locations

Initially, Elevision’s network consisted of elevator screens in high-end residential and commercial buildings in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Over the last four years, large-format DOOH screens have been added to its network and expanded into premium business districts, including the Dubai International Financial Centre and the Dubai World Trade Centre.

Having built its network across premium areas, Elevision provides advertisers access to affluent demographics, audience segments and profiles. Moreover, the elevator environment offers meaningful targeting at scale. In addition to easily reaching over 500,000 people daily, DOOH elevator screens are a high dwell-time and high-frequency format, efficiently providing high ad recall rates. The ability to combine precise audience targeting with extensive reach has made Elevision the go-to network for connecting with audiences.

Another significant benefit of working with Elevision is the detailed reporting of DOOH campaigns through its custom reporting platform. Launched last year, the platform gives clients access to real-time data to monitor their campaigns’ performance, including ad plays, reach, and impression volume. These real-time insights enable advertisers to remain agile by adjusting their strategies while campaigns are in flight, ensuring business objectives are met.

How Broadsign Guaranteed Campaigns helped optimize their sales strategy and media operations

Before partnering with Broadsign, Elevision had worked with two other digital signage software providers. However, as its network expanded and its content strategy became more complex to meet advertisers’ needs, its existing solution struggled to scale with its growing business. Having found that Broadsign offered a more robust technology stack with advanced features, the company decided to onboard its network onto the Broadsign Platform.

With Broadsign’s CMS, which follows a rule-based approach rather than a playlist-based one, Elevision only requires two administrators to keep its network of over 1,900 screens up and running. One feature it particularly relies on is Broadsign Live, which allows administrators to take real-time action at a distance. With on-demand player polling, they no longer need to wait for the poll period for changes to take effect. The administrators can also capture what’s displayed on their screens in real-time through the player monitoring centre, allowing them to verify that updates or dynamic content are rendered properly.

Elevision also chose Broadsign for its campaign planning and management capabilities, accessible through the Guaranteed Campaigns module, as it’s the only solution on the market to offer real-time inventory visibility, flexible campaign types and an optimization engine all in one platform. With Broadsign’s Enterprise plan, Elevision’s sales team can now view real-time inventory availability and fill rates, as well as projected impressions and CPMs simultaneously when selecting screens. Previously, when the sales team needed to schedule upcoming campaigns, the media operations team would have to manually search screen availability for specific locations within a given timeframe through a spreadsheet.

“The ability to see inventory availability in real-time through Broadsign Guaranteed Campaigns has reshaped the sales team’s pricing activities,” said Eamon Sallam, Chief Operating Officer at Elevision. “They can now see when screens are at 90% fill rate versus 30%, giving them more confidence in how they apply their pricing and discounts. Scheduling features within Guaranteed Campaigns have also provided the sales team with valuable tools to build more tactical proposals to better meet the needs of clients.”

Furthermore, access to flexible campaign types, including share of voice and goal-based (impression, plays, budget) campaigns, has opened inventory to a new set of buyers: programmatic advertisers looking to buy guaranteed impression-based OOH campaigns. With the impression goal campaign type, advertisers can decide how many people they’d like to see their ad. Broadsign’s optimization engine enables campaigns to be dynamically reallocated across the selected inventory, ensuring delivery goals are met despite inventory availability or demand changes.

The Guaranteed Campaigns module has also helped Elevision automate much of its manual campaign management process. Using one platform for campaign planning and management has made the handoff of campaigns between sales and media operations seamless. Once the sales team has booked the campaign, the media operations team can make any necessary changes to the campaigns directly in the platform, like locations, flight dates, and creatives.

Another capability that Elevision relies on is Broadsign’s APIs to feed its custom reporting platform. Broadsign has over 100 active API integrations and is considered the most open platform in the industry, with just about every feature accessible. Using the API integrations from Broadsign’s CMS and Guaranteed Campaigns, Elevision is able to provide advertisers with comprehensive data on campaign performance.

More recently, Elevision worked on enhancing its reporting capabilities for programmatic OOH campaigns as that subset of advertisers had much higher expectations of reporting coming from online environments. Now, the media owner’s reporting dashboard not only shows ad plays, impressions and gross spend for programmatic campaigns but also audience reach and demographic segmentations, providing the same granular reporting as its directly sold campaigns.

What we can expect from Elevision in the coming years

What’s next for Elevision? The company intends to double its network in the next three years. In the UAE, it plans to add more large-format and elevator DOOH screens in another premium business district. It also plans to continue global expansion, having already installed over 100 elevator DOOH screens in a newly built luxury residential community in London.

While still ahead of the curve with real-time reporting, Elevision’s next goal is to close the gap of attribution in OOH. In collaboration with some of its advertisers, the company has begun running case studies to demonstrate how the results from OOH campaigns contribute to campaign objectives.

Want to grow your out-of-home network? Schedule a live demo to see how we can help make that happen!

Product News | October 11, 2021

First-party data in digital OOH: What it is and how to leverage it

Digital out-of-home is growing fast, with global spend expected to surpass $20 billion by the end of the year, according to the World Out of Home Organization. As the medium scales, it’s also evolving from broad-reach awareness to more data-driven, audience-first strategies. This shift is making first-party data more important than ever, especially as third-party cookies dwindle and privacy regulations tighten.

Put simply, today’s advertisers are looking for more than just reach—they want precision, personalization, and contextual relevance, even in a traditionally one-to-many channel like OOH. First-party data delivers on that need, offering a privacy-safe and cost-effective way to engage real customers based on actual behaviour and intent. And with modern DOOH platforms making it easier than ever to activate data, brands can now drive better targeting, stronger performance, and a more connected omnichannel experience.

To understand how to make first-party data work in digital out-of-home and outdoor advertising, it’s important to start with the basics, unpack the common barriers, and explore the tools and tactics that make activation possible today.

What is first-party data, and why is it so valuable?

First-party data is information a brand collects directly through its channels, based on real customer interactions or touchpoints. Examples can include actions like pages viewed, time spent on a website, items added to cart, app usage patterns, purchase history, loyalty programs, and more. Because it’s based on actual behaviour within your own ecosystem, and not inferred or purchased, first-party data gives brands a reliable, privacy-safe foundation for targeted, high-impact campaigns.

Tailoring messaging to real audiences and high-value prospects leads to more relevant and effective campaigns. This kind of personalization drives stronger performance, from increased engagement to higher conversion rates. It’s also more cost-efficient, since the data is already owned by the brand and doesn’t require additional spend to access—just the opportunity to activate it more strategically.

Barriers to smarter DOOH campaigns

Despite the growing potential of first-party data, many advertisers still face structural and technical challenges when it comes to putting it into action, especially in outdoor advertising and DOOH environments. Here are a few of the most common barriers:

Data silos between CRM and media teams: In many organizations, the teams responsible for customer data, like CRM, loyalty, or analytics, operate separately from the teams planning and executing media. Without shared systems or workflows, valuable first-party data often stays locked away in internal platforms, disconnected from the tools used to build and target DOOH campaigns.
Technical limitations have made first-party data harder to activate: Bringing first-party data into DOOH hasn’t always been straightforward. Many demand-side platforms (DSPs) lacked the flexibility to support custom data uploads, limiting brands to pre-packaged third-party segments. When activation was possible, it often required custom integrations, manual workarounds, or higher campaign spend—barriers that slowed adoption and limited the ability to fully tap into valuable audience insights.
Perceptions around cost and complexity still linger: Brands may assume data onboarding is expensive, time-consuming, or reserved for large-scale campaigns. But many platforms now offer flexible, self-serve tools or managed support to help teams onboard everything from simple geo lists to advanced CRM segments.

Key considerations and best practices for activating first-party data in DOOH

With the right foundation, audience data can be a powerful driver of performance in DOOH. From preparing your data to choosing the right platforms, here are key considerations and best practices to help you activate it effectively.

Start with a DSP built for data-driven campaigns

Activating your own audience data in DOOH campaigns used to be a heavy lift, requiring custom integrations, technical support, or large-scale media budgets. Today’s DSPs, however, are built to be more flexible and data-friendly. Modern DSP platforms like OutMoove, for example, make it easier to activate customer data with minimal friction, giving advertisers full control over how data is used, where it comes from, and how it impacts campaigns.

Advertisers can use data they already have, like postal codes tied to customer addresses, loyalty program lists, or CRM segments based on purchase history. Many also incorporate behavioural signals like recent website activity to build high-intent audience segments—all without needing to reinvent their targeting strategy.

The benefits? Smarter targeting, stronger performance, and more efficient spending. By using audience insights to go beyond broad awareness, advertisers can connect with people who are more likely to take action. This reduces waste, helping teams focus their budget on audiences that have already shown interest or intent.

Expand reach with multi-layered targeting

Platforms like OutMoove support layered targeting, allowing you to start with your own audience, like loyalty members or recent store visitors, and expand reach by adding third-party segments based on foot traffic patterns, purchase intent, or lifestyle traits. For example, a brand could target its existing in-store shoppers and layer on third-party data to find others who frequently visit similar retail environments. This kind of multi-layered approach unlocks more precise, personalized campaigns without relying solely on broad demographic filters.

Deliver ads at the right time with real-world triggers

Moment targeting allows brands to activate ads based on real-world conditions like weather changes, traffic flow, sports scores, or time of day. These dynamic triggers help ensure your message appears when it’s most relevant, making your media spend more efficient and impactful.

Beyond standard conditions, many platforms now support custom triggers powered by business-specific data. Whether tied to a regional promotion, local event, or time-sensitive inventory, these inputs can be used to control when and where ads appear. This flexibility allows campaigns to align with meaningful moments that drive both relevance and results.

Align with data standards and industry guidelines

While fragmentation across buying methods and data standards has historically made it harder to apply audience data in DOOH as seamlessly as in digital, the industry is making important strides toward alignment, especially around measurement, data integrity, and audience definitions.

Initiatives like the IAB’s Digital Out-of-Home Measurement Guide are helping set a foundation for scalable, data-led campaigns. Introducing standardized metrics gives advertisers more confidence in campaign performance and supports better data collection, impression validation, and privacy compliance under frameworks like GDPR and CCPA. This growing alignment strengthens trust, improves transparency, and simplifies automated buying, making it easier for brands to activate audience data and run more effective, measurable DOOH campaigns.

As digital out-of-home advances, audience data is becoming a key driver of smarter, more impactful campaigns. With the right strategy and tools in place, advertisers can move beyond broad awareness to reach the right people at the right time.

Month: August 2024