Modernizing the platform that powers out-of-home: Introducing the evolution of Broadsign

Every year, our platform evolves to better address the needs of OOH media owners. And today, with OOH media owners needing tools that are smarter, more comprehensive, and better connected than ever, we’re evolving yet again—just more than usual. 

We’re thrilled to start 2023 off by announcing a reimagined Broadsign Platform. It has all the Broadsign features you know and love, just enhanced with additional capabilities and unified by a more intuitive, shared interface.

These are some of the biggest changes we’ve ever made to how our products work together and are used. As such, we will be rolling out this new vision of the Broadsign Platform in three steps:

Step One (Today!): We are uniting select Broadsign products within a single interface and standardizing how audiences and digital inventory are managed.

Step Two (February): We are launching a new ad server in beta, enabling you to start planning and selling ultra-sophisticated audience-based campaigns with contextual targeting tools. 

Step Three (later this spring): We are delivering static asset and campaign management tools into the Broadsign Platform.

Why we’re evolving our platform

Broadsign has changed a lot over the years. We went from having a single product to offering a multi-platform solution with four unique applications: Broadsign Control (which turns 20 this year, btw), Broadsign Direct, Broadsign Reach, and Broadsign Publish. We then acquired Ayuda and the Campsite DSP, now known as Broadsign Ads.

As our offering grew, the experience for customers became increasingly fragmented. A consolidated platform is essential to not only simplify the user experience but also make our tools work together more effectively.

The united platform allows us to deliver better automation, more intelligent ad serving, and a streamlined user experience for everyone who touches our tools.

We’ll spend the rest of this blog digging into these changes in some more detail.

But before that, we want to take a moment to offer our sincere thanks to all of our clients and partners, past and present, for the role they’ve played in bringing us to this moment. 

We are privileged to play our role in supporting some of the world’s largest and most innovative working in OOH today. Everything we do is in service to your evolving needs. 

We can’t wait to see what you do with the new tools we’re rolling out.

Step One: Bringing together inventory, audience, and campaign management

What you can do:

• Update your digital screens and audience data through our new Inventory module
• Plan, schedule, and view inventory availability in real-time with the Guaranteed Campaigns module (formerly Broadsign Direct)
• Manage your private programmatic marketplace (PMP) and open exchange deals with the Programmatic Campaigns module (formerly Broadsign Reach)
• View your real-time programmatic reports with the Programmatic Reporting module (formerly Broadsign Reach Reporting). 

At the center of our platform unification is the management of digital screen inventory and audiences. Previously, you may have had to set up inventory and audiences multiple times across our products. Now you only need to do so once, via the Inventory module, to have that information accessible from within all your other Broadsign tools.

As a part of this change, we’re also making it easier to bring screens online for programmatic transactions. Now, you’ll be able to easily add and remove screens from your programmatic inventory within the Inventory module whenever you like.

We’ve also made big improvements to the look and feel of our platform and are gradually moving away from product names. Moving forward, everything we offer will be named according to the function it serves your business.

Step Two: Introducing our new ad server 

What you can do:

• Build and deliver campaigns with more refined audience-targeting tools
• Incorporate contextual triggers for conditional campaign delivery

Next month, we’ll deploy step two of our platform update with the beta launch of our new ad server.

Media buyers today are increasingly interested in the flexibility behind audience-based and contextual campaigns, and it’s our goal to make it easier for you to deliver just that.

Our new ad server makes it possible to plan audience-based campaigns with the benefits of a direct one-to-one sale and the heightened ability to target specific demographics such as age, income, points of interest, etc.

Once approved, campaigns will play out in real-time based on contextual triggers like weather or financial market movements, introducing to direct OOH sales the kind of delivery flexibility you see with programmatic advertising. Whatever your best eligible inventory is for meeting a campaign’s objectives is where these campaigns will be played.

Step 3: Incorporating static media management

What you can do:

• Centralize static asset data management
• Thorough and realistic static campaign charting
• View stock levels in real-time
• Institute total creative and production management for campaigns
• Use a mobile app to handle work orders in the field

The final step of our platform launch continues on the theme of unification. Later this spring, you’ll be able to manage your digital, programmatic, and static campaigns all from within the Broadsign Platform.

The new Static Operations module is based on the rich Ayuda static workflows and will offer end-to-end asset, stock, and campaign management features to ensure the many moving pieces involved in getting a static campaign out into the world work together as smoothly as possible.

This means that, for the first time, Broadsign users will be able to manage their static inventory and workflows alongside their digital and programmatic assets—one set of tools for all things out-of-home.

Accessing the reimagined Broadsign Platform 

The Broadsign Platform isn’t some faraway thing—it exists today, and we’ll gradually be onboarding customers during the first half of the year. 

If you’re keen to jump in, want to enroll in a beta program, or have specific questions about how your business can use our updated platform, please reach out to your account manager. They will be happy to help.

You can also drop by the Broadsign booth at the upcoming ISE show in Barcelona—book an appointment with us here. 

We’re so excited about this next phase for the Broadsign Platform, and we hope you are too. We look forward to hearing from you about these improvements over the coming days.