October 11, 2021
|What’s new on the Broadsign Platform: Highlights from our latest webinar
At our most recent webinar, our VP of Products, Francois Hechme, and Senior Directors of Products, Gavin Lee and Seamus Hunn, presented the 2025 roadmap for the Broadsign Platform. The presentation showcased the upcoming enhancements designed to optimize processes, improve productivity, and unlock new revenue opportunities for out-of-home (OOH) media owners.
Looking back on what we accomplished in 2024
Before we look at what’s to come, let’s highlight some of the changes we made in 2024 that helped you operate a little more efficiently every day.
Improved campaign planning and management to better meet customer needs
Enhancing our campaign planning and management capabilities was a big focus for us last year. The first notable change was the integration of the Guaranteed Campaigns module, formerly known as Broadsign Direct, into the platform interface. Another big capability that was brought onto the platform was creative management tools, allowing you to create, edit, manage, and assign campaign creatives with ease. Finally, we introduced new targeting tools and a map view to better visualize your inventory for directly-sold campaigns to provide media owners with the same flexibility and comprehensive targeting capabilities as online and programmatic buyers.
Campaign optimization tools to help you make the most out of your inventory
Another big focus of last year was campaign optimization, which was heavily driven by Broadsign’s optimization engine. Composed of two functionalities – campaign rebalancing and reallocation – our optimization engine is designed to ensure that your campaigns deliver on target while optimizing your inventory availability to boost sales. Below we highlight a few ways that media owners benefited from Broadsign’s optimization engine in 2024.
Campaign rebalancing
As a refresher, our rebalancing feature modifies the pace at which a campaign is delivered. It will speed up or slow down campaign delivery to help under or overperforming campaigns stay on target and meet campaign objectives.
In 2024 alone, 26% of all campaigns booked through Broadsign Guaranteed Campaigns required some level of rebalancing. Customers who leveraged our rebalancing feature had three times more campaigns on target and 37% fewer campaigns that were underperforming.
Campaign reallocation
The second functionality of our optimization engine is the reallocation feature, which is used at the time of booking. If an advertiser’s incoming request requires a screen that is already booked by another campaign, the system will automatically reorganize how screens are allocated to each campaign while ensuring that newly allocated screens still fit campaign requirements.
Given that each media owner’s network is different, the data varied for this capability. While most were able to accommodate on average 10% to 20% more campaigns with our reallocation feature, a few select were able to achieve up to 40% more campaigns.
Without Broadsign’s optimization engine automatically reallocating screens to optimize fill rates, media owners would have to manually reshuffle campaigns to accommodate incoming demand. Not only is that a time-consuming and inefficient process that cannot scale with your business, but it also can’t achieve the same results as our optimization engine.
Growing our trading capabilities to connect you to more buyers
Last but not least, one of the biggest moments for our programmatic business last year was the acquisition of OutMoove, which includes its business and DOOH demand-side platform (DSP) technology. This has enabled OutMoove to focus on scaling its unique OOH specialist agency workflows and support globally while giving Broadsign access to OutMoove’s expertise and specialist OOH clients.
Furthermore, we worked closely with media owners to expand our inventory, leading to 72% more screens that were onboarded onto Broadsign’s programmatic supply-side platform (SSP) and Header Bidder. The expansion of inventory led to 43% more unique advertisers transacting with Broadsign and 36% more impressions transacted.
What you can expect from Broadsign in 2025
Evolving campaign planning and management in the Broadsign Platform
One of Broadsign’s key focuses this year will be the continued evolution of our campaign planning and management capabilities within the Broadsign Platform. This focus is divided into three big initiatives: the first is the next enhancements to our creative management capabilities, the second is the continued modernization of Broadsign Guaranteed Campaigns’ workflows, and finally, the unification of static and digital workflows.
Creative management in the platform
When examining what creative management capabilities we wanted to bring in-platform, we extensively studied the use of creative capabilities within our standalone products. This allowed us to map out the rollout of in-platform creative capabilities in three separate phases. The first phase was released last year, allowing you to schedule one or multiple creatives for all line items within a campaign.
The next phase, which is currently in development and expected to be released in the first half of the year, will allow you to set multiple schedules for your creatives and be applied to all line items in a campaign. Finally, the last phase which is expected to be ready by the latter half of the year, provides you with full flexibility by setting multiple schedules for each line item in a campaign. Once these two phases have been completed, we’ll be shifting our focus to expand our supported content types from just accepting images and videos to also include HTML and web redirects.
Modernizing the line items workflow
The line item workflow within our Guaranteed Campaigns module is one of the most used workflows in our platform. This is where you typically plan, check availability, and book your line items for a campaign. In 2024, we created the Line Items list, which is easily accessible through the navigation bar. Since its launch, this feature has been well-loved by users, as ad operations teams can quickly sort and filter through the list, allowing easy identification of line items that need monitoring and troubleshooting.
This year, we’re working on further enhancing the line items workflow so that you can accommodate more campaigns, better tailor them to client needs, and work more efficiently. The new enhancements include a new view for when you’re creating new digital line items, making it easier to understand your inventory availability and how to optimally fill your network. We’re also adding a multitude of new targeting options, providing you with more flexibility in how you package your inventory to better meet advertiser’s needs.
Unifying static and digital workflows in-platform
At our last customer summit, Broadsign Connect 2024, we presented some key findings from our State of Static OOH report, which found that 69.8% of media owners operate a hybrid network, meaning that they have both static and digital OOH inventory. Given this data, another enhancement to our campaign planning and management capabilities this year will be to unify static and digital OOH workflows in the Broadsign Platform.
Doing so would allow you to book digital and static inventory in a single campaign, saving you time by eliminating the need to switch between modules in the platform. The unification of workflows would also allow for seamless planning as you’ll be able to book all inventory types in one place, as well as use map visualization and set impression goals for static campaigns. Finally, integrating the operations of both mediums would allow you to consolidate tracking and reporting, providing advertisers with a more holistic view of how OOH works to meet their objectives.
Expanding our trading capabilities to connect media owners to more buyers
Another key focus for 2025 will be continuing to extend our trading capabilities to connect media owners to more demand. We’re doing so by enhancing our real-time programmatic transactions with features that reduce friction, and increase demand and yield.
New AI creative assistance and extended competitive separation for Broadsign’s Programmatic SSP
Regarding upcoming enhancements to support programmatic DOOH, the first big item will be the introduction of our Header Bidder Pro. Building on our existing header bidding capabilities, the Pro version will support the execution of price-based auctions as well as brand separation features across multiple supply-side platforms (SSPs). This upgrade in header bidding capabilities will optimize your demand channels, help you increase programmatic yield, and consolidate your programmatic scheduling.
Another exciting update will be enhanced programmatic creative management workflows. This includes the unveiling of our new AI Assistant. This patent-pending tool is designed to reduce the time media owners spend on repetitive tasks, like reviewing, categorizing, and approving incoming ad creatives from programmatic bids sent through DSPs.
Automating the categorization process improves accuracy, as the system will learn and refine its recommendations the more it’s used. Broadsign’s AI Assistant can also minimize common misclassification errors and quickly identify sensitive content that could hinder brand safety efforts. Finally, with programmatic demand expected to increase in the coming years, the AI Assistant will seamlessly scale to support your growing demand.
Bridging the gap for reporting in OOH with our unified reporting module
In today’s advertising landscape, data drives revenue – access to real-time data helps keep you agile and ahead of the competition. Recognizing this need, another key focus will be to build a unified reporting module in-platform, providing you with a real-time view of how your network is performing at any given moment.
In terms of specific capabilities, the new reporting module will consolidate key data across all products, allowing you to evaluate all aspects of your business. The module will have an overview dashboard that provides quick and real-time data at a glance, but also a secondary view where you’ll be able to drill down into specific data points. You’ll also be able to set a schedule for when reports should be sent to you by email, as well as extract data from the module to import it into your BI tools.
This latest series of updates is another step forward in Broadsign’s mission to transform how brands, agencies and media owners buy, sell and deliver OOH campaigns. For media owners, the latest evolution of the Broadsign Platform will allow them to deliver more campaigns, more efficiently, and always with the same reliability.