DSrupted: How Dynamic Data Will Soon By The Digital OOH Norm

August 26, 2015 by Dave Haynes

I was very, very pleased when Martin Porter of the big digital OOH agency Posterscope agreed to speak at DSrupted next month. A subset of the company – called Liveposter – is doing work that harvest, harmonizes and mashes up real-time data to execute hyper-local, hyper-relevant ad campaigns.

Data is a big topic at DSrupted, and what Liveposter is doing is very relevant to anyone thinking about content for digital signage. Here’s my Q&A with Martin, who will be up in Toronto Sept. 16th for the event.

Q: Can you tell me how Liveposter sits within the larger Posterscope organization, and give readers a sense of the size, scope and location of the team?

Porter: Liveposter is part owned by Posterscope, but operates across a range of clients globally. The platform is four years old and was set up in London, where the main team is based, But we do now have a presence in our NY office, to project manage for North America. Liveposter has executed over 140+ campaigns around the world

Q: Could you run through what Liveposter does, and how it works with creatives and brands? For example, what are the components you do, what do other member companies in the campaign do, and how do they intertwine?

Porter: Liveposter is a real-time marketing platform. It enables brands to fully exploit dynamic digital out-of-home advertising. By using data to trigger or generate messages that change over the course of a day, a week or a campaign, Liveposter make brands more relevant, more engaging and more effective. Relevance is the key to grabbing and retaining customer attention.

Liveposter allows digital OOH to be accessible and scalable through:

• Smart Scheduling – using data to trigger a pre-supplied (or ‘linear’) ad, based on a set of pre-defined rules;
• The Liveposter Editor platform – which is a creative and scheduling tool that helps to easily create and style posters that can be scheduled to go to multiple different outputs globally. The dashboard can be made available to whoever needs it – client, creative agency, media agency – and can have multiple users allowed to approve and upload creative.

Q: The Cortana UK campaign was a particularly impressive example of what’s possible with data-driven messaging. Could you briefly describe it and then tell readers if any results are back and available on its impacts?

Porter: To bring Cortana’s intelligent capabilities to life, Microsoft proprietary data services are being used in combination with real-time audience data and data sets specific to each screen and environment, to generate constantly-updating, helpful and thought-provoking content.

Each poster had multiple distinct creative executions depending on a set of pre-defined rules and data for a particular moment. The creative executions use time of day and location as the foundation of the campaign, reflecting the actual Cortana experience in real-time at each poster site.

In total, there were 241 unique content posters with multiple dynamic welcome and end screens showcasing the Cortana phone interface, giving 9,640 poster variants.

Data sets were scheduled and optimized for each location based on date, time, location based imagery, local events, weather data and countdowns to cultural events

The dynamism and sophistication of this digital OOH campaign perfectly mirrored the versatilities of Cortana’s intelligent capabilities and delivered a big campaign which was scalable

Q: At one level, the idea of using data to share, trigger and be content sounds quite reasonable and easy. But I gather there are many challenges, notably getting data from sources that don’t normally make that data available. True?

Porter: We have put a lot of effort into making the obvious data sets readily available within the platform, such as weather, traffic and flight data. Unfortunately, client data is the most untapped real-time data source. When some of these hurdles can be overcome, the outcomes can be great.

Q: Does what Liveposter produces sync and play nicely with programmatic buying services, or is that still a bridge to build and cross?

Porter: There are still some challenges here and we are pushing to make them happen. It’s actually less about technology sync-up as opposed to education, and getting all parties feeling comfortable with doing this. Media owners have always had full control over their inventory, but with programmatic and dynamic creative platforms, we are asking them to give up a lot of this, which is understandably going to take time 

Q: What do you plan to talk about at DSrupted?

Porter: I will be talking about how we use data to make dynamic digital OOH the norm, not just a stunt. And leading on from that is how we can use platforms such as Liveposter to be able to deliver scale, and not just do one off stunts, which garner a lot of PR but are difficult to make relevant on a large scale.

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Porter is one of five speakers at DSrupted, and one of two talking specifically about turning data into content. There are still some seats available, and you can book yours online, to get a full day on where tech is going in digital signage.