More Activity In Last Three Months, Than In Previous Three Years, Suggests Shift In Digital OOH Interest

April 11, 2019 by guest author, Jason Cremins

Guest Post: Jason Cremins, Signagelive

As my company set its development and commercial strategy for this year, back in late 2018, a focus on Digital Out of Home (DOOH) was not on our agenda. But that may change, because of a noticeable uptick we’re sensing in both interest and activity in ad-based digital signage.

Jason Cremins

Broadsign, with 44% of the global DOOH market, is the established behemoth in this vertical, and has built and expanded its software and services offerings to deliver solutions that cater to everything a media owner requires.

There’s room for other options, however, and in the first three months of 2019, our business development has logged more meetings and discussions with established media owners than we had in the previous three years.

It’s not, first of all, entirely foreign work to us. In the early days of the company, the answer to “Can you do this?” from potential customers – whatever “this” was – was always “Yes!”’ That took us into the OOH media business with clients, but our CMS platform’s features were not optimized for the growing requirements of media owners, as they accelerated to transition from traditional printed out of home media to digital.

So why the sudden flurry of activity and interest from media owners? What has changed in the media landscape?

The common connecting between the various media owners we have spoken with and met over the last three months has been a desire to explore a more open and collaborative approach to their DOOH requirements.

As the DOOH sector grows, there are numerous very smart and agile cloud-based software companies moving into the market that meet the future needs of media owners. These include Programmatic Buying Platforms, Inventory Management and Audience Analytics. All of these companies have an API-first approach to their solutions, and a core need to collaborate to deliver a combined solution with complementary products, and then deliver a cohesive solution for a media owner.

In every industry where consolidation has led to reduced choice and a lack of competition, opportunities opens up for those that provide an alternative solution when integrated with other platforms. This has happened with the web, where apps are now expected to be open with APIs and integrations with other complementary apps.

It appears that we are now seeing this collaborative and open movement reach digital signage, and in particular, the Digital Out of Home sector.

 

Leave a comment