Toronto Newspaper Adds DOOH Screens To Media Sales Inventory

October 5, 2023 by Dave Haynes

I left the daily newspaper industry 24 years ago because I’d become the digital guy at the paper and could clearly see what would happen to papers because of the Internet. I went over to a start-up that was putting screens in office tower elevators.

All these years later, we have a big Canadian newspaper partnering to have its ad sales team include screens in elevators in the inventory they’re selling to local businesses and brands.

The Toronto Star already had a content partnership that put headlines on office tower screens operated in that city by the DOOH network Captivate. Now that partnership has expanded to ad sales.

“Our own video inventory has strong viewability and completion rates, on par with industry standards,” says Brandon Grosvenor, Torstar’s Chief Revenue Officer. “Expanding that level of performance and brand-safety for our clients’ video is important to us and we saw that Captivate could be an excellent extension to what we have on our sites.”

The PR adds:

Marketers who want to reach affluent and influential audiences in Toronto’s downtown core will find the arrangement makes it easy to get targeted cross-platform video campaigns up and running. 

“The Star’s strong local and nationwide reach positions them as the ideal partner to provide exceptional attention in Toronto through integrated campaigns with their products, with an eye to exploring opportunities in Captivate’s other major markets,” says NYC-based Captivate’s Canadian GM Barb Huggett. “Our discussions with the Star have been proactive and thoughtful; they clearly prioritize enhancing the user experience and client performance.”

Having traditional media people sell digital has always been a challenge, as print display ads are wildly different from digital. But newspapers have now had a couple of decades at selling both print and online, so it’s no longer such a big reach.

When I was running online at the Calgary Herald in the late ’90s, I had the print people selling for me and it was painful. The ad VP definitely never spoke in terms of “strong viewability and completion rates.” It was more like: “Sorry, what’s an impression???”