Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
If you aren’t familiar with SPACE, you’re not necessarily alone: Unless you are either an Out-of-Home or Digital Out-of-Home media owner or a media buyer specialized in buying OOH and DOOH media in the UK, chances are that you may not yet have heard of it.
That is all about to change as SPACE forms the necessary first step in standardization of the OOH and DOOH sector AND is an integral part of this week’s Programmatic Buying and Marketplace Workshop, the world’s first, focussed on out of home, which takes place during London Digital Signage Week.
Together with Gavin Lee, Global Product Director at Posterscope, Mungo Knott is joint-chairman of the UK OOH Standards Committee, which was setup by Outsmart, the industry association that has gone from strength to strength these past 12 months and who announced the SPACE initiative last November.
Mungo Knott‘s day job is Marketing and Insight director at Primesight and we caught up with him this week and asked him to explain exactly what this means for the industry.
“The OOH industry is trying to help media buyers move beyond having to deal with all those Excel spread sheets of the past,” said Knott in an exclusive interview with DailyDOOH. “It used to be that all the OOH companies had their own data on their media properties. People want to find the data that’s common to the various sites in terms on location, size, whether a site is close to a school zone, and a lot more. Nothing was consistent and the information wasn’t managed well.
“We wanted a place where we could categorize all the inventory in one place. SPACE is a structure whereby all OOH inventory, every single poster, transit shelter, billboard, every piece of media – which each has its individual code – now is categorized with its data. We now have every piece of print and digital media from all the big media companies in one spot and are now working on including all the smaller media companies, as well.
“Outsmart has been encouraging all media owners to put their inventory on SPACE and to keep it up-to-date. The committee that worked on this is representative of all the media buyers and sellers in the UK and all the buyers and sellers are committed to using it. It’s not specific to any one platform.”
SPACE has now categorized most of the more-than 500,000 individual print and digital media sites of all sizes, shapes and media owner across England, Scotland and Wales.
“This has been a key step forward for the industry, which will now be more interdependent between the buyers and the sellers,” says Knott. “I believe that things will be done more efficiently and the industry will be better future-proofed and more effective. It’s designed to be very inclusive.
“I believe it may also be useful as providing a base for measuring a certain type of location. ROUTE (the audience measurement used by industry members) may be helped a bit by the classification.”
SPACE is not a trading platform. It’s not transactional and cannot at this stage be considered in any way ready for programmatic.
Next Wednesday afternoon, Mungo will lead the first debate on ‘Standards’ at the Programmatic Buying and Marketplace Workshop together with Mediatel’s Nicola Mullett, Posterscope’s Gavin Lee and BroadSign’s Maarten Dollevoet.
Mediatel developed the very first joint industry trading system in the UK, a platform called J-ET which allows commercial radio, media buyers and creative agencies to get maximum efficiency from the trading process. Mediate are handling the technical management of the standardisation efforts.
Two other important ‘debates’ take place as part of the workshop; one on ‘software’ led by DailyDOOH editor-in-chief Adrian Cotterill and another on ‘programmatic’ led by VUKUNET’s Dirk Huelsermann. Panelists include SignKick’s Tobias van Amstel. JCDecaux’s Tim Harvey, Ayuda Media Systems’ Andreas Soupliotis and Mereo’s Elias Bauguil.
With just over 50 people signed up and with all the important media buyers, specialists and media owners in the room this workshop is one that is sure to help the UK and continental European industry move forward. Surely not to be missed?
There is still time to register for the workshop here.
Follow DailyDOOH