oOh! Launches New #AI Platform
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
oOh!media this week announced a new automated private marketplace which they say, harnesses the power of machine learning to enable marketers to more easily, effectively and efficiently engage with its audiences through its extensive network of signs. The marketplace however will not be launched until April next year.
The online planning, buying and placement platform combines oOh!’s audience environments, the unparalleled knowledge of its team and the company’s extensive audience data sets such as Quantium with machine learning models to determine the best inventory to use and when to reach and engage with the desired audience.
At the first of the national A World of Unmissable series of events, oOh! CEO Brendon Cook said the private marketplace was just one part of its $15 million Organisational Transformation Platform to revolutionise the industry and accelerate the Out Of Home share of the media pie.
He told us “Serving ads is the easy part, but to operate a major Out Of Home platform we had to rebuild the entire way we function as a business – from finance to operations to data and of course on how we deliver the right message at the right time in the right place to meet our client’s objectives and deliver results. On the ad-serving side, in recent years we have integrated recognition software into our offering to trigger advertising based on vehicles that drove past or the moods of those walking past our retail panels. This has all been part of our test and learn program, but we have not stopped there.
“We have been working on building technology for the future and being mindful that Out Of Home, unlike an online channel, needs to be held to a higher standard as a Pubic Space Medium, we have not done this alone.
“We have worked alongside multiple partners in multiple industries to understand how, in this real time and connected world, Out Of Home needs to scale, be brand safe and deliver advertisers with a solution to book an optimised, flexible, contextually relevant creative and location-based campaign that will make their brand Unmissable.”
Developed with design-led thinking, the platform will have a clean and intuitive user interface with data-driven decision making in the back-end to enable a campaign to be planned and purchased within two minutes and in 10 clicks or less.
Brendon Cook continued “In building the platform, we had to do at this at speed for both our classic and digital Out Of Home offering and we had to ensure we can meet any future campaign requirements. It had to be transparent from the data sources through to the campaign delivery and it had to be brand safe for our customers, our property partners and in unison with our public space community responsibility. To deliver this we had to develop advanced leading machine learning capability inhouse and employ a tech company structure. Over the last 18 months we’ve engaged 27 software engineers, 1 Data Architect, 5 Product People, 5 Data scientists and 5 mathematicians, because that is the new capability we need. From today our great internal team is training the machine and, in fact, clients briefs and behaviours are helping us train the machine so that by April 2019 we will launch the private market place.
The aim is undoubtedly to enable their clients to buy, plan and place campaigns across their digital and classic inventory in a complete ecosystem that includes DSP (demand side platforms), SSP (supply side platforms), DMP (data management platforms) and other Out Of Home specific platforms.
When available, clients will be required to submit responses to a series of questions including typical information of a current media brief, such as period, budget, requirements for proposal and locations, plus specific information around audiences and media considerations.
Mr Cook said the private marketplace followed on from oOh!’s launch of its Creative Scheduler 18 months ago, which provided advertisers the ability to tailor their Out Of Home advertising flighting and creative immediately to match their business imperatives. It also enabled property partners, like shopping centre owners, to use the inventory to provide customers with relevant news, local events and weather warnings.
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