An Interview With Ken Sahlin, CEO, DOmedia
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
“We’ve been flying under the radar in terms of talking about ourselves, but we are extremely busy,” Ken Sahlin, CEO of DOmedia, Columbus, Ohio, told us in an exclusive interview last week.
“In fact, Our business has doubled each of the last two years. In total, we’ve seen a total of $1 billion in media planned and bought through us.”
Not to be misunderstood, DOmedia does not plan nor buy media itself. Rather, it centralizes information and facilitates the task for agency planners and buyers so that they do not have to deal with a maze of files, spreadsheets and other data in putting together an answer for an RFP, for example.
In the past year, DOmedia was one of the first third party processors to gain a Traffic Audit Bureau OOH Ratings license and helped TAB see the value of making licenses available to other such companies. It has also built an app with a TAB database which allows agencies to search find, map and see ratings for TAB media companies. Only TAB member agencies (like Starcom, Mediavest, Spark, Posterscope, Kinetic, etc.) can access TAB ratings on DOmedia.
DOmedia has over 850 media selling companies in its platform, including over 175 companies selling DOOH.
“I think for the industry to grow and scale, it’s important to have a common currency and a standardized framework to build tech applications on,” said Sahlin. “TAB wants to create the standard measurement currency for the out-of-home industry, digital out-of-home billboards included. They are developing a standardized framework for measurement and we’re building applications with that to help the industry be faster, smarter and better. Agencies are really looking for neutral third-parrty measurement sources.”
DOmedia has also been training planners on how to use DOmedia for RFPs.
“Agencies all have different ways of doing things, so our app allows them to basically use a standard format.” said Sahlin. “It’s making their lives so much easier in the out-of-home and digital out-of-home sector.”
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