DailyDOOH

DPAA, the global trade marketing association, driving the growth and digitization of out-of-home media and its growing role in the omnichannel mix, is holding its Canada Summit next week, on June 14 at the Scotiabank Theater.

Speakers for this event include. 

• Tracey Cooke, Sr. VP, Head of Marketing, Nestle Canada 
• Laura Pearce, Head of Marketing, Google Canada 
• Solange Bernard, Sr. Director, Marketing Communications, Tim Horton’s
• Melanie Johnston, Chief Marketing Officer, Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation 
• Noah Vardon, President, Havas Media Group Canada 
• Urania Agas, CEO, EssenceMediacom Canada
• Lesley Conway, CEO, Mindshare 
• Nikki Stone, Exec VP, Managing Director, Zenith Canada
• Bettina Heimrath, President, Hearts & Sciences 
• Caroline Breton, Managing Director, Involved Media 
• Debbie Benadiba, CEO, Talon Canada 

Barry Frey, President & CEO of DPAA told us ““We are excited to see iconic brands and senior agency executives that have already signed up for this year’s DPAA Canada Summit. DOOH is playing an increasing role in brands’ omnichannel mix and at this event we’ll showcase this and the latest innovation in the industry.” 

The Summit program will explore the growing role of digital out of home advertising in today’s omnichannel mix. You can register and find out more information about the event here.

In addition to Hillenaar Outdoor’s expanding network of digital billboards across the Netherlands, they are now offering advertisers the unprecedented opportunity to track their out of home campaigns in real time through webcams.

This service, the first of its kind in the Netherlands, is already active and has received positive feedback from advertisers.

“We are proud to introduce this unique feature to our clients,” said Peter Heemskerk, CEO of Hillenaar Outdoor. “At Hillenaar, our focus is on campaign effectiveness and client satisfaction, and this includes comprehensive reporting. Currently, we provide accurate data on the number of passers-by and the reach of our billboards. Now, advertisers can also observe their campaigns in action. We have noticed a growing demand for this level of transparency. Advertisers want to ensure that their marketing investments are well spent.”

The majority of Hillenaar’s extensive network of advertising displays is equipped with webcams, allowing advertisers to gain visibility into their booked campaigns. By making these live webcam feeds accessible, Hillenaar Outdoor aims to offer advertisers unparalleled transparency. The process is simple: “clients receive a message with a link to our livestreams during their campaign week, and the footage appears on their screens in real time.”

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Viola Outdoor, a division of Viola Communications, the Abu Dhabi-based media communications specialists, has announced a joint venture with Firefly.

The partnership will introduce Firefly’s roof-top digital LED screens to Abu Dhabi’s Tawasul fleet of taxis, vastly expanding the reach of Viola’s portfolio of Digital Out Of Home products.

Ammar Sharaf, Group CEO and Board Member of Viola Communications, told us “I am delighted that Viola Communications is at the vanguard of digitalisation of the outdoor marketing infrastructure of the UAE capital. We have been introducing innovations in OOH throughout our history in Abu Dhabi with our lamppost, bus and bridge banner advertising. Since we launched our digital OOH transformation plan, our goal has remained constant – to help advertisers reach people in key, premium areas with the highest quality sites and screens. Accomplishing the implementation of the capital’s first digital bridge banner network on highly visible key arterial routes was a fantastic milestone, soon to be augmented by the installation of digital Totem.Lights on the streets of Abu Dhabi. Now, with the addition of Firefly’s dynamic industry-leading digital vehicle-top screens, we are providing unique eye-level marketing opportunities in association with Tawasul taxis. Viola Outdoor’s partnership with Firefly and Tawasul is a game-changing addition to the marketeers’ arsenal and I am delighted that we are leading the field by contributing to the adoption of smart technologies across the DOOH landscape in line with the digital transformation strategy of the Abu Dhabi government, and enhancing the experience”.

The addition of Firefly’s programmable vehicle top LED screens to Viola’s digital portfolio via Tawasul’s taxi fleet will ensure the widest possible coverage for advertisers, as the vehicles boast an average 23,000 passengers driven a distance of 350,000 km per day throughout every zone, street, and area of Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, journeys that are additionally enhanced by Viola Outdoors’ digital bridge banners and Totem.Lights.

VIOOH, the leading premium global digital out of home (DOOH) supply-side platform, has announced the launch of its new real-time programmatic platform VIOOH Trading Manager, and VIOOH Intelligence, a suite of advanced features focused on operational efficiency, programmatic deal management and yield optimisation.

“At VIOOH, we predict that the growth in programmatic demand will outpace media owners’ ability to roll out new supply. To best manage this situation, media owners need to optimise revenue from the finite number of screens available – meaning campaigns need to be sold at the right price, and portfolio occupancy needs to be maximised. In order to solve this challenge, VIOOH has created these new tools to help our clients embrace yield management and make the most out of their portfolio,” said Gavin Wilson, Global Chief Customer and Revenue Officer at VIOOH.

VIOOH Trading Manager represents another huge milestone for the DOOH industry enabling out of home (OOH) media owners to trade their inventory programmatically with 40 leading demand-side platforms (DSPs) currently integrated, in real-time. VIOOH’s proprietary ad-serving capabilities that power VIOOH Trading Manager align digital OOH to more omni-channel buys and brings an array of innovative benefits for VIOOH’s media owner partners, including:

• Increased demand through the support of a highly requested content management offering  – including the management of visual units and moderation of creatives in bulk
• Optimisation and an intuitive user experience through visual planning and allocation intelligence tools
• s well as increasing overall demand, an ability to flag last-minute revenue opportunities

Media owners using VIOOH Trading Manager also have the opportunity to take advantage of the first new VIOOH Intelligence offerings from a suite of additional data-led features that empower media owners to maximise the usage and value of their inventory. These advanced features will give media owners access to:

• Enhanced predictability of revenue via Programmatic Guaranteed deals
• Optimised portfolio allocation powered by the VIOOH Allocation Engine – proprietary machine learning software that uses state-of-the-art optimisation techniques
• Greater visibility and control over portfolio health – alerting and empowering media owners to react quickly to trading activity
• Data-enriched planning, and trading – through secondary audience targeting data and live trigger activation

“One of our key strategic objectives as a company is to ensure we provide market-leading capabilities within a future-proof platform that connects buyers and sellers. Our digital OOH and programmatic experts at VIOOH have been continuously researching and developing our product offering to be able to provide solutions that align with the needs of our customers. This has resulted in our latest innovations – VIOOH Trading Manager and VIOOH Intelligence – that I’m delighted to be able to share today,” said Jon Block, Chief Product Officer at VIOOH.

VIOOH will be rolling out more features in the coming months – including premium yield management tools.

VIOOH Trading Manager and VIOOH Intelligence are currently live with a number of clients in Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Netherlands, and Singapore, with more to follow.

DPAA, the global trade marketing association, driving the growth and digitization of out-of-home media and its role in the omnichannel mix, announced this week that Innovare Medical Media has joined the association.

Hospital Placed Media (HPM) has shown itself to provide both an exceedingly valuable point of care opportunity for advertisers to reach both hospital patients, visitors, families, seniors and caregivers, as well as an opportunity for advertisers to reach prescribing providers, and a high-income earning, credit worthy clientele in healthcare professionals.

Nick Leiberman, CEO of Innovare told us “There is no question that Healthcare in the United States will continue to be top of mind to consumers and Health Care Personnel (HCP).  With the aging baby-boomer population, healthcare utilization will expand and there will be tens of millions of new jobs and opportunities in the industry. Partnering with the DPAA is a no-brainer for Innovare as we continue to grow our niche digital placed based advertising platform in healthcare settings.  Through a variety of efforts and support from the DPAA, Innovare will leverage their organization to fuel our growth.”

Innovare’s network, consisting of over 230 hospitals and health system venues in 29 states, delivers over half billion annual impressions from healthcare professionals and healthcare users.   Digital out of home in the US is on the rise, with Innovare offering the right audience in the right place, providing for the lowest marketing waste in the industry.

“We are pleased to welcome Innovare into the DPAA community,” said Barry Frey, President & CEO of DPAA. “For a myriad of reasons healthcare is top of mind for consumers and leading advertisers today, I look forward to Innovare bringing their expertise in this space to share with our community.”

Innovare is a national media company dedicated to exclusively working in healthcare venues on a mission to infuse them with innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit. While providing numerous essential patient, visitor and healthcare professional cell phone charging stations, Innovare also contributes a percentage of these programs’ gross revenue directly to its hospital partners. Innovare is able to accomplish this by providing business marketers with an exceptional niche audience of patients, visitors, families, seniors and caregivers, as well as prescribing providers, and a high-income earning, credit worthy clientele in healthcare professionals.   Currently, Innovare has a network of over 240 hospitals and heathcare venues and believes that by 2032, over 1,000 facilities will choose to partner with Innovare to leverage this unique entrepreneurial model.

Vistar Media, the world’s leading marketplace for programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH), today announced the launch of a new global function – Vistar Studio. Vistar Studio is a new offering that provides advertising design services to help marketers take full advantage of the out-of-home (OOH) format. Creative is central to the success of any campaign, which is why Vistar is the first programmatic DOOH provider to offer a dedicated creative team – helping clients build creatives that are optimized for OOH’s unique capabilities.

The newly launched Vistar Studio will be led by Martine Hammink, who has been leading the studio team in supporting EMEA clients under Sage+Archer, the leading European buying platform for DOOH that was acquired by Vistar Media in 2022.

Martine’s approach is rooted in a deep understanding of neuroscience insights and physiological signals — for example, how the human brain most effectively processes imagery, how a looming vs. receding graphic can capture attention more effectively, or how leveraging subtle animation over abrupt can be less distracting.

Based in Amsterdam and New York, the Vistar Studio team is an award-winning group of creative strategists, designers and HTML5 specialists with over a decade of experience leaning into the science behind creatives when bringing impactful digital design to life. The team supports advertising design for more than 160 unique brands annually, including some of the world’s leading brands such as Exxon, Gall & Gall, Heineken, Jack in the Box, JPMChase, KLM Airlines, NBA, New Balance, Nordstrom Rack, Pernod Ricard, Playmobil, Rituals, Target and more.

“Designing for digital out-of-home, especially for dynamic campaigns, goes beyond just graphic and motion design,” said Martine Hammink, Head of Creative Studio at Vistar Media. “It requires a deep understanding of HTML5, the technicalities of ad serving, and insight into how to capture visual attention effectively through dynamic elements. By being able to support agencies and brands with full-service digital design, we have created truly innovative and award-winning campaigns.”

Starting this week, the following core creative services are available globally to clients of the wider Vistar programmatic marketplace:

• Dynamic creative production: Technical and visual optimization of a client’s existing advertising creatives for powerful dynamic activations, or consultative development of new dynamic assets for OOH
• Resizing: Rapid turnaround of creatives to support all targeted screen specs within a campaign
• Mockups: Visualization of creatives within DOOH venue environments
• Static-to-motion animation: Static creatives brought to life with subtle or full motion
• Cross-channel asset conversion: Social media, print and other channel creatives can be reimagined to perform beautifully for OOH

“Programmatic companies are typically seen as the pipes that allow transactions to flow in a marketplace, but our aim is to grow that marketplace by delivering undeniable results for brands,” said Michael Provenzano, Co-Founder & CEO of Vistar Media. “Better creatives drive better results. Creatives and design have always been at the heart of OOH, and by joining that with programmatic tech we can deliver at a whole other level.”

There are incrediblecapabilities available in programmatic OOH today – weather triggers, full-motion video, dynamic creative solutions, audience targeting and more – but it can be complex to align the creative side of a campaign with these features. The Vistar Studio marries knowledge of this cutting-edge technology with deep expertise in design fundamentals, consumer psychology and neuro-visual insights to create impactful designs and personalized marketing campaigns that run without a hitch.

Even as digital out-of-home continues to proliferate, static (or classic) OOH remains the dominant format, yet the processes in place for managing and selling static OOH inventory have largely remained manual.

To help modernize classic workflows, Broadsign today launched its new Static Campaigns module, which makes it easy for media owners to manage static and digital inventory and workflows in tandem from the Broadsign Platform.

Real-time inventory availability for faster deal closings 

Unified workflows for improved operational efficiency

Faster campaign deployment with a more streamlined design process

Insightful reporting and analytics tools for making data-driven decisions 

When you think of iconic vehicles, the Volkswagen Bus is probably one of the first on your list. Its unique look stands the test of time and is one of the most culturally relevant automobiles there is.

Inspired by the original VW Bus, the global car manufacturer revealed its 21st-century, fully electric remodel, the ID. Buzz, in the American market on June 2 (it will be available for purchase in 2024).

With the VW Bus inspiration, the ID. Buzz reboot has been modernized as an electronic vehicle (and includes air conditioning this time around), and its three-row longer wheelbase is designed to better cater to the American demographic.

To support last week’s Huntington Beach, CA launch the VW marketing team debuted a paid media campaign to extend beyond the event itself. As an iconic nod to VW’s past and a statement on its vision for an EV future, the intent of the campaign was to elevate the moment beyond just the vehicle and make it a bigger VW brand moment. It wasn’t just another car reveal, but the rebirth of one of the most iconic cars in American history, the original VW bus.

Rachael Zaluzec, SVP Customer Experience & Brand Marketing at Volkswagen of America told us “This reveal is one of the most iconic moments in VW history in the US. There is literally no other vehicle like this one on the road today, and we can’t wait to see drivers experience the ID Buzz, reimagined for the electric future.”

The creative work took over key bus routes (playing off the contextual relevance of the original ‘Bus’) and many other placements across LA and NYC – the work announces that the VW bus is back, and celebrated the optimism, color and happiness that it brings into the world.

Jonathan Santana, Executive Creative Director of Johannes Leonardo said “We’re thrilled to have a hand in introducing an automotive icon, one that honors the importance of the rebirth of one America’s most beloved and iconic vehicles. Our goal was to make the campaign as simple and iconic as the original bus. Centered on its classic two tone paint job accompanied with smart witty headlines in true VW style, we reacquaint America to this original spirit, now gone electric.”

As one of the most beloved vehicles in automotive history, the creative focuses on what is simple, ownable, and iconic about its reincarnation, its two tone paint job. The campaign was teased out to the public on Monday, May 29th, featuring digital OOH that shows just two tone colors (no car) to create intrigue and excitement of what’s to come. On Friday, June 2nd, in line with the ID. Buzz Reveal in Huntington Beach, the OOH focused campaign formally went live, replacing the tease OOH and including additional print placements.

While the current AI boom is only just getting started, an early winner is Nvidia according to IDTechEx, who on Tuesday, May 30 saw the company’s market capitalization exceed US$1 trillion for the first time.

For a chip designer with no fabrication capabilities of its own, this is a significant moment. Hovering around a US$970 billion valuation as of June 1, the momentary increase in share price saw Nvidia join an elite club occupied by only five other companies; Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Saudi Aramco.

Nvidia’s share price has increased roughly 170% since the beginning of the year, growth that has outpaced other members of the S&P 500 index. That growth is directly correlated to the increasing awareness and use of #AI tools, and the potential for impact on business and consumers alike.

ChatGPT has been discussed in boardrooms and at the water cooler since it was released back in November 2022 and just three months after its release, ChatGPT had registered 100 million users. The chatbot – which is built on a large language model consisting of 175 billion parameters – was trained using approximately 10,000 Nvidia A100 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Nvidia currently accounts for around 80% of all GPUs globally, where the use of these GPUs has been bolstered by AI and data mining (the parallel processing benefits of GPUs making them as useful for the training of AI algorithms as for cryptocurrency mining).

Market research company IDTechEx recently published a report that forecasts Nvidia’s continued dominance not just on the GPU stage but more specifically as AI hardware leaders, with the company taking a considerable percentage of the forecast US$257 billion AI chip revenue as of 2033.

Presently, Nvidia generates more revenue from their data center and networking market segment (which includes data centre platforms as well as autonomous vehicle solutions and cryptocurrency mining processors) than from their graphics reporting segment. In FY2023, Nvidia generated US$15.01 billion in Data Center revenue, which accounted for 55.6% of the total revenue generated for the year. This presents an increase in Data Center revenue of 41% from 2022, where Nvidia has shown year-on-year growth in Data Center revenues of over 40% since 2020. Contrast this to other AI chip designers – such as AMD (who recently acquired Xilinx) and Qualcomm and it is clear that Nvidia are establishing early dominance in the data center AI space.

The company is not resting on its laurels either. While the A100 is presently the most commonly used chip for AI purposes within data centers, Nvidia announced early this year the H100 GPU, based on their new Hopper architecture. The Hopper architecture is built in TSMC’s 4N process (an enhanced version of the 5 nm node), incorporating 80 billion transistors (the A100 has 54.2 billion transistors, made in a 7 nm process). With speedups ranging from 7X to 30X across training and inference when compared with the A100 – as well as a comparable thermal design power in the PCIe form factor – Nvidia will be supplying the key hardware necessary to run the increasingly complex AI algorithms of tomorrow.

According to IDTechEx’s latest report on AI chips, AI at the edge has different requirements than in the cloud, chief among them the power consumption of chips due to the thermal capabilities of the devices in which they are embedded. As chips at the edge can typically consume no more than a few Watts, the complexity of the models that they run must be greatly simplified. A chip such as the A100, with its large footprint and transistor density, would be a waste; instead, companies need not design at the cutting-edge in terms of node processes and can instead opt to manufacture at more mature nodes, which have a lower price point (and therefore barrier to entry) than leading-edge nodes.

It is difficult to determine the precise location of the AI inflection point and how far in the future it is. While opinions may differ, there is no questioning that the AI boom is happening and that AI tools have the capacity to transform workflows across industry verticals. To learn more about the global AI chips market, including the technology developments, key players, and market prospects for AI-capable hardware, please refer to IDTechEx’s “AI Chips 2023-2033” report.

To find out more, including downloadable sample pages, please click here.

We asked ChatGPT what you would call a conference around the subjects of Generative AI, Machine Learning and ChatGPT and how they might affect the Out of Home industry.

It came up with ‘AdAI: OOH – Conference. The Impact of Generative AI, Machine Learning and ChatGPT on Out-of-Home Advertising‘.

It’s an event that we are currently exploring and one that could be held in Toronto as soon as November.

Vistar Media, the world’s leading marketplace for programmatic digital out-of-home has announced the launch of Vistar Verify, a new program that establishes a set of measurable quality standards for digital out-of-home inventory.

Vistar Verify creates a shared definition of quality that can be monitored fairly and objectively across all inventory in the Vistar marketplace. Vistar Verify utilizes a set of manual and automated checks to ensure inventory is represented accurately and meets a collective set of standards established by Vistar in consultation with media owners, buyers and platform partners. Vistar Verify assures buyers that they can confidently make inventory choices and continue to grow their investment in DOOH.

When it comes to out-of-home media, the concept of “quality” can take on a lot of meanings. Vistar has consulted with clients and partners across the OOH ecosystem, incorporating input from brands, agencies, demand-side platforms and media owners to develop a set of criteria that can be used to assess the quality of an OOH media asset:

• Environment: The quality of environment in which a screen is located, including both the location itself and the audience present in the location
• Presentation: The quality and effectiveness of the presentation in terms of the physical display itself and the on-screen experience
• Signals: The reliability and accuracy of data (‘signals) describing the inventory

Through the Vistar Verify program, Vistar launched a verification process to benchmark all Vistar inventory against each criteria to ensure that all inventory in the marketplace meets the highest standards. Audited media owners also complete a detailed RFI covering all aspects of a media owner’s environment, processes, data usage, integrations and more.

Additionally, an automated inventory check runs a script against a list of OOH venues, checking the location (latitude/longitude) against the Google Places API, to verify the accuracy of the venue type – for example, identifying a grocery store at or within 50m of the location of a venue listed in the “grocery store” category.

“As the programmatic OOH space has grown, the supply landscape has become saturated, and all screens are not bringing equivalent inventory quality to the table,” said Wade Rifkin, EVP and GM, Programmatic, Clear Channel Outdoor. “Vistar’s ‘Verify’ solution is illuminating for brands, helping them demarcate and focus investment within premium and impactful contexts for their campaigns. We’re excited to see powerful audience targeting and DSP decisioning marry up even more with high quality programmatic DOOH environments like our roadside and airports inventory through the use of Vistar Verify.”

Over the next few months, Vistar will be rolling out tools for buyers making it easier to browse, plan against, and target inventory based on verification status. Additionally, this framework provides media owners with actionable insights into how they can continue to improve the quality of their networks and drive value for advertisers.

Vistar Verify is currently available in the United States, with global rollout expected by the end of 2023. Full details of the Vistar Verify program and quality rubric can be found here.