billups hires two new c-suite execs, OAAA promotes pDOOH and 4A’s event, ad delivering robots, and cars parked on stack. A weekly recap of the top OOH stories you may have missed and colorful commentary from BB for the week ending September 29, 2024.
1. billups Hires Two C-Level Ad Vets
B.B.’s Take: Ben Billups keeps his foot on the accelerator with additional high level staffing, continuing growth. Strong hires internationally. Could billups be the one, keeping with OOH Today’s firm belief that the Industry lacks sufficient numbers of women in the C-Suite, to be the first substantial OOH agency to be headed by a female at the CEO position? Let’s see what type of growth continues with them.
2. FlexYourOOH —Campaign to Promote Programmatic OOH
OAAA launched an awareness campaign that encourages advertisers to consider programmatic OOH. The campaign ran from September 22-25 during the AdExchanger’s prestigious Programmatic I/O event at the Marriot Marquis Times Square.
The creatives share messaging that showcases pDOOH’s flexibility, scalability, and targeting capabilities to a key audience of digital media buyers.
OAAA’s Programmatic Working Group collaborated to put together the campaign, which targets event attendees within a three-block radius of the event venue.
B.B.’s Take: Effective messaging which moves the needle? If yes, then what manner and degree of follow-up in calls to continue the message? Commitment to a campaign continues with the boots on the ground. Share that effort and success.
3. OAAA Adds New Event to OOH NY Week
In partnership with the 4A’s, the OAAA is co-hosting the Medium of the Moment event during OOH NY Week in October. The event’s goal is to unite agencies, advertisers, and media owners to explore the transformative power of OOH advertising. Industry leaders will have panel discussions on innovative strategies, examining creativity as a key performance indicator. Featured Speakers include:
Clive Punter, EVP & Chief Revenue Officer, OUTFRONT; Kelly Peppers, President, Colossal Media; Jonathan Schaaf, Global Chief Investment Officer, Stagwell; Mike McGraw, SVP, Executive Creative Director, Clear Channel Outdoor; Jaime Robinson, Co-Founder, CCO, JOAN; Michael Lieberman, Executive Director, OOH, GroupM; Ian Dallimore, VP, Digital Growth & General Manager, Programmatic, Lamar Advertising; Kristy Schlepp, CEO, ODN
B.B.’s Take: This sounds like a potential for a strong event. Who’s attending?
4. Kiwibot’s $25M Acquisition of Nickelytics
This $25 million acquisition combines Kiwibot’s advanced autonomous robots with Nickelytics’ proprietary ad tracking and attribution platform. Their business model aims to fuse functionality with data-driven advertising and enhanced consumer interaction. A fleet of kiwibot’s robots will become smart advertising robots that deliver ads in addition to what the customer ordered.
B.B.’s Take: Robots,, car wraps(mobile) and analytics. Tough product lines. Can two relatively weak, none traditional OOH platforms combine to provide and be perceived as greater than the two individual pieces? Good people. We wish them well .
5. Parking a Nissan Qashqai on Chimney
Though the campaign was kicked off by 3 CGI videos covering the vehicle’s journey from Sunderland across key cities in the UK, the capstone of the campaign is a real-life vehicle parked on the side of Truman Brewery in London.
The campaign, which blurs the lines between faux OOH and OOH by containing elements of both, was executed by Nissan and TBWA/London. You can watch films of the campaign here.
B.B.’s Take: Haul a car up in the air a few hundred feet and it’s an automatic OOH creative winner? Not so fast. OOH has been attaching cars to billboards, walls and everything up in the air for the last 50+ years in my experience. So this is nothing new. Does the added social media put the ‘feat’ in a greater context of success? Probably not. Been there, done that. My only curiosity is a question from an ops perspective. How was the car attached? Bricks, mortar, narrow chimney’s are not the strongest of structures to hold that kind of wight no matter how stripped down the vehicle is.