In order to fight back against online, the OOH industry must embrace independent verification
Author: Nick Parker, Global President, Veridooh.
In the past year, 60% of all spend in the USA went to just three companies: Google, Meta and Amazon. Google alone took 36% of that – fifteen times the revenue as the entire OOH industry.
These figures are still shocking, even if no longer surprising. In the last twenty years, we have witnessed a fundamental reorganization of the advertising landscape. And it’s not over yet: by as soon as next year, online advertising is forecast to capture more than 70% of the entire market globally.
Today, a whole generation of senior marketers have built their careers alongside an embrace of digital-first performance marketing: highly-focused media buys, measurement and tracking as standard, cheap and straightforward to deliver.
OOH, by contrast, is unfortunately still battling the same stubborn credibility problem it has for decades. Extensive research and investigations proving OOH’s effectiveness time and again have clearly shown the efficacy of OOH, however, there’s just no getting around the fact that a lot of marketers are still not fully confident their OOH campaigns are delivered as booked. Did the ad even run? Was it on the panels booked? Did it get the promised share of time? Did it actually achieve the impressions promised?
These are real questions that the industry faces, and continue to face. Without proving these questions, they will continue to exist and hold back the growth of OOH beyond a 4% channel.
The continued digitisation of OOH inventory is redrawing the landscape once again. In mature OOH markets such as the UK and Australia, well over 50% of OOH revenues are now coming from digital OOH (DOOH). The US is catching up quickly, with that figure currently standing at 36%. And as a result, OOH is being recast as a channel that is starting to look and behave a lot more like an online channel – presenting brands with an opportunity to deploy OOH more dynamically, transparently and measurably.
Central to this will be independent verification. Already widely utilized in Australia, independent verification is helping grow the OOH industry by empowering marketers with greater confidence in campaign delivery, in turn increasing investment into OOH.
Why Independent Verification is a game changer for the industry
At its core, independent verification provides advertisers with trusted, transparent campaign delivery metrics, empowering them to review performance with confidence. This is achieved through a variety of means, including advanced data analytics, real-time tracking technologies, and third-party auditing.
At Veridooh, we achieve this through our technology that we call SmartCreative; it safely and securely wraps a creative in our proprietary code that passively and independently tracks and collects delivery play data at the creative and panel level. It works without integration to the CMS and sends data back to our platform, which all stakeholders have access to. The upshot is a single source of truth, independently sourced and presented in a place that brands, media agencies and media owners can view and review, and take action on.
By validating campaign performance metrics through unbiased assessment, advertisers can better understand the impact of their OOH campaigns, leading to increased investment and growth in the industry. Despite initial concerns that Independent Verification would inhibit trust and growth in the industry, the opposite has proven to be true: since achieving mass utilization in Australia, the OOH industry has grown at 20% year on year (twice the average annual rate as before), with 75% of Veridooh’s Top 50 customers increasing their OOH investment year on year.
The learning from this is unambiguous: what’s good for brands is good for the industry – when advertisers can independently verify their campaigns, it creates a new level of trust and investment will follow.
Becoming the most trusted channel for advertisers
We should not underestimate the importance of advertiser confidence as a point of differentiation against an online advertising industry that is now staring down the barrel of an $84 billion ad fraud problem. Made For Advertising (MFA) websites, impression fraud, cyber scammers, use of bots – Online’s myriad issues are not easily overcome. With OOH, on the other hand, what you see is what you get. The ads are out there in the real world, and independent verification can help us to demonstrate it without bias.
This presents an opportunity for the OOH industry to firmly establish itself as the most trusted medium for advertisers, offering recognized value in a brand safe environment. But this will only happen if the industry works collaboratively to implement this technology with speed and at scale.
As the Australian market has shown, Independent Verification holds tremendous promise for revolutionizing the way we track, evaluate, and optimize OOH advertising. If the industry is to capitalize on digitization opportunities and become the most trusted channel for brands, for OOH to break the 4% ceiling of advertiser spend embracing independent verification is more than just important – it’s essential.
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