There’s an interesting article today in MediaPost that suggests technology is not a cure-all for all elements of the Out-of-Home advertising marketplace.
One of the recent so-called saviors of streamlined advertising media planning and buying has been programmatic buying because it automates all of the processes via pre-set parameters such as bid price and network reach. The big holding companies also like it because it excises the need for mid and low-level buyers (sorry, gang!).
Programmatic buying has worked well for online advertising (even if more than half the people on the Internet never see it, according to Google), and it’s started to get serious toeholds in radio and television commercial advertising buys as well.
Early steps into the OOH industry, however, are clunking. As Jerry Gondek, director of client partnerships at Out of Home America Wilkens Media notes, “Proponents of programmatic media buying promise far greater efficiency, speed, and flexibility, but a number of fundamental obstacles will make universal adoption in the OOH industry a distant prospect at best.”
Five primary barriers to programmatic buying ever becoming the norm in OOH advertising are, according to Gondek:
- Huge variety of OOH inventory
- Lack of standard audience data
- Lack of addressability
- Fragmented trading platforms
- Industry inertia
We got a good laugh out of that last one since it’s also pretty much the last, biggest obstacle Wrapify faces as well. The others, though, either don’t relate to our platform or we’ve got ‘em solved solid.
Overall, it just goes to show, as we’ve said in the past, technology for the sake of technology is not the answer. It may well be proven that programmatic media buying is not suitable for the OOH advertising industry. But that’s not to say some other type of technology is yet to be created that changes the game, the same way Wrapify’s use of technology has amplified the power of wrapped vehicles in the OOH marketplace. We’re betting there will be.
