Bridging the gap between online and offline with programmatic DOOH

This piece delves into two examples of how brands have leveraged programmatic DOOH to drive brand awareness and sales and support investments in performance-led channels.

Marketers are increasingly learning that with digital ad spend at an all-time high, success in online advertising requires support from offline channels. 

Control, flexibility, and real-time optimization capabilities are top priorities when it comes to selecting media channels, which is exactly why programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) is the channel of choice for so many brands, agencies, and demand-side platforms (DSPs) looking to amplify their investments in online advertising. Read on to discover how Skyrise and The Woodland Trust and Flow City and Face The Future used pDOOH to deliver both online and offline results. 

How Skyrise delivered 21% uplift in revenue for The Woodland Trust using pDOOH

Speaking on the Life in Programmatic DOOH podcast, Mark Burton (business director, Skyrise) describes how pDOOH helped deliver outstanding results for The Woodland Trust as part of a cross-channel campaign including audio and social media.

The challenge

Memberships were declining, and the effectiveness of response-orientated channels, e.g. social, was just waning because they were saturated due to a high volume of advertising from across the charity sector.

This meant that The Woodland Trust needed a new approach. The challenge was to harness awareness channels in such a way that we could drive emotional responses that resulted in direct responses – in this case memberships. We were also tasked with proving the effectiveness and incrementality of this new strategy over and above what previous media plans had delivered.

The solution

Skyrise uses mobile network data signals to build persona-based audiences that are bespoke for each campaign. For The Woodland Trust we were looking for people who are active, interested in walking and exploring, and environmentally focused or nature-loving.

Once these audiences are built, that tells us who they are, where they are, where they live, how they move, and more importantly, what media channels they consume. In this instance, the channels that over-indexed were pDOOH and digital audio.

For this campaign pDOOH was the glue – the unavoidable channel that immersed the audience in the campaign. Additionally, pDOOH provided our audience with a feeling of escapism through a juxtaposition of woodland imagery in busy city centre environments e.g. bluebells swaying in the wind. That’s something that you can’t do on small screens.

Results

We measure as much as we can but what really matters is business metrics – in this case, memberships. Skyrise gives you a view of all traffic from mobile devices; we see traffic for individual clients, traffic for sectors, we see every search and every website visit from a mobile device pre-, during, and post-campaign.

The Woodland Trust achieved 15% of all charitable category searches in the locations in which the campaign ran, which is a strong indicator of success, but it’s not the key metric here. To get to the metrics that mattered, memberships and revenue, we used first-party data from Woodland Trust supplied by postcode, date, and time which allowed us to define robust test and control areas and measure uplift.

Our test areas outperformed control areas by 21% delivering 2,883 new memberships and £172,980 in revenue which was 32% above target and well above our media spend. Additionally, Woodland Trust measured the performance of social channels in the test and control areas and saw an uplift in donation levels and membership levels in the areas in which pDOOH was running.

How Flow City increased brand awareness for Face The Future by 55% in just 10 days

Dagny Lacka (co-founder, Flow City) also joined us on Life in Programmatic DOOH to explain how tactical use of pDOOH can deliver results in a short period of time without the need for huge budgets.

The challenge

Up until last year, Face The Future only had an online presence in a crowded space competing with Boots.com and other retail giants. The brand decided to host a five-day ‘pop-up’ style physical presence in four UK cities. Bespoke vans acted as the venue where consumers could learn more about Face The Future, receive goody bags, and sign up to receive future offers and promotions via email. But first they needed to drive footfall to the vans.

New to anything other than online advertising, one of the key challenges was starting from zero with real-world audiences.

The solution

The goals for this campaign were to build brand awareness and drive footfall to specific locations at specific times. pDOOH offered us the opportunity to use hyper-local planning methods based on proximity and affinity to reach the target audience while making sure we only delivered the campaign at the times when it had the best chance of getting through to the audience. Face The Future also ran an online campaign designed to encourage consumers to pre-register for the event.

Results

The target for pDOOH was to drive an additional 1,000 people per day to each location, we drove, on average, 5,000. This was not down to a huge budget but thanks to the tactical delivery made possible through programmatic.

Additionally, partner product brand awareness increased by an average of 55%, there was a 9.4% increase in brand awareness for Face The Future accompanied by a £24,000 increase in sales revenue (almost all of which came from new customers) which equated to a140% return on investment.

Putting audiences first delivers results

Both these campaigns highlight the importance of putting audiences, not channels first. The results achieved across all channels underpin the need to support online performance-driven advertising with audience-first strategies that go beyond online environments and reach people in the real world.

This change in media planning will have a knock-on effect on measurement requiring agencies to move away from measuring channel performance and instead focus on measuring audience performance. Armed with unparalleled insights into audiences, media owners and technology platforms act as enablers and facilitators of this change.

Visit our Programmatic Intelligence Hub to find out more about how pDOOH can help you achieve your marketing goals.