DOOH: A major opportunity for self-service still waiting to happen

Eric Lamb of Vistar Media, left, poses questions to Derek Myers of Advana, Adrienne Lin of PespsiCo, Donnie Helms of Pursuant Health and Brendan Carr of Crane Medianet.

Owners and operators of self-serve kiosks, ATMs and vending machines are sitting on one of the biggest business opportunities that they may not even be aware of.

Self-serve equipment with digital screens can offer digital-out-of-home advertising, the fastest growing advertising channel in today's digital media savvy society. Kiosk operators have only begun to scratch the surface of this multi-billion-dollar industry.

Which is not to say that unattended retail property owners and digital advertisers just recognized the opportunity in 2021. The two industries have been working to develop the channel for more than a decade, but have been stymied by the fragmentation of the unattended retail market and the DOOH industry's focus on other markets.

But progress, while slow, has been real, as attested by a panel of experts who gave an overview on this emerging opportunity during the Self-Serve Innovation Summit last month in Hollywood, Florida. The session was titled, "The Third Customer Set: An Opportunity You Didn't Even Know You're Ignoring."

DOOH expands

Panel moderator Eric Lamb, senior vice president of supply at Vistar Media, a provider of DOOH software, said at the outset that DOOH — which also includes digital billboards and digital screens in transportation facilities and on elevators — is the only advertising medium that is growing while other media (TV, radio and print) are declining. Vistar Media helps digital signage operators (including kiosk and vending operators) monetize their screens through digital advertising.

"We're starting to see a much bigger adoption from kiosk operators," Lamb said, adding that most of the kiosks with digital signage screens serve customers in ways other than displaying ads.

Vistar Media helps digital screen networks, including three of the four panelists — Advana, Crane Medianet and Puruant Health — manage media content inventory. Vistar Media provides automated ("programmatic") ad scheduling which gives media owners control of when specific creative content appears on their screens.

The advertiser perspective

Adrienne Lin, foodservice marketing manager, PepsiCo Inc., offered the advertiser perspective. Lin works to deliver brand advertising to locations such as cafeterias, office buildings, hospitals and colleges in addition to unattended retail venues such as vending machines and micro markets.

Lin said she is most excited about the ability to account for the investment in the digital media, thanks to DOOH technology, a benefit that is not as easy to quantify in other advertising media, such as print.
PepsiCo has been working with both Advana and Crane Medianet to conduct "test and learn" DOOH advertising in unattended locations.

Donnie Helms of Pursuant Health describes his company's success in DOOH, flanked by Adrienne Lin of PepsiCo and Brendan Carr of Crane Medianet.

"Just having better visibility to execution in knowing that when we push out these ads and these promotional offers, we know where they're going," Lin said. "We know that they're going across the diverse sets of customers that we have, and we know the time span. Knowing the execution is happening has been really big for us."

This has been important to the company in the last two years since it has focused on the unattended channels, Lin said, which encompass a diverse customer base.

Prior to the pandemic, the company realized micro markets were expanding, and accelerated in the pandemic.

"The lines between foodservice, cafeterias and micro markets really started to blur," she said.

With digital media, it's also possible to know when a person is interacting, she said, which is not true for all other media formats.

It is also possible to track what transactions take place when a certain ad is playing, she said, and to know what offers people are and aren't responding to.

This is why 80% of new advertising dollars being invested are going to online formats like Facebook and Google, Lamb said.

"They (online formats) give marketers great insights into what they're buying and how it's working," he said.

New technology emerges

Donnie Helms, CFO at Pursuant Health, a digital health data platform which includes about 4,600 self-serve health care kiosks located in retail settings, said Vistar Media's ad serving software provided a turnkey solution for DOOH, which the company saw as "an all-around natural fit."

Pursuant Health's DOOH business was profitable "out of the gate" working with Vistar Media, he said. The company has seen double to triple digit growth over the last two years.

Helms said his company is able to target its digital ads demographically and credited Vistar Media with making advertising buying and selling more efficient.

"You want to be sure you are touching the right markets with your sales team and you're keeping them in their right respective lanes while also making them feel like they have a fair share of the pie," Helms said.

There is also a digital top screen on the kiosk that displays more general ads to passersby.

About 50,000 people use Pursuant Health's kiosks daily to check in on their health and connect with health care resources, not including passersby.

Pursuant Health has also worked with digital ad agencies that sell its advertising programs to advertisers.

Progress still needed

Moderator Eric Lamb of Vistar Media describes the growth of DOOH, flanked by Derek Myers of Advana.

While the panelists agreed DOOH offers more ways to quantify ad spending than some of the other advertising channels, there is still a fair amount of trial and error involved.

Despite the available data, Helms said one of the biggest challenges is still proving to marketers that their investment is improving product sales. He called this the "attribution" problem which the industry is still in the early stage of addressing.

To this end, Advana provides data to quantify growth for the brands the company partners with that advertise to 35,000 locations, said Derek Myers, founder and CEO. The company provides curated promotions and brand content to consumers at relevant times throughout their day at multiple workplace channels.

"It's really a combination of great brand partnerships to understand their goals going forward and insuring that as those ads are running, that you're delivering their outcome," Myers said. "A lot of people think we're an advertising company and we branded ourselves as Advana, but in reality we're really an applied data science company, and advertising is one of our outcomes."

A win-win-win scenario

Crane Medianet, a division of Crane Payment Innovations, a vending hardware manufacturer, connects advertisers to more than 50,000 digital screens on vending machines, said Brendan Carr, new business development leader.

In 2014 Crane Payment Innovations saw the opportunity to integrate digital screens on the vending machines, Carr said. The opportunity was to bring value to Crane's marketing partners such as PepsiCo and its vending operator partners in addition to Crane itself.

"We have the ability to really target," Carr said. He knows for example, that the company has 8,000 screens on college campuses.

Crane's vending management software allows the company to know how much people in office parks are spending at the machines, for example, and what products they are buying.

"If PepsiCo is focusing on college campuses, we can target that," Carr said.

Where to begin

Asked for advice for companies interested in expanding into DOOH advertising, Helms said it is important to invest in ad tracking. "If we can't track it, it didn't happen," he said.

The programmatic solution, which refers to the buying and selling of advertising through software, is a good way to start out slowly in DOOH advertising, he said.

To expand into DOOH in a bigger way, it is important to embrace both the technology and human aspects, Helms said. He believes automation will play a bigger part of DOOH advertising.

"You don't want to focus too much of your energy on one of the other," he said.

How big is the pie?

How can the investment in the space grow?

Carr said one way is to get more national advertising.

Helms said media owners can seek ways to make their data actionable for the marketers, which includes ensuring that a media network is aligned with the audiences the advertiser wants to reach.

"Further investments in the tracking will actually pull those dollars of ad share from the digital media companies today," Myers said. "Because Facebook, Snapchat, they're all in multi-year efforts right now to rebuild their platform off of personally identifiable information into aggregated groups.

"The beauty you have as kiosk owners in the physical world where your locations are (is) you already have that level of aggregation," Myers said. "So you're starting point is in a great spot to where the digital ad business is heading."

Photos by Willie Lawless.