The Benefits of OOH and Automated Direct
Those familiar with digital out-of-home (DOOH) understand it to be a uniquely complex channel. Whereas channels like search or social have a handful of major publishers, DOOH is composed of fragmented inventory owned by many different operators around the world. And because it is a one-to-many channel, measurement and attribution require sophisticated computing that takes into account environmental factors like geographic location, time-of-day, and time-of-year.
For these reasons, DOOH requires custom solutions tailored to specific buyers’ needs and intended outcomes. The plug-and-play approach of programmatic falls short for the channel, often leading to wasted time and, worse, ad dollars.
A better solution is automated direct advertising—FatTail’s bread and butter. By expanding access to premium inventory and creating customized solutions for individual publishers, automated direct brings much-needed simplicity to DOOH.
Programmatic workarounds cause unnecessary waste
Both old-fashioned, manual approaches to DOOH and programmatic fall short by failing to take into account the channel’s complexities, leading to custom workarounds that end up making the channel too complicated for buyers and sellers alike. The result is lost revenue for DOOH sellers, who might be losing ad dollars to simpler channels.
As Alvaro Villa, FatTail’s VP of Business Development, recently said on the OOH Insider podcast, “The more workarounds you have, the more money you’re losing.”
In other words, when an OMS encounters edge cases that incur manual workarounds, either due to a lack of integrations or a shortcoming in its platform, it introduces friction into buyer-seller relationships. And that friction can be a major obstacle to growth for DOOH media owners.
“Let’s take this offline” is something DOOH publishers hear too often when working with programmatic adtech partners that don’t have a standardized workflow for their clients’ unique needs. Instead, publishers need a fully customizable platform that can handle all of their cases—including edge cases.
FatTail solves for a complicated DOOH media sales model
FatTail exists to automate direct, offering media owners an OMS configured to the nuances of their particular business — a technology that streamlines media buying for advertisers without foisting a one-size-fits-all solution on advertisers. We recently partnered with Gas Station TV (GSTV), for example, to help them manage their nearly 30,000 DOOH screens at gas stations across the US.
Before working with FatTail, GSTV had a highly complex media sales model: while the spots they sold ran at gas stations, their sales model functioned on the basis of impressions. They used a nearly proprietary means of calculating availability that further complicated the equation. Calculating the impressions an ad would deliver and, relatedly, the availability of media, was an extremely labor-intensive process.
FatTail built a campaign module that integrates bespoke algorithms to select gas stations based on parameters GSTV specifies. We are also integrating with Vistar Media, the leading OOH ad server, to enable GSTV to easily push IDs to its ad server and unlock a seamless process from media planning to trafficking. GSTV can now surface and sell media with the click of a button.
When selecting an OMS, DOOH publishers need partners that are equipped to handle all the complexities of the channel and integrate their needs in a systematized way on the platform. FatTail’s automated direct model puts it in the upper-right-hand quadrant of OMSs, making it the partner of record for premium publishers in DOOH and beyond.
Check out the OOH Insider podcast to learn more about automating direct in DOOH — and how FatTail can help you make it easier for your advertiser to buy.