Efficiency and Precision: The Advantages of Programmatic Advertising

For most people, the term “programmatic advertising” conjures up images of the kind of ads that pop up in your social media feed or at the top of web pages. Programmatic online ads seem to represent the pinnacle of efficiency—targeted to potential customers based on extensive user data, subject to constant performance tracking and, of course, featuring automated placement.

Out-of-home advertising has a very different reputation. It’s the first kind of advertising to exist and it’s associated with formats from the past that have quickly become obsolete in our data-driven, digital world. It makes us think of advertisers haphazardly placing a billboard within public view, just hoping the right people would see it.

Today, out-of-home and programmatic advertising have merged in the form of programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH), a format that offers the best of both worlds for any brand that hopes to reach the right audience while still spreading their message in a memorable way.

So, let’s go over the things you can do with pDOOH that you just can’t with an old-school billboard.

Reach your ideal audience

If reaching a target audience is exactly what you thought you couldn’t do with out-of-home strategies, you might be thinking back to the dark times before programmatic advertising came into play. Today, consumer data allows us to optimize factors like location and timing of your campaigns so that more impressions actually turn into leads.

Let’s say a fashion brand wants to place an ad for a new line of business casual clothes in an area with many office buildings. They could pay to run the ad all day long just to get impressions from employees who pass it on the way to and from their workplace. Or they could use programmatic advertising to create a strategic schedule and pay less for the same exposure.

Businesses can also use the targeting methods described above to segment their audience and create personalized messages for different subgroups, increasing the relevance of their ads and boosting customer identification with the brand.

Adapt to the surroundings

The surroundings of an out-of-home ad can quickly change and render the message irrelevant. For example, imagine a restaurant that launches a campaign in the dead of winter, hoping to entice potential customers with images of steaming soup and hot cocoa. When there’s an uncharacteristically warm day, those ads will not have the intended effect on their audience.

With programmatic advertising, it’s easy for brands to adjust their messaging on the fly, whether in response to climatic conditions, traffic, breaking news, or any other exterior factors. This flexibility not only allows them to avoid running ads that don’t fit the context, but also empowers them to take advantage of opportunities to tweak their ads in order to meet the moment.

Marketers sometimes speak of “advertising blindness” to refer to people’s tendency to tune out ads, a result of being bombarded with them. But when you glance at a digital billboard and notice it references the heavy traffic you’re currently stuck in? That’s a feat of programmatic advertising that’s bound to catch your attention.

Boost performance with real-time insights

Gone are the days when you had to wait for a campaign’s end to know if you made money, lost money, or broke even. The joy of programmatic advertising is the visibility you have throughout the whole process. Programmatic DOOH technology has taken the characteristic transparency of digital marketing and applied it to advertising that takes place in the public sphere.

The constant feedback of programmatic advertising is the key to reducing financial risk, optimizing your investment and achieving all of your marketing goals. Any time you perceive an opportunity to improve your campaign and boost its performance, you can modify the content in a flash.

Just be sure to choose a user-friendly platform, such as Beeyond, that makes it easy to visualize and change all aspects of your campaigns. The quality of the platform, and the responsiveness of the team in case you should need any assistance, is ultimately what determines how positive (and profitable) your experience with pDOOH is.

Turn heads

No brand can deny the merits of digital marketing, with all its obvious advantages when it comes to segmenting and targeting. But there is an element of out-of-home advertising that’s hard to reproduce with ads aimed at individuals looking at their computer or phone screen: the head-turn moment.

Bold ads displayed in the public sphere garner attention. They’re shareable. The audience is a collective, not an individual, and this fact means that more conversation is generated. But does the head-turn factor outweigh the benefits of programmatic advertising?

Like we said, now you don’t have to choose.