| | JUNE 20188CIOReviewOutdoor Advertising is the oldest advertising medium. It's been around for this long because of the perfect marriage of simplicity and effectiveness. It was easy to install and required no electronic or mechanical parts, yet it would have the most visual impact on account of its size and placement in the real world. It's no surprise the medium maintains steady growth and is consistent on media plans the world over.In the information age starting roughly in the 90s, we saw the rise of digital technology rapidly impacting every facet of our lives. Electronic gadgets of all kinds, which were then inter-connected on wireless networks, became the focus of attention as they brought with them whole new advertising channels. We saw the start of the Digital Media revolution.The Outdoor medium saw its first major transformational event with the advent of LCD technology; the means to convert a printed vinyl sign to a digital screen. While still expensive, the implications were stratospheric. Digital signage could be connected via centralized servers and have their content fed to them, avoiding the need to send personnel to mount the creative physically.Outdoor advertising had proven to be a flexible and adaptive industry, able to take advantage of advancing technology to By Mike Gamaroff, SVP of Channel Strategy, SITO MobileDIGITAL SIGNAGE: AN INDUSTRY REBORNreinvent itself and create efficiencies for advertisers. With this new transactional ease, Digital Outdoor advertising became an increasingly favored medium--but this was only the beginning.Now that advertisers had a faster, more engaging, dynamic and visually impressive channel to invest in, attention turned to economic efficiency. Outdoor Advertising still suffered from one major disadvantage when compared to its rapidly growing competitor, online media. This was its ability to measure ROI and conversions.When online, consumers can click banners leading them to a site, which will in turn lead them through a purchase process, resulting in a sale. Each point in this cycle can yield a success metric that can be displayed neatly on a dashboard. Advertisers can watch in real-time how each ad performs and whether or not it led to a sale.Conversely, when a consumer is moved to purchase a product based on something they saw up on a billboard, there did not exist the same means to track these interactions on a step-by-step basis. However, in the past few years, an entirely new transformational change to Outdoor Media has taken place thanks to another emerging technology. This transformation was made possible thanks to the power of Big Data working in conjunction with commonly used digital technologies like smart phones and sensors. Mobile phones were a separate development and were viewed by advertisers as an
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