| | JUNE 20189CIOReviewunrelated and unconnected media channel. This is true when Outdoor and Mobile advertising is viewed in respective isolation, yet they were far more closely linked than many understood.Mobile phones were transmitting location signals in many different ways and few saw the potential of what this data could do given it contained no personal information, or any way they could talk directly to the mobile phone owner. It was at a time when advertisers sought an email address or phone number above all else so that they could speak directly to their consumers.Yet the data told a different and far more powerful story. It showed where groups of consumers would go during their day, what places they would visit and what stores they would shop at. The Outdoor Advertising industry realized they could find these concentrations of consumers, linked to a specific behavior, and find which billboard placements were available to buy in these areas.This meant that advertisers now could select their Outdoor media placements based on the precise concentrations of their target audience--ensuring that money wasn't wasted on consumers who were not likely to buy their product. Additionally, this same data could identify those consumers who were within view of an Outdoor media placement and who were then observed in the Advertiser's retail store. In the same way that digital advertising could report a conversion, this passive data--requiring no click--could be used to show advertisers the number of consumers who were driven from the billboard into their store. Now, not only do they have more confidence that their ad was shown to the right people, they were able to see on a dashboard how many customers were driven into their store.As if these two major developments in the Outdoor Advertising industry were not enough, there was yet more on the way. By now, the medium had been radically re-invented, and resembled very little of its vinyl analogue past. These ads were now digital screens, connected to Cloud servers. Dynamic mobile data could now bring real-time capabilities to the display of the advertising content itself.Since the mobile data revealed concentrations of like-minded consumers in real-time, it meant that Digital Out of Home ad-serving platforms could connect pipes to this data and make fluid decisions on what creative to display at what time.If the data was showing that, between the hours of 10 a.m, and 11 a.m, there was a concentration of people who frequently visit a quick-serve restaurant, then a brand like McDonald's could choose to automate the display of their ad only during this time. The whole process had become completely automatic.Live data would trigger an ad on a particular screen only when target audience concentrations met a certain threshold, and the same data could then report back to the brand how many of those consumers made their way back into their store--all in real-time and completely automated.The industry of digital signage is completely unrecognizable from just a few years ago. Many advertisers are becoming aware of this dramatic shift and these new abilities to target effectively and measure ROI. Big Data and the programmatic ad-serving platforms that have risen around it have taken this once simple and opaque medium and rendered it a powerful response-driven solution that achieves many of the same advantages of online advertising but without the viewability concerns that have plagued this channel from the start.The future is as bright as the LED screens themselves, and one can only imagine where digital signage will go from here considering how much it has evolved in such a short period. As long as the industry remains quick to adapt to the emerging technologies around it, with the needs of the advertisers in mind, there is simply no stopping it. The industry of digital signage is being used for its new abilities to target effectively and measure ROIMike Gamaroff
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