Making a Start is the Hardest Part

Richard Pook

co-founder, youdooh

Are you one of those people who put off the new or difficult things, in favour of the mini dopamine hits? You are not alone.

Ticking off easy to-dos or checking your email is always easier and can feel good at the time, but let’s be honest, it’s not really making progress.

In the last of our series on AI in outdoor advertising, we’re sharing how we’re using AI at youdooh to tackle the hardest part – making a start so you can get from an idea to a first plan.

The curse of the blank sheet of paper

We have thousands of customers signed up to youdooh, the vast majority of whom are new to outdoor advertising. Creating your first digital outdoor media plan can be daunting, with lots of decisions to be made on things like screen locations, formats, campaign objectives, audience data and budgets.

Even with all the research and investment we’ve put into creating an intuitive user experience, some people still aren’t sure where to start and so they just put it off taking that first step.

AI is perfectly suited to this challenge. Processing a large number of inputs and bringing some order to them. Like I’m sure many of you do, I often use Chat GPT or Gemini to give me a steer when I’m not sure where to begin.

Benefits to marketers

So why not deliver a similar experience for outdoor and take the uncertainty and guesswork out of the booking process?

So if someone says ‘I want to reach commuters near my store’, we’d automatically translates this into a morning daypart plus a local radius, without the user needing to think in technical terms.

If we can get people through those first few minutes, then they’d be over the hump and on their way to trying something new.

Getting from an idea to done in DOOH faster with fewer blockers, less guesswork, lower cognitive load.

The vision

Conversation. Draft outdoor campaign. Review. Book. Done.

Making DOOH even easier and more accessible for everyone.

New UX territory

It was an interesting project to tackle for our UX team because it’s in such a new realm of design.

We wanted to stay true to youdooh’s core principles of simplicity, speed and structure, so maintaining the familiarity, visual language and components of the existing Youdooh booking process but with more free-flowing and unscripted user components

We landed on a step-by-step template builder, with the flexibility and dynamic nature of AI.

Intent beats exact inputs

A lot of our customers build campaigns with intent and goals, rather than looking at our screen inventory first. So rather than trying to simplify UI controls, what if we just removed the feeling of interacting with inputs and settings altogether?

Instead of forcing users to pick exact screens, inputs and paths, we focused on capturing their intent - proximity, goals, audience behaviour - and only translating it into technical parameters right at the end. So AI wasn’t just a layer on top, it flipped the process from inputs to intent.

That’s where the conversational approach made sense. We built it around the idea of only asking one question at a time, but asking the right question based on the previous answer.

If someone shows early on that budget is their main constraint, the AI flow pivots towards that. If they jump straight to locations, we take the campaign build in that direction. The goal was to feel more like reacting to the user than pushing them through a set way of doing things.

Starting your DOOH campaign just got a whole lot easier.

So what’s the outcome of all this development work?

Screenplanr.ai, youdooh’s AI outdoor planning tool.

Conversation. Draft Outdoor campaign. Review. Book. Done.

The hardest part is starting. Screenplanr.AI makes it easy. Try it today for free