The Future of Outdoor Advertising – How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Media

Richard Pook

co-founder, youdooh

What’s next for AI and automation in outdoor advertising?

Media and advertising have always been an imprecise science, where the insight, strategy and tactics vary depending on who you talk to. It’s a messy business going from idea to done. These conditions create the ideal hunting ground for AI and automation. We can all feel it - AI is coming for media and advertising with the promise of simplification, efficiency and effectiveness. Doing more with less, capitalism doing what it does best.

Despite all this flux, outdoor advertising is a channel that’s still going places. Australia and New Zealand ad spend more than doubled over the last 10 years and it has outperformed everyone else except big tech, with no sign that things are slowing down.

Why so?

We might be a little biased, but we think outdoor is awesome.

It’s a potent combination of physical, finite advertising inventory (who doesn’t love seeing their ad on a billboard?) and the great taste of digital advertising without the calories. There’s speed, relevance and impact without the bot fraud, AI slop and partially viewed or skippable ads. However, just like the rest of media, it won’t escape disruption from technology. Tens of thousands of new digital screens have been deployed over the 10 years, fuelling the growth but also creating an extremely fragmented marketplace. To exacerbate matters, 90% of planning & buying is still done manually with emails, spreadsheets and phone calls.

What’s next

So where’s the opportunity? How can outdoor automate, streamline and forge ahead for another 10 years? Here’s a few ideas:

• Planning- There’s still so much guesswork and arbitrariness that goes into buying outdoor advertising at scale. Lots of variables and decisions to be made that creates confusion and choice anxiety for marketers. Advertisers just want someone make sense of it all - to review screen locations, formats, campaign objectives, audience data and budgets to build them a sensible outdoor media plan. This is increasingly something AI will perform, with humans defining inputs and prompting agents to get it done.
  

• Buying- Outdoor ads are still sold as slots in the loop and scheduled manually. Why? It’s mostly a legacy thing. If you started DOOH again today, the industry would give advertisers a share of time on screen, let the advertiser set up and control the campaign themselves and hand over to an adserver and algorithm play out the delivery. This happens with the 10% that’s traded automatically today, it’s just a matter of time before the rest follows.
  

• Data & trading currency- Inventory and supplier fragmentation mean that there’s been no consistent audience methodology or currency. Apples in one place and oranges in another. New measurement systems with Move 2.0 in Australia and KnooH initiatives in New Zealand are big steps forward. They provide unified, market level datasets that will be the fuel for AI to drive better planning, data modelling and measurement. With more clarity and confidence in outcomes, more digital ad spend will come to outdoor.
  

• Creative Optimisation - AI will make it effortless to build ads, and to resize to the myriad screen sizes. Dynamic creatives tailored by time, place, weather or audience flows will become easier. Less friction and more contextual relevance at scale will drive more ad spend.
  

• Pricing & Yield Management- Pricing is inconsistent, and demand is not managed properly, with screens selling out even when there’s more demand. The makes it a shoo-in for AI to optimise yield and pricing dynamically to ensure that nothing sells out and every play sells for the price something is willing to pay for it.
  

• Creative Optimisation - AI will make it effortless to build ads, and to resize to the myriad screen sizes. Dynamic creatives tailored by time, place, weather or audience flows will become easier. Less friction and more contextual relevance at scale will drive more ad spend.

There are so many other areas we could big shifts too; blockchain technology being used to verify delivery, privacy safe audiences with synthetic personas and more downstream campaign outcome measures to name but a few.

Solid foundations for future growth Unlike most of media today, the foundations of outdoor advertising are incredibly strong. There’s no fading legacy business that drags the innovation down and AI can’t come for physical advertising, at least not yet anyway! If we embrace the opportunities and focus on the future, outdoor advertising has the potential to be a top three advertising medium and a must buy for every marketer.

In the final instalment, we’ll share what we’re doing at youdooh to help build this future.