Let’s talk about programmatic advertising.

What is this programmatic advertising thing I keep hearing about?

Simply put, programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying and selling digital ads, rather than purchasing directly from publishers. This process happens on an exchange and leverages artificial intelligence and real-time bidding for inventory. Programmatic digital-out-of-home (also called pDOOH) takes all the best parts of traditional DOOH advertising, with its wide reach and customer targeting, and adds the ability to reach consumers in the real world, when they can take immediate action. Imagine being able to advertise umbrellas in a store when it’s raining outside, or displaying your company’s new travel-insurance packages to people in airports all over the country. Programmatic advertising makes this possible.

How it Works

Imagine that you're the marketing director of a large consumer brand that sells things like laundry detergent. You're looking for a way to advertise to customers in a fresh new way, since TV ads are expensive and people are tired of receiving marketing emails. Ideally you would choose an advertising medium that allows you to reach customers when they're close to a point of sale. It needs to be affordable and measurable - so you know how many people have seen the advertisement and calculate your ROI from the resulting sales.

This is where programmatic comes in. By leveraging a programmatic advertising network like Vistar, you can identify an existing network of screens that are located in the household-goods section of retail locations (i.e. Target or CVS) where your detergent is sold. You agree to pay Vistar a nominal fee in order to have your short video advertisement placed on 1,500 screens for a month, where it's estimated to be seen by 15 million customers. Your ads will be displayed on screens powered by XOGO, which you can count on to deliver your content consistently.

Once your video is uploaded to Vistar, the hard part is done. XOGO media players run your content (and likely other ads) on a loop, reporting the proof-of-play metrics back to Vistar. You just need to check in occasionally to see which locations or ad videos are performing best. It's even possible to connect audience-recognition sensors at each screen, in order to record exactly how many people looked at your ad, and what percentage of them paid attention for a particular duration of time (i.e. 2 seconds or more) called an “engagement”. It sounds futuristic but we work with Vistar in order to deliver programmatic ads like this to thousands of screens everyday.

Benefits of Programmatic Advertising for Brands

Regardless of how well-done your ad is, if it’s not in the right location and targeting the right people, your campaign will not be effective. Programmatic advertising streamlines the process of buying and selling advertising space. Traditionally, buying ad space involves a lot of back-and-forth between the buyer and seller. Programmatic advertising automates the bidding and ad placement, giving marketers more time to optimize their ads and analyze performance.

Programmatic advertising is efficient, targeted, and scalable. With pDOOH, an algorithm determines where one’s ad money is best spent. All the advertiser needs to do is give his or her programmatic platform information about the campaign, the target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs) - the algorithm handles the heavy lifting, and XOGO plays your ad content on the screens.

Benefits of Programmatic Advertising for Screen Owners

Programmatic advertising can be lucrative for screen owners as well. Suppose you’re a retailer that has dozens or even hundreds of screens in place, displaying digital signage content to your shoppers. Brands are willing to pay top dollar to display their digital ads on your screens and drive sales of their products and services. There are also businesses whose sole purpose is to deploy XOGO-powered digital kiosks in retail locations and convenience stores - oftentimes free of charge - in order to monetize those screens by running programmatic ads on them.

XOGO’s Partnership with Vistar Media

Vistar Media is a world leader in programmatic DOOH advertising. Their platform allows brands and agencies to tap into a massive network of screens in order to advertise products and services to specific target audiences. XOGO has partnered with Vistar to enable their programmatic advertising content to run in the XOGO Player app. Since XOGO Player is available on 12 different platforms (Windows, Android, iOS, Chrome and many more), we effectively bring Vistar content to tens of thousands of additional devices. Our smart player platform has been optimized to download and run programmatic content from cache whenever possible - allowing customers the option to connect their media players via LTE modems without incurring huge fees from cellular providers.

Summary

Programmatic digital signage is the advertising platform of the future. It allows brands to reach new audiences exactly when and where they are prepared to make a purchase. It allows screen-owners to profit from displaying those ads across their screen. And the whole thing is enabled by Vistar's platform and XOGO's robust player applications. We know that programmatic advertising can be a confusing topic. Please contact us at the form below with questions, or to discuss how programmatic advertising may work for your business.

Take-Aways

• Programmatic advertising allows advertisers to reach customers when and where they are about to make a purchase

• Programmatic advertising enables screen owners to profit from displaying ads on their screens

• XOGO partners with Vistar Media to bring programmatic advertising to thousands of screens worldwide

• XOGO’s enterprise pricing tiers make it incredibly affordable to deploy large networks of screens for pDOOH