VIOOH, a global digital out of home (DOOH) supply-side platform, has released its annual research into the programmatic DOOH market. The findings show that the future of programmatic DOOH (prDOOH) remains strong with its popularity surging, especially in the UK.

Across campaigns UK advertisers have worked on in the past 12-18 months, on average nearly a third (31%) have included prDOOH, with the average expected to increase to 39% in the next 18 months.

Survey respondents in the UK state that they plan to increase spend by almost a third (31%) over the next 18 months. A third of advertisers (33%) are moving budget from other digital channels, 24% are moving budget from other traditional channels, and more than one in 10 (15%) creating new budgets to grow prDOOH. Whilst only 4% of main OOH teams are likely to be accessing new budget for prDOOH, when buying is diversified, this increases to 25% when bought through a dedicated prDOOH team, and 28% when bought through programmatic/digital teams.

As the number of advertisers in the UK adopting prDOOH rises, so does awareness of the distinctive advantages including hyper-targeting (64%), increased brand awareness (64%), high quality viewability (59%), and generating ROI (57%). prDOOH has become particularly popular with advertisers in retail, FMCG, and healthcare verticals, who this year cited the ability to leverage location (68%) and audience targeting (67%), and ability to use dynamic creative (62%) as reasons to invest.

The majority (81%) of those surveyed feel that, alongside DOOH (83%), prDOOH offers the most innovative opportunities compared to any other media channel, delivering highly targeted activations, the ability to buy placements in real-time, optimise campaigns in-flight and deliver dynamic and contextually relevant creative. Over a third (38%) of UK advertisers usually or always purchase their DOOH campaigns through a mix of both direct buys and programmatic buys, followed by 30% who say they usually or always use programmatic buys only.

UK advertisers leverage prDOOH both for performance and branding contexts. Almost three quarters (71%) of UK advertisers consider prDOOH important for brand-led campaigns, increasing for performance-based campaigns (81%), with the gap increasing year-on-year.

Seven out of ten (71%) of the UK advertisers surveyed plan to prioritise integrating prDOOH more closely in multi-channel campaigns. The majority would buy display (79%) and digital video (72%) alongside prDOOH in a performance-led activation, with a marginally lower proportion claiming to use display (77%) and social (73%) as a complement to prDOOH in a brand-based campaigns.          

Jean-Christophe Conti, CEO at VIOOH, said: “Programmatic DOOH is becoming mainstream and is now a must-have on every media plan. This year’s State of the Nation report shows not only that advertising budgets continue to be reallocated for increased prDOOH spend year-on-year, but the opportunities from highly targeted activations to trigger-based buying are giving advertisers a raft of flexible high-value tools which complement both brand and performance ad campaigns.

“With programmatic DOOH becoming more mature, media professionals are also increasingly integrating prDOOH into multi-channel strategies, often using it alongside social media and display advertising.”

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Tags: digital, DOOH, programmatic