By Ryan Sullivan, Director of Partnerships ANZ at VIOOH
Programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) advertising has transformed outdoor advertising from a niche media channel to an essential component of multi-channel strategies.
The statistics speak for themselves: 92% of Australian marketers now view pDOOH as offering the most innovative opportunities across all advertising channels. This isn’t just industry hype – it’s backed by significant growth, with pDOOH revenue in Australia projected to reach $100 million in 2025 according to JCDecaux, up from just $3 million in 2020.
Why Australian advertisers are embracing pDOOH
What makes pDOOH so compelling is its unique combination of traditional OOH strengths with digital flexibility. Unlike traditional OOH buying, which required lengthy planning cycles and locked-in investments, programmatic offers unprecedented agility.
Recent ad campaigns have leveraged pDOOH’s speed to market, activating time-sensitive campaigns in hours rather than weeks. This agility is crucial for product launches, responding to competitor activities, or capitalising on timely market opportunities.
A great example is Vodafone in Australia, which has a strong requirement for speed to market. The telecoms brand knows it only has a 48 hr window to influence international students when they enter Australia to choose a mobile phone.
The agility of pDOOH offering allows brands such as Vodafone to achieve their goals through targeted messaging, quickly and efficiently. Campaigns can be deployed using audience targeting, proximity targeting to place ads near points of purchase, contextual triggers, scalable individual targeting, weather targeting and day-parting.
Creative possibilities are almost limitless with the integration of first and third party data. For example, campaigns can also capitalise on midweek product launches by activating pDOOH specifically on launch day, and then utilising sequential creative on subsequent days.
Measurement and performance
One of the most significant advantages of pDOOH is its measurability. For most campaigns, we look at standard media metrics such as impressions delivered and cost KPIs. Other metrics include attribution across both online and footfall traffic, mixed media modelling (MMM) results and weekly business results. This gives us an accurate picture of the market and how media performs beyond standard media KPIs. pDOOH allows us to also optimise based on real-time business insights, which is a true benefit for brands that need high levels of agility.
Channel selection is heavily guided by these data points, and brands have discovered that DOOH delivers significantly higher business outcomes than some other digital channels, which can be particularly valuable for brands with an extensive store footprint.
The omnichannel advantage
According to our recent State of the Nation report, pDOOH aligns effectively with both brand-led campaigns (85% adoption) and performance-led initiatives (91% adoption). What’s particularly powerful about pDOOH is how seamlessly it integrates with other channels, pairing exceptionally well with social media (88% for brand campaigns, 79% for performance campaigns), digital video (67% and 71% respectively), and display advertising (75% and 65%).
One great example is a recent campaign for Mars, which aimed to refresh Mars’s brand image in the Australian market, positioning it as the go-to reward for everyday achievements. The multi-channel campaign, which featured pDOOH, radio and TV, deployed audience targeting, proximity targeting to place ads near points of purchase, contextual triggers, weather targeting, and day-parting on the pDOOH.
Creative possibilities were almost limitless from the integration of 1st and 3rd party data, which resulted in dynamic content with highly relevant messages tailored to consumers based on location, weather conditions, and time of day. Following the campaign, there was a 32% increase in brand attribution, and crucially, a 30% increase in purchase intent, enabling Mars to connect with consumers in a relevant and meaningful way.
This capability to integrate pDOOH alongside other channels allows brands to create truly connected customer journeys. For example, advertisers can target audiences with awareness messaging via pDOOH screens during their morning commute, then re-engage those exposed audiences through mobile, desktop and connected TV as the day progresses.
Brands are typically seeing much higher engagement across digital channels from audiences first exposed to our pDOOH activity, which demonstrates the power of a multichannel approach in creating a seamless experience as consumers move through their day – from getting up and travelling to work – to walking down the street and enjoying home entertainment.
Innovation driving growth
Investment in pDOOH is projected to increase by 28% across the industry in the next 18 months, with pDOOH expected to be included in 35% of digital campaigns, up from 27% previously.
So, what’s driving this growth? In my view, it’s innovation in several key areas:
Dynamic creative optimisation (DCO), allowing for weather triggers, countdowns and time-based messaging.
Agile activation, enabling quick campaign turnarounds to seize opportunities.
Eye-catching 3D content delivering immersive visuals.
Smart screen selection for targeting specific audiences.
Beyond performance benefits, there’s also a sustainability angle – pDOOH with VIOOH is on average more than 10x carbon emission efficient compared to programmatic display and 13x more efficient than programmatic video.
We’re seeing pDOOH play a starring role in multi-channel campaigns that drive consumers down the funnel to conversions or in-store foot traffic, completing the ecosystem alongside display, video, radio and TV. The uplift and engagement results across digital activity reached by an exposed pDOOH audience speak for themselves.
By combining the premium, brand-safe environment of traditional OOH with the flexibility, targeting capabilities and measurability of digital channels, pDOOH truly supercharges ad campaigns in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.