Advertising network and DOOH

A screen belongs either to you or to somebody else. That sounds banal, but it is the most important distinction in this chapter: it determines what you are allowed to show, who maintains the content and who sends whom an invoice.

On a surface of your own – in the shop window, in the branch, in the waiting room – you are the host. You decide the content and can turn it upside down tomorrow morning. In return your reach is exactly as large as your own flow of customers. Anyone who does not walk past your building sees nothing.

On somebody else's surface you buy your way into a flow of people that somebody else generates. You reach people who do not know your business, and that is the whole point. In return you have seconds rather than minutes and you follow other people's formats and deadlines.

Most businesses that take this seriously do both: their own surfaces for depth, other people's for breadth. How to fill your own surfaces is covered in the chapters on hardware and content. This chapter is about what happens outside.

Digital out of home, DOOH for short, means nothing more than digital advertising beyond your own four walls. Not on the phone, but out and about. The term comes from the poster world, and DOOH behaves the same way – except that the surface can change while the person is standing in front of it.

In Switzerland you find such surfaces almost everywhere people gather or linger:

The networks differ greatly. Transport networks deliver many fleeting contacts in a short time. Networks in gyms, practices and neighbourhood shops deliver fewer, but longer and calmer ones. Anyone advertising a regional trade business rarely needs the main station.

Anyone reading a DOOH quotation for the first time stumbles over terms that sound similar and mean different things.

What matters is the relationship between the middle three. A sixty-second loop with six ten-second creatives gives each one a sixth of the time. Add a seventh and your share drops without anything changing in your booking. So always ask how long the loop is and how many creatives fit into it.

Programmatic booking merely means those slots are allocated via a trading platform rather than over the phone. For small, regional campaigns the direct route through the network operator is usually simpler.

During installations I have spent a lot of time watching people who are waiting. For the train, for the coffee, for the doctor, for the free machine in the weights room. Waiting is a peculiar state: the mind is awake, the hands are empty, and the eye is looking for something to settle on.

That is exactly where the difference lies between a surface at a thoroughfare and one at a waiting place. At the thoroughfare you are fighting for two seconds of a hurrying eye. At the waiting place you may get the whole loop, and twice over. You are allowed to tell more, add a second message, even show something that requires a moment's thought.

That only applies as long as the screen hangs in the field of view. A display behind the backs of the people waiting is expensive wall cladding. For every site offered, check where people actually look: at the counter, at the departure board, at the door. That is where the surface belongs.

A DOOH creative is not a small television spot. It has no sound, no title sequence and no audience that stays seated. What works is surprisingly strict:

On the QR code, a clear position: at passing places it is pointless. Nobody stops, pulls out their phone and scans while the train pulls in. At waiting places, on the other hand, it is worthwhile, because the phone is in hand anyway. Then make it big enough, leave it up long enough and say what comes after the scan.

A DOOH campaign can be sketched out in a good hour if you go in order.

Start with the goal, in one sentence. Building awareness in a region, drawing visitors to an event, finding apprentices – those are four different campaigns, even if the logo stays the same.

Then the target audience, and from that the choice of sites, not the other way round. Anyone looking for apprentices is better served in sports facilities than in a waiting room.

Then the period and the daypart. A lunch offer belongs between ten and half past twelve, an evening event the other way round.

Plan creative variants from the start. Two or three motifs keep the campaign fresh and allow you to replace the weaker one after a week.

Only then come production and formats: resolution, portrait or landscape, file type, spot length. Every network has its specification sheet, and the approval deadlines are meant seriously – there are often several working days between delivery and first playout. Last comes measurement: what will you look at afterwards so that you are wiser next time?

Operators of gyms and shops regularly ask me the reverse question: can I show other people's advertising on my screen and earn something from it?

It is worthwhile when three things come together: enough footfall. Enough dwell time, meaning real waiting situations rather than mere passing through. And an environment that suits possible advertisers – a gym for nutrition, a practice for preventive care.

Billing usually works in one of three ways:

Legally, three points need clarifying: does your lease permit third-party advertising? Does the surface need an advertising permit from the municipality? And how do you handle sensors for measuring contacts – the requirements of the revised data protection act apply as soon as faces are captured.

Going it alone is rarely worth it: finding advertisers, checking creatives and issuing invoices is a profession of its own. Anyone with one or two surfaces is better off joining an existing network.

DOOH almost never works alone. It makes known what gets deepened elsewhere. Somebody who has seen the name of a garage three times at the gym will click weeks later in the search engine on that entry rather than on the unknown one next to it. That is the contribution – not the direct sale.

That is why the combination works better than any channel on its own. Poster and DOOH share the visual language. Radio supplies the sound the screen does not have. Social media takes over the storytelling at length. The search engine catches whoever looks for you later. Use the same image and the same sentence everywhere.

One network built entirely on waiting situations is our own. IMAGEMEDIA operates more than five thousand surfaces at over a thousand sites in German-speaking Switzerland, mostly in gyms – where people stand between two exercises or have time in the changing room. The loops are longer than at a railway station, and regional businesses can choose precisely which municipalities they are visible in. Whether this network or another one fits is decided not by the surfaces but by the people in front of them.