OOH#3 - gOOHgle
Google/FB/Amazon can take over OOH if they want to, but won't. Reading time: 6 minutes.
Google For India - a $10B digitization fund to help accelerate India’s digital economy.
Facebook - Jio - a $5.7B investment into one of the hottest properties in the world, Jio.
Amazon - export $10B worth of Make-In-India goods by 2025 and a $1B commitment to digitise SMBs in India.
The big guns are coming for the SMBs, each wanting to be a part of India’s digital growth, with consumption per capita in rural areas slated to grow by 4.3 times in just 10 years. (The rural economy contributes ~45% to the country’s GDP).
These giants can take over OOH advertising if they want to since they stand to gain the most from an advertising ecosystem point-of-view. It’s the only medium that has eluded them due to it being surrounded by bureaucracy, legalities and fragmentation. It is also the only sustainable offline format that has been operating independently, preventing Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. from taking over 100% of the advertising budgets.
We know what happens to anything that is divided or highly fragmented. It cost our country, which was constantly bickering and fighting amongst itself, trillions of rupees and millions of deaths to overcome a united British front.
The tech-giants can use the same model to either take over the highly fragmented industry by getting into hardware and integrating hardware with software such as DV360 to get a full-fledged, end-to-end advertising platform, or, can collaborate with the OOH owners (Digital + Static) to unify the ad-industry as a whole and become a one-stop-solution.
We know how they operate. Amazon allows brands to sell on their platform. They aggregate data, spend millions analysing them to the bone and drop a private label at just the right price point, and of course, they receive preferential treatment when it comes to search results, and reaps all the benefits of owning the platform & distribution.
Google has always been known for its partnerships. Consider Android, DoubleClick, Youtube, Waze, AdMob, etc. Each acquisition made to strengthen its core business - Search and Advertising.
Google has also often been called out for abusing its dominant position by promoting and pushing its own products ahead of its competitors.
Facebook has a robust platform, although not as versatile as that of Google’s. However, if there’s such a thing called Whatsapp advertising, the FB/IG/Whatsapp combination can become as big a threat as Google in the advertising world.
Programmatic advertising, especially in the DOOH space is growing fast, with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating its adoption.
If you’ve read our previous edition OOH#2 on attribution, we know that OOH campaigns are truly successful and measurable when combined with mobile data and brought wholly into the digital ecosystem.
Google’s biggest strength lies in the wealth of interest and location data it collects across its products. The power Google has to target and track users cross-device and allow advertisers to attribute accordingly is the strongest USP it can bring to the OOH market. To know if someone has seen your OOH advert and understand how it has influenced their behaviour is of course the ultimate goal.
For instance, when a train full of Chennai Super Kings fans arrives at Chepauk ahead of the IPL cup finals on a Sunday (of course, against Mumbai Indians), the hoarding or the bus shelter changes to show an upcoming Rajini movie trailer, or Chennai Super Kings merch or an advert of Seven - Dhoni’s lifestyle brand, while on a Monday morning at rush hour it goes back to displaying regular neighbourhood retail stores’ ads (such as a Saravana Stores ad) for the hyperlocal audience.
Google Ads + DV 360 + Google Beacons + OOH is a complete end-to-end ad solution. It is definitely captivating.
Here is where Google’s Android-Jio acquaintance seems to be the trump card - instead of buying broad demographic data you would be able to hone in on the exact locations frequented by people with a particular buying taste, credit history, music interests, or website browsing history – and buy your ads there. You could analyse the most common commuting routes of people who most resemble the behaviour of your top 5% of customers and place ads accordingly.
One advantage here for the industry is this - Google has always been reluctant to get into the hardware or asset-heavy business alone. Check this page out to see the products killed by Google, aka, the Google Graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/).
An average well-to-do advertising agency regularly deals with 50+ media owners on an annual basis, and they’re vexed at this stage and are collectively looking for a common solution.
As I’ve pointed out time and again, the industry needs more cohesion and collaboration. With Google poised to enter the arena equipped with its own data arsenal, it’s going to be a major powerhouse in running highly attributable (and somewhat accurate) ad campaigns.
Like our motto at Surespace, the end goal is to make outdoor advertising as easy as possible to plan and execute for advertisers and to remove as many barriers and friction points as we can. At the moment, OOH makes it difficult for people to buy and include it in the campaigns due to there being no common denominator.
Just as there are Geopath in the US and Route in the UK, I’m eagerly waiting for a uniform currency in India as well. I am very interested to see how Biztalk’s People and Posterscope’s OOHmeter/OCS develop and integrate with the industry.
All this being said, I do love for Google to be an active part of the industry and genuinely enjoy the OOH campaigns they have pulled off.
First is a joint mult-collab campaign created by 72andSunny Amsterdam, produced by Grand Visual and planned by OMD and Talon that showed the little ways in which Google helps people enjoy the summer.
Featuring second is Google x ooh!media, the largest OOH company based out of Australia and the one media company that I’ve admired for long.
They have been in the spotlight for executing the world’s first advertising campaign along with Google by utilising NFC and QR technologies to enable consumers to take control of digital advertising panels.
The ground-breaking campaign for the Google Play Store lets travellers at Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane domestic airports use their mobile device as a remote control to interact with one of 39 digital advertising panels featuring Google Play content.
You can read more about it here. (It’s worth the read.)
Ultimately, for the industry to progress, we need a uniform system and collaboration to continue operating independently and produce some exhilarating content! OOH players should always remember that they’re a platform for voices to be heard and should be privileged to be in a position to bring about change.
OOH ain’t going nowhere, and has always found a way to evolve. We’ve seen private OOH media boutiques produce spectacular campaigns and we’ve seen age-old media houses trying to barely survive by doing what they’ve been doing for decades. Once 50% of the OOH companies adopt new technology such as AI, AR & Programmatic, it then becomes a whole new ballgame.
References:
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/economy/india-s-declining-rural-income-pulls-downs-global-economic-growth-imf-68896
https://grandvisual.com/google-launches-data-driven-dooh-campaign-make-the-most-of-summer/
https://www.oohmedianz.com/other/ooh-delivers-google-world-first-away-from-home-advertising/