Billboard Insider caught up with Chris Cowlbeck, General Manager of IBOUSA on the new OAAA Open Direct (OOH) Guidelines recently announced.
Why did the OAAA adopt the Open Direct OOH guideline?
In my opinion, OAAA as our OOH industry trade organization is leading in a number of areas to get us on a similar playing field whereby all OOH media owners can interact more effectively and efficiently. The buy side for brands has grown over the last two decades to take ad budgets from OOH where they can deploy them rapidly, almost instantly, to desktop browsers and mobile devices. OOH was initially excluded because they were digital and OOH was not. They have a significant foothold and the vertical walled gardens have a huge market share and budget command. Because OOH has been around easily for over a century, we have a lot of inventory that was placed in “static” mode, and with the evolution of LED Billboards over the last decade now, we are now in the proverbial ballpark. The big three companies have a good presence and significant resources and teams to address and capture this business, but each have gone their similar but different ways to get there. Similarly, I understand many of the large agencies are building their own platforms and most likely going down their customized pathways to fulfill their needs. This guideline puts the coding guidelines out there so that everyone is not doing something different and compounding the complexity and cost.
What exactly is the OAAA Open Direct OOH guideline?
Ninety-nine percent of media owners need not worry about exactly what they are, simply that it’s a definition of and the common naming of the data needed to have computers communicate with each other. Basically coding. OAAA didn’t reinvent the wheel here by the way. The guideline came out of the IAB Tech Lab that was developed in the UK with many well known large media owners (like Clear Channel and JCDecaux) and international ad agencies (like Rapport, Posterscope and Talon). The terms and names may slightly vary for the USA, but I anticipate they will dovetail readily into the OOH Standard the Media Rating Council (MRC) is currently working on. Kudos to OAAA that nothing is different from the international document primarily because so many brand budgets are international now – we need to make it easy on them.
What does the OAAA Open Direct OOH mean for independents?
At this time the push is for this to be programmatic (computer to computer execution and delivery) and less so at this time for static which is a lion share of our booked guaranteed placement volume. I understand the intent is to include static as well, but the prints specs and delivery mechanisms may need to evolve. While digital ad plays have been bought and played one spot at a time generally, the guideline allows for trades to be done on a programmatic guaranteed basis, meaning potential better rates for media owners and the drawing of budgets from other areas we’d lost over the years. Much of the heavy lifting will be done by the Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) like Adomni, Vistar, Broadsign Reach, Place Exchange, Hivestack or by the aggregators on the sell side like our IBO COOP Speedway and the various “plumbers” that bring automation to a media owners’ proposal and contract workflow, so that current pricing and availability can be automated. I understand the intent is also to have the agencies align with these guidelines which will allow the sell side to tap a larger deal flow. I anticipate that much of the guideline can be used to account for automated guaranteed placements for our static and digital inventory, much the way we process things now, only with humans at certain checkpoints to deal with normal issues like road closures, local sales conflicts or weather events. My basic takeaway is that things are changing and being driven in this direction by the brand budgets.
What is the IBOUSA position on this guideline?
We should certainly embrace standards which will help us all over time. Many of us simply don’t want to change, as we’ve been soooooo overwhelmed with technology growth and expansion into our daily lives that our heads are swimming. At the recent OAAA conference, I heard a speaker Joanna Peña-Bickley, Head of Research & Design, Alexa Devices at Amazon, give a speech and one comment she made really stuck out to me, ‘We’ll see more technology change in the next five years than we’ve seen in the past twenty-five years’. I can’t quite imagine the speed at which things might be coming at us, but dang, I personally have to pull my head out of the sand and get ready for it. It’ll change with or without us, and I like that we’re positioning ourselves as an industry. I think the OAAA board, Anna Bager and Christina Radigan are on the right track and will have my support in these efforts.
About IBO
Our network of business professionals emerged a few decades ago and combined efforts with common ties as independent business operators, mostly from smaller rural and suburban markets. Challenged by our size and access to resources, contacts and ideas, we created an organization whereby we helped each other out, not dissimilar to the old ways that our great country was born, by neighbors helping neighbors.
Over time we have grown to be a fun, innovative and influential group of business entrepreneurs and companies, centered around the world of marketing and exchanging ideas of technology, operations and sales. We each have resources, products and services that operators may benefit from, and this site attempts to coordinate a wide variety of interests.
Our primary networking tool is our semi-annual conference whereby the owners and key people in our Associate Companies meet to discuss the topics of concern. We have extended our access to our services to a broader spectrum of groups, including agencies that touch the OOH industry. Our IBO COOP Speedway is similar to a real estate MLS whereby we band together our nationwide inventory footprint to provide current pricing and availability for buyers, brands and platforms in a traditional or automated manner.
For more information about IBOUSA send an email to support@IBOUSA.org or for immediate attention call 580-226-2234.
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