The digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad sector just got its latest set of standards. The World Out of Home Organization (WOO) has launched what it calls Global OOH Audience Measurement Guidelines. These are meant to standardize ad measurement, thus boosting advertiser demand and trust in DOOH.
As local advertising mavens know, DOOH includes digital displays that continue to take new shapes and sizes. We’re talking everything from retail end-caps to more traditional placements like billboards and bus stops. They’re experiencing a bit of a revival in the privacy-first era (more on that in a bit).
Introduced at last month’s WOO Global Congress in Toronto, the new guidelines extend from the DOOH sector’s existing standards bible, which was established in 2009 by ESOMAR according to industry trade publication Sixtine Nine (a title that presumably plays on the aspect ratio for most digital displays).
Catching Up
So what do these guidelines specify? The main categories involve three ad placement and attribution factors, fleshed out in a 96-page e-book. These include the measurement of DOOH, using “contemporary data for automated trading and attribution,” and cross-media measurement practices.
When hearing this list, it’s clear that the DOOH sector and its standards bodies are looking to catch up to several forms of online digital media. Things like automated trading and cross-platform measurement have become table stakes over the past decade in social, search, and online display ads.
But in fairness to DOOH, catching up isn’t due to previous laziness or lack of adoption. It has more to do with the tracking challenges of a partially-offline media (the “out of home” part.). Though these displays are digital and connected, they inherently possess analog components that are harder to track.
Those components include things like impressions from consumers that walk by a given display, as opposed to measurable/binary clicks. In fact, a classic example of outdated ad analytics practices is billboard impressions, where companies counted cars on a given street where a billboard sat.
Of course, things have come a long way since then, and the DOOH (and broader OOH) world has adopted reliable methodologies for ad measurement. As we examined recently, those include a variety of attribution methods including location-specific QR codes, promo codes, and landing pages.
DOOH Revival
Another reason for the timing of these new guidelines could be (our speculation), the current revival in DOOH. As hinted above, it’s an indirect effect of the heavy privacy reform of the past few years. Crackdowns on behavioral targeting have led to a rise in advertiser demand for contextual targeting.
Along with print media and television (including CTV and streaming), DOOH has elements of contextual ad targeting, which is all about situational relevance and content adjacency. For example, a digital display on the Las Vegas Strip, or a retail endcap at Home Depot, carry rich contextual targeting opportunities.
We’ll keep tracking this formerly-sleepy local ad category for its ongoing action in the privacy-first era. Meanwhile, back to the WOO guidelines, the eBook format is meant to open things up to ongoing updates as the industry course corrects to shifting factors. You can see its current version here.
