5 Reasons to Build a White Label Programmatic DOOH Advertising Platform

Traditional offline out-of-home advertising (OOH) is gradually becoming obsolete. Advertisers are no longer making long-term investments in static billboard ads - such placements are already so customary that they skip the eyes of the passers-by and quickly get forgotten.

While online ads are already overrepresented on the web, DOOH has just marched into an active stage of development and is already winning the hearts of advertisers as it doesn’t cause ad fatigue and banner blindness.

As a relatively new advertising medium, DOOH attracts many enthusiasts, searching for opportunities to open their own ad platforms and capitalize on them. Creating your own DOOH solution is a very challenging task that will require a lot of planning, investment, and effort. That’s why we decided to discover whether the game is worth the candle and if there are other ways to simplify the challenge.

So, why DOOH

DOOH is an acronym that stands for "digital out of home". Basically, it is a digitalized format of traditional out-of-home advertising. The purpose of such advertising is to display effective branding campaigns on digital billboards and many other kinds of digital screens that one can encounter in public places: airports, sports venues, concert arenas, shopping centers, major transport interchanges, subways, and so on.

This allows advertisers to:

• Get a large reach of potential buyers;
• Attract new customers;
• Promote the brand and increase brand awareness.

With this, it is worth pointing out that DOOH is a relatively new and innovative advertising technology and the infrastructure for it is still being developed.

While the average, traditional out-of-home billboards display the same ad message to everyone (or show several ads one by one), DOOH works according to different mechanics that deliver more in-deep personalization.

How does DOOH work then

Modern data technologies at the core of the DOOH allow it to interact with the target audience based on available data sets that can personalize the advertising experience for the selected group of people.

Sure, the targeting precision on DOOH is far from the one available on personal devices, since it is not based on user cookies or contextual signals. Still, as practice shows, DOOH can leverage the incoming data (most frequently data about the outside environment) to interact with users in a more meaningful and personalized way.

A good example of it (and for sure not a single one) is a DOOH ad campaign delivered by ActionAid near the Piccadilly Circus. It aggregated live data from the local weather station and showed the ads based on weather conditions in order to draw public attention to climate problems.

Likewise, DOOH can leverage other information like time, location, the current availability of products, and more data to keep the ad messages up to the point. With this, advertisers can address their audiences more effectively than on static banners.

Additionally, static billboards cannot track traffic or count how many impressions were served per hour, per day, for the entire duration of the campaign. That’s where the main advantages of DOOH stem from.

Why do companies strive to build their own DOOH solutions

Taking the abovementioned advantages and the innovation of the DOOH format, the popularity of digital out-of-home advertising is expected to grow. It opens up a number of opportunities for companies that strive to build programmatic advertising products for this emerging space.

As pandemics are coming to an end and more people venture outside for traveling and offline activities, the experts expect that advertising budgets will largely be distributed to the DOOH channel once again.

Apparently, the ad spending in DOOH is expected to grow exponentially through the years so that by the end of 2027 it will account for $15.905 in the U.S only. Naturally, this innovative advertising medium attracts more and more interest from advertisers.

Meantime, the ad tech providers are striving to equip their technologies with DOOH capacities to satisfy the growing need of their clients.

Large OOH advertising companies, like Clear Channel Outdoor, Lamar Advertising, and Outfront Media, are actively pursuing the opportunity to advertise with DOOH. However, since the DOOH technology is still developing, most parts of the DOOH ad placements are performed manually.

The robust programmatic DOOH solutions are only starting to emerge, so many businesses are searching for opportunities to pioneer this vacant niche with the power of automation.

What are the main business use cases of building a custom DOOH advertising platform

• To capitalize on ad-tech business. This is the most obvious reason why companies strive to build a DOOH platform. They plan to open their own ad tech platform to provide services to clients (advertisers who run DOOH campaigns through their platform).
• To sell or buy available DOOH inventory. Publishers that have DOOH inventory normally need to join an environment where they can monetize it with DOOH advertising (SSPs). Some companies build DSPs so that their advertisers could effectively reach DOOH advertisers and run such ad campaigns.
• To diversify the business. Many agencies are branching out by opening their own programmatic DOOH platform. The others also plan to add new capacities to their existing solutions and extend the scope of provided services by this.

Why you should build the DOOH platform based on white-label

Creating an ad tech platform entails the same time-consuming stages as creating any other software platform: coding, team and project management, licensing the solution, and then maintaining it and keeping it updated. In case the company has sufficient investments, human resources, and time, this task can be considered feasible. However, these days the ad tech industry developed an easier way for companies to enter the programmatic market.

The white-label model has been used by various industries as a business concept, especially since it is popular in IT. The essence of it is that the tech provider creates a pre-built technology core based on which the startup can build its own solution.

Unlike in the popular franchising model, in this case, the company labels the new solution as its own, establishes its own rules, and pricing, and adjusts the product according to its own needs and operational requirements.

Benefits of building the DOOH platform with a white label:

• Reduced costs and time. A pre-built core allows companies to effortlessly unfold their own DOOH solution in the shortest time possible. Since it requires less time and less labor invested in the process, it naturally reduces the cost of installation.
• Less labor is involved. Less labor involved means less money is spent. Additionally, you don’t need to hire people for further solution maintenance as white-label platforms are normally hosted and maintained by professional teams.
• Fewer risks. Building your own DOOH solution from scratch is a challenging adventure, but you have to be 100% sure of the quality of the finished product. When you build a DOOH solution based on a tested and proven tech core, you don’t have to worry about potential bugs or operational issues.
• Optimized advertising environment. The DOOH ad campaign delivery is automated by programmatic algorithms that ensure the efficiency of the media trading process. Additionally, white-label solutions like those delivered by SmartyAds, feature bid optimization tools, and smart algorithms that optimize the traffic and increase platform profitability.
• Privacy-friendly secured media trading. The programmatic advertising ecosystem is multilayered and complicated. Each middleman and vendor should comply with the principles of the GDPR, CCPA, COPPA, and other international privacy acts, otherwise, the ad tech provider might be penalized. With white-label solutions like SmartyAds, companies don’t have to worry about the legal part of the technology functioning since it corresponds to all necessary requirements.

Conclusion

As they say “one should not put all the eggs in just one basket,” so advertisers no longer stick only to web ads but also actively diversify their media mix with DOOH campaigns. Because of this, the popularity of DOOH advertising platforms only grows and is expected to grow more with time.

Agencies and advertising companies that strive to establish themselves as DOOH advertising pioneers have the best chances to do it in 2022 since new models like white-label streamline the process and make it less complicated.