There’s a big world (of screens) out there.
So it makes sense that we’re seeing more consolidation in the out-of-home advertising sector.
On Tuesday, digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad tech startup Place Exchange was acquired by Broadsign, another out-of-home SSP.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The DOOH category is finally starting to generate its own programmatic momentum, Place Exchange CEO Ari Buchalter told AdExchanger. Buchalter was a co-founder of MediaMath before going all in on out-of-home back in 2017 when he joined OOH media network Intersection as CEO. Place Exchange was founded as part of Intersection and spun out in 2021.
Finding a new out-of-home
OOH advertising is increasingly transacted “using RTB pipes,” said Broadsign CEO Burr Smith, “but not necessarily through the typical RTB process.”
In other words, as Buchalter put it, the OOH category is a unique beast that merits a standalone sell-side stack.
There are a bunch of other format-specific and/or channel-specific buying platforms out there, like, for instance, video DSPs and mobile DSPs. But these channels have since been comfortably folded into omnichannel platforms like The Trade Desk.
The emerging DOOH category spans different supply sources, Buchalter said, including retail media (screens in and around stores) and CTV (most DOOH screens are essentially TVs, if you think about it). Yet DOOH campaigns have very particular needs.
Measurement and targeting are different in out-of-home, and DOOH screens come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
“Not to oversimplify,” Buchalter said, “but a website is a website is a website.”
DOOH DSPs need to support multiple types of dynamic creative scenarios, as well as handle particular programmatic nuances. Some advertisers might have demographic or audience targeting preferences, for example, like reaching high-income millennials, but others might want to target within a certain radius of a given real-world location.
More than 95% of Place Exchange’s programmatic buys are based on deal IDs, Buchalter said, so open auction DOOH is almost nonexistent.
For years, according to Buchalter, the goal with digital or programmatic out-of-home buying was to automate what was a manual process. “But it’s different from the likes of mobile, web or other digital inventory types,” he said.
What’s new?
The merger of Broadsign and Place Exchange mostly reconciles two rivals in the DOOH SSP market. Broadsign has a larger international footprint, while Place Exchange focuses on North America, Smith said. Broadsign also sells some traditional OOH, not just screen-based DOOH.
But what’s new for the category, aside from hundreds of thousands of screens being installed in new places every year, is the uptick in advertiser interest, Buchalter said.
“We’re now seeing a whole wave of digital-native advertisers that maybe haven’t transacted digital out-of-home before,” he said. Many of them are in-house advertisers, too, meaning they don’t buy ads through a media agency.
These are marketers who are accustomed to using data for targeting and attribution, he said, unlike most traditional OOH agencies.
Programmatic platforms like The Trade Desk and Google DV360, meanwhile, offer DOOH as a channel add-on and primarily support buying media channels and formats that have been heavily “normalized,” Buchalter said, and come in totally standard units and environments.
“That’s not the case in out-of-home,” he added, hence the need for a purpose-built OOH SSP.
