Not to be left out, out-of-home (OOH) media companies are getting in on the clean room trend.
On Tuesday, Clear Channel Outdoor announced clean room integrations with InfoSum, Habu, LiveRamp and Aqfer, so advertisers can link first-party data for planning, targeting and measurement.
Just because OOH is a one-to-many medium “doesn’t mean it’s not data-driven or optimizable,” said Jeremy Flynn, SVP of data products and strategy at Clear Channel.
“We want to tap into the same technology that brands and advertisers are using for campaign planning and attribution in other channels,” Flynn said.
Clean up in aisle OOH
Like many other OOH media companies, Clear Channel uses data for targeting and attribution that can be considered sensitive, such as mobile IDs and location data from opted-in devices.
Brands and advertisers also want to use more of their own first-party data to link ad exposures to their audiences, but they need privacy guarantees.
Advertisers already using InfoSum, for example, can match their customer data with data from identity providers, including TransUnion and Experian, to create segments based on behaviors and interests.
Buyers can then run ads on Clear Channel inventory in locations where those types of audiences often pass by, said Devon DeBlasio, global VP of product marketing at InfoSum.
Clear Channel facilitates private marketplace deals through more than 30 demand-side platforms, including The Trade Desk and Google’s DV360.
Clear Channel’s clean room integrations are meant to help with planning and measurement across both digital OOH screens and traditional billboards. Although advertisers can’t change physical billboards on the fly, they can plan future placements based on sales.
Due to competition concerns, however, the level of interoperability between Clear Channel’s new tech partners has limits.
InfoSum and LiveRamp are direct rivals, so InfoSum clients don’t currently have access to LiveRamp, DeBlasio said. Similarly, agencies integrated with InfoSum, such as GroupM and Omnicom, can block competing agencies from accessing their first-party data within the platform.
Still, DeBlasio said partnering with several clean room providers is an important step for an OOH company because it opens the doors for measuring campaign performance against specific audiences, including tracking incremental reach and sales.
Eyes on outcomes
OOH may be an upper-funnel channel, but it still helps drive lower-funnel conversions such as purchases and app downloads. If brands can connect data about their audiences to OOH ad exposures, Flynn said, they can measure the impact of those campaigns on conversions.
It’s a lot like TV in that sense.
For example, a QSR brand that links purchase data to Clear Channel’s location data could track store visits and repeat orders to determine a campaign’s role in driving net-new customers or an increase in sales from already-existing ones.
“With data clean room integrations, we will now be able to match [outcomes] directly back to a brand’s first-party data,” Flynn said. The ability to both drive and measure campaign outcomes makes OOH a performance channel that belongs in the same media mix as digital channels like display and online video, he added.
If OOH can get closer to the targeting and measurement granularity that advertisers expect on other channels, Flynn said, “buyers will increasingly [consider] adding it to their media mixes.”
