Asian marketers, associations & agencies discuss need for common OOH currency

Members of the Outernet Marketing Innovation Group (OMIG) held an Inaugural Session to address the Need for a Common Out-of-Home (OOH) Currency. The focus of the session was to discuss the need and benefits of a common Outernet Currency from the industry and advertisers’ perspective along with the group’s latest initiatives.

The session was attended by multiple stakeholders including the Association of Advertising & Marketing Singapore (AAMS), the Media Specialists Association of the Philippines (MSAP), as well as regional Marketers and Agency representatives. 

The Importance of Outernet Media in a Post-Cookie-Less World

The session kicked off with Chloe Neo, COO, Omnicom Media Group & 1st Vice President from AAMS, sharing her thoughts on how advertisers can navigate and cut through the noise in a cookie-less world, with location data being described as the new “cookie” in the real world.

“Location data breaches the gap between the digital and physical world. We need a more universal currency to measure marketing effectiveness as well as return on investment across the different formats that we are seeing, especially the digital front where we have the opportunity.”

Chloe also commented how location data can be used for tracking patterns and trends related to human movement, support risk management and streamline services and operations. 

Increased social media usage also contributed to huge sources of data to enrich consumer insights. By converging all these social and location data sources, advertisers have a more holistic view that bridges the gap between the digital and physical world.

Memo Moreno, Managing Partner of Mindshare Philippines & representative of MSAP, chimed in with her thoughts that OOH is highly fragmented and highly political. She claimed that there is no robust measurement for OOH actual deliveries and MSAP as an industry is working towards a single screen currency to enable omnichannel video planning.

“The Outernet is a good initiative to have from a digital lens as it brings a robust measurement and accountability.“

As the discussion deepened, most of the participants agreed through a live poll session that – Automation, Transparency and Accountability – are the biggest drivers for adoption of a common currency in Outernet. 

With that, advertisers also took turns sharing how they see value in adopting a common currency in the Outernet.

Moving Forward: Advertisers Views

Jimmy Piong, Managing Director of Kotra Pharma shared his views that it is getting more and more complex to make ad spend decisions, with advancement in advertising technology and new Outernet formats. The ultimate goal is to reach the consumer in the most efficient way possible and a common verified OOH currency will go a long way to enable this.

Ravi Shankar, Chief Growth and Platform Officer, AirAsia highlighted that viewable impressions came out of nowhere during the early days of programmatic buying and marketers simply had to accept what they were getting at the time. He agreed that now is the time for us to move towards common OOH metrics and start ingesting them into Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). He also stressed that without a standard metric in OOH, SMEs won’t be so experimental with their limited budgets.

JP Bautista, Business Director, PHD Media – agency representative of Wipro commented on a recent campaign they did with Moving Walls, and how they are able to engage specific interest, occupation, and demographic-based audiences segments via the Outernet. With the improved measurement capability of DOOH, they are able to dive deeper and have more visibility on the types of consumers that have responded and interacted with their ads. They are also then able to extend their reach of the existing campaign by re-targeting them through their mobile devices and thereby driving activations.

Jaikishin Chhaproo, Head of Media and PR of ITC- PCPB, commented that most active advertisers on digital have their own benchmarks regarding Cost-per-Mille (CPM). The seamless integration of screens and the ability to monitor and measure the media view is going to be very advantageous to the OOH medium, enabling Cost-per-Measure (CPMs) to be managed very conveniently.

Finally, Industry Standards was The Most Interesting Topic OMIG Members wanted to discuss during the next Session with a more in-depth view of available OOH measurement methodologies and case studies to be shared.

The OMIG is a group of marketing innovators across the Asian region including Singapore, Malaysia, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, who are from a variety of industry verticals, coming together to share their knowledge and put out best practices and guidelines for OOH advertising.