EUROPE NEWS

UK: William Eccleshare to return to the UK as chief of Clear Channel International

William Eccleshare, the chief executive of Clear Channel Outdoor, is returning to the UK to take the role of chairman and chief executive officer of Clear Channel International.

At the same time Clear Channel has appointed Scott Wells, a board member at Clear Channel Outdoor, as chief executive of its Amercias division. Eccleshare will focus on driving international growth. He will be based in London and continue to report to Pittman.

Eccleshare said:

"After a record-breaking year in which we significantly outperformed the market, we have ambitious plans for CCI in 2015 and beyond as we deliver on our customer obsession. "I'm hugely looking forward to continuing to drive our strategy for long-term profitable growth."

Wells will jointly report to Bob Pittman, the chairman and chief executive of both Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings and iHeartMedia, and Rich Bressler, the chief finance officer of Clear Channel and president, chief operating officer and chief finance officer of iHeartMedia. The chief executive officer role is a new one for Clear Channel Americas. It replaces the president post that has been vacant since Suzanne Grimes’ departure in August last year.

Wells joins Clear Channel from asset management firm Bain Capital, where he was operating partner. He has sat on the board of directors for Clear Channel for six years. Since August last year, Bain has also served as a member of Clear Channel Outdoor Americas’ Office of the President, which is responsible for setting the direction of the company.

Wells said: "The more I worked with the terrific team at Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, the more I realized that I wanted to play a more pivotal role in helping the company realize its great potential."

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UK: FEPE 56th Annual Congress in Budapest: Early Bird booking closes this Friday!

Early bird discounted booking for the 56th FEPE Congress will close this Friday.

The congress, titled "Your Audience is Waiting", which will be held between Wednesday June 10th and Friday June 12th at the Intercontinental Hotel, Budapest.

We will be having 2 full days of presentations and high calibre speakers from across the world, all of whom will be bringing their unique viewpoints on the Out of Home industry.

Last year's congress in Vienna was FEPE's best yet, with over 300 delegates attending from 31 countries, both new records for us.

There will be an exclusive exhibition area attached to the main congress hall, and spaces are now available to reserve. If you are a supplier who wishes to get your product in front of an audience of global OOH decision makers please email us soon so we can hold a space for you.

We have also decided to lower the price for exhibition spaces this year, to offer best value to our industry suppliers.

The Thursday night Gala Dinner, in keeping with the FEPE tradition of finding special locations, will be at the Buda Castle, (see photo) one of Budapest's foremost buildings, and the Friday night social evening will be at a dinner cruise down the river Danube, taking in all the sights of Budapest for 3 hours.

As usual we have negotiated a special delegate rate for the hotel rooms and delegates are able to pay by credit card or bank transfer, which we hope will make bookings easier for some overseas delegates.

Delegate fees are unchanged from last year (and several years before) at €1100 for members and €1600 for non members, plus the additional early bird reduction of €100 per delegate.

You can register by following the link on the FEPE homepage and FEPE members all receive an additional €500 discount so if you are considering attending with colleagues and are not a member, please get in touch so we can organise the most cost effective package for you.

Apolgies for some linking problems in last week's newsletter, please go directly to worldooh.org to find the Congress link.

We will announce our Keynote speaker in next week's newsletter.

UK: Google takes over Silicon Roundabout

Google has launched a digital outdoor campaign at Silicon Roundabout in Old Street, London, featuring practical information for locals.

The ads on JCDecaux's four large digital screens were created by R/GA London. They promote details about local cafes, updates on the weather and display Google Earth images of the city.

They will also provide information on what people are searching for. Google was unavailable for comment.

R/GA confirmed it developed the digital displays in collaboration with Google but declined to comment further.

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UK: Live advertising sends commuters doughnut mad at Piccadilly Circus

A doughnut vendor’s sales have shot up 150% thanks to an out of home advertising first – serving promotions in real-time, using live point of sale (PoS) information. Exterion Media, Transport for London (TfL) and Shopwave, the iPad PoS specialist, worked together to help Crosstown Doughnuts achieve the sales increase during a two-week advertising trial at Piccadilly Circus.

Exterion Media and TfL teamed up with Shopwave and retailer Crosstown Doughnuts to offer commuters at the station live promotions through the advertising screens in and around the station over a three-week period. This forms part of TfL’s ongoing commitment to finding creative ways to improve the service it provides to customers.

At quieter times, staff at Crosstown Doughnuts’ West End pop-up shop were able to use Shopwave’s PoS software to push a coffee and doughnut deal to Exterion-managed digital screens in and around Piccadilly Circus tube station. Shopwave installed their electronic point of sale software (EPOS system) inside Crosstown Doughnuts’ retail unit. The system enabled the retailer to control the EPOS system directly from the store at Piccadilly Circus, putting them in control of the delivery of advertising messages, allowing for greater flexibility and more dynamic messaging.

In two weeks, the trial increased sales of the promotion itself by 150% and overall transactions at the store by nearly ten per cent. During this period, total growth in transactional deals far exceeded typical store growth.

Jason Cotterell, managing director UK, Exterion Media,said: “We were the first OOH media owner to exploit the power of digital and our partnership with Shopwave is another example of our pioneering work in this arena. By integrating digital advertising with other platforms, we can provide our customers with more innovative ways of engaging consumers. The aim of the trial was to test and learn, and it has been a great success. As a result, we plan to scale and open this opportunity up to other potential retail partners.”

Graeme Craig, director of commercial development at Transport for London, said “This partnership is a great example of what we are doing to utilise our assets to deliver the services our customers want. We are delighted that this trial has been such a success and look forward to working with more retailers across our network and using this kind of targeted advertising for the benefit of our customers.”

Julian Polzella, CTO and co-founder at Shopwave, said: “By bringing together the Shopwave Connect system and Exterion Media’s dashboard we are enabling tactical targeting to take place in real-time through an easy-to-use platform. This trial with Crosstown Doughnuts has proved the concept and we look forward to working with Exterion and other brands in the future to see what impact we can make on driving footfall to their businesses.”

JP Then, co-founder of Crosstown Doughnuts, said: “Being able to use one system that delivers a simple way to drive footfall to stores through digital screens is a ground-breaking concept for retailers. This is a truly innovative idea and we’re delighted with the results of the trial.”

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Germany: Kinetic ups the stakes in adland’s turf wars with roll-out of in-house offer Active in Germany

WPP’s giant Out of Home agency Kinetic Worldwide is launching its Kinetic Active division in Germany.

Kinetic Active is a full-service creative and production shop which says it wants to “raise the creative bar of out-of-home marketing.” It launched earlier this year in the US, UK, India, China and Southeast Asia.

Kinetic Active, under director Steffen Ansorge, will offer in-house support including creative services, production, digital, experiential and special builds plus mobile activation and social engagement.

Kinetic CEO, Germany & Central Europe Thorsten Ebbing says: “We would like to entertain and inform people. Our aim is to continually discover new ways to use media and technology to connect consumers with our clients’ brands – focusing on creating engaging and meaningful user experiences.” Such experiences cover a fairly broad remit, not just posters or other forms of OOH.

There’s a ferocious turf war going on in adland over who does what, with media agencies offering creative, creative agencies trying to take over media planning and production agencies offering everything.

The latest battleground seems to be, as instanced above, in-house units.

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UK: British Gas' Hive bus shelter heats up with a Twitter request

British Gas smart energy brand Hive has installed a tweet-activated bus shelter in Manchester Piccadilly station, which will warm up users waiting inside when they tweet using #TweetToHeat.

The stunt is a campaign for Hive, the smart home kit that allows users to control their heating and hot water remotely.

The pop-up shelter launches today, and uses technology from Visual Voice to process and respond to tweets under #TweetToHeat. Waiting passengers who tweet under the hashtag will see a response from the Hive Twitter account, as the shelter heats up.

Pamela Brown, who heads up marketing and insight at British Gas' connected homes division, said:

"We love #TweetToHeat – it fits perfectly with our progressive communications approach, using technology to bring to life our smart brand idea; that you can control your heating and hot water from anywhere with your phone."

Source

AMERICAS NEWS

USA: Outfront Media hires James rice to lead data management and programmatic product

Outfront Media has made a key hire to further its digital future with the appointment of James Price as its Senior Vice President, Data Insights & Programmatic Product.

A recognized leader in the digital media industry, Price was a pioneer of programmatic distribution and data capture. Most recently, he served as the VP of Digital Solutions at DexMedia, where he delivered a suite of digital products to the local business market.

Previously, he held senior roles at SuperMedia and Idearc Media, and he also held several sales, product management and development positions at Verizon Information Services.

Price is a frequent lecturer at events such as the Local Search Association, the Local Media Association, and Search Engine Strategies. He is also the co-author of a patent that is focused on the programmatic distribution of advertising across a variety of media. The use of data to support client decisions and audience measurement has become even more important.

In this new role, Price will build and oversee the company's data management and programmatic connectivity practice, through partnerships and engineered solutions. These tools will be fundamental to the digital promotion of all of the company’s assets and will make out of home advertising more accessible to the digital ad buying community, enabling clients to leverage additional programmatic channels.

Jeremy Male, CEO of OUTFRONT, said: "We created this important role to oversee the systematic and strategic use of data for our advertising clients, and James brings exceptional expertise in rolling out modern, innovative platforms to media clients. In short, he speaks the language of our future." Price will report to Andy Sriubas, EVP, Strategic Planning & Development.

CANADA: COMB Announces Board Changes

Fiona McLaughlin, Vice-President, Group Director, Communications Planning, Carat and Lisa Kahn, Vice-President, Group Director, Vizeum/Dentsu Aegis have been appointed Directors of the Canadian Out-of-Home Measurement Bureau (COMB). They will serve on COMB’s Board for a one-year term.

“Fiona and Lisa, without question, will bring a wealth of media knowledge and strategic planning experience to our Board”, says Julie Myers, COMB’s Chairman of the Board.

Luc Quétel, President, Astral Out-of-Home has taken over Astral’s seat on the COMB Board which was previously held by Jordana Fatsis, Vice-President, Out-of-Home Sales. Ron Hutchinson, Senior Vice President, Real Estate Services, who was first elected to the Board in 1992 and became Treasurer in 2008 will be retiring from the COMB Board.

“Ron has not only served for many years on the COMB Board but also participated in many COMB committees. His passion and commitment will be missed”, said Julie Myers, COMB’s Chairman of the Board.

The new COMB Treasurer will be Barry Wilde. Barry has been the CFO at Pattison Outdoor Advertising since 2006.

Other members of COMB’s Board include: Julie Myers, Zenith Media (COMB Chair); Rosanne Caron, COMB President; Andrea Parnell, MacLaren M2 Universal; Sheri Metcalfe, Jungle Media; Richard Ivey, Media Experts; Philippe Marchessault, Newad; Dave Petryna, Outdoor Exposure; Nick Arakgi, OUTFRONT Media; Michele Erskine, OUTFRONT Media; Randy Otto, Pattison Outdoor; Bob Leroux, Pattison Outdoor; Karine Courtemanche, Touché! and Fiona Donoghue-Paylor, Zoom Media

The Canadian Out-of-Home Measurement Bureau sets the industry standard for measurement of OOH advertising audiences across Canada. It publishes circulation and market data for close to 80,000 OOH advertising faces in over 280 markets.

COMB is a national, not-for-profit association dedicated to providing unbiased, accurate and independent quantitative research since 1965.

COMB’s members include OOH companies, advertising agencies and advertisers that provide guidance, funding and oversight to the measurement process.

USA: Formetco Launches Innovative LED Billboard System

Formetco today announced the official launch for the new FTX digital billboard design. The FTX uses state-of-the-art technology to deliver an outdoor advertising display with unparalleled image quality, performance reliability, and owner satisfaction. An item of particular value, and previously unavailable in the industry, is the exclusive Formetco 10 year LED Brightness Warranty.

Why the FTX was developed: “The FTX was designed to be a superior billboard among any other billboard product in the world. Our objective is to take both owner and advertiser satisfaction to new heights,” said Todd Heller, Vice President, Formetco.

Formetco invested time to identify the top concerns of billboard owners and outdoor advertising companies. Each customer concern was isolated and assigned a team whose mission was to find a solution.

The development teams exceeded expectations with well engineered design improvements. The improvements were combined to produce the FTX system, which is now the best engineered LED billboard on the market. The FTX system, a superior billboard design The FTX billboard system improves the advertiser’s visibility and control, and provides for vast improvements in lowering cost of ownership and repair needs.

A grid based LED tile design makes display repairs fast and easy. Significantly reducing the number of electrical connections and using weather tight sealed LED tiles and connectors eliminates numerous areas of common problems with typical electronic billboards. Multiple safeguards and system redundancies affect a more reliable performance from critical components of the system.

Green friendly features provide ownership benefits An open box design eliminates the need for cooling fans which require replacement, and the absence of fans means lower power consumption. The new energy efficient power system further lowers power consumption. The FTX technology is available in five sizes of display signs making it perfect for indoor and outdoor advertising.

FTX technology can also be retrofit into existing billboard structural framing for upgrading to a high visibility sign. 24 hour monitoring, live support and service Formetco FTX billboard owners benefit from an in-house support team, SmartLink technology and a nationwide network of service providers. Specialized billboard software provides live diagnostics feedback, and the Formetco network operations center also uses visual monitoring of FTX billboards.

Service issues are identified immediately, with our remote troubleshooting repair technicians can be dispatched promptly. The exclusive Formetco 10 Year LED Brightness Warranty Only Formetco offers a 10 year LED Brightness Warranty.

Formetco also provides a 5 year parts warranty, and labor warranties. The bottom line on the FTX billboard is an incredibly vivid, color rich and sharp display, with lower operating costs and superb 24 hour customer support every day of the year.

AFRICA NEWS

South Africa: Interview with Mr Barry Sayer, Executive Chairman of Continental Outdoor Media

What major changes are taking place in the OOH industry in Africa this year and how will those changes evolve in the next 2 years?

Twenty years ago three percent of the world’s population had a mobile phone and one percent were on the internet. Leap forward to today and two thirds of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone and one third of them have the ability to communicate on the internet, according to the McKinsey Global Institute: “Global flows in a digital age”.

So what does that have to do with Out of Home advertising in Africa you may ask? For the answer to that I would refer you to another bit of interesting intelligence from McKinsey which discovers that fifteen percent of transactions in Africa are carried out via mobile banking versus five percent in the developed world. Interesting that Africa considered by some as a backwater in terms of commercial enterprise and a continent considered to be late adapters of new technological concepts, leads the way in the development and adoption of mobile banking through such services as Mpesa (Pesa is the Swahili word for money), offered by mobile phone operators Safricom, MTN, and Vodacom . A service developed in Africa after researchers discovered that local African people were using mobile air time as a proxy for money.

People working in the cities were transferring prepaid mobile airtime to their families in rural areas or small towns through mobile networks to use or sell to release cash (in the case of the latter). Safricom apparently formalised the service in 2007 by allowing customers to deposit money credited to an account on their mobile phones and then by using SMS technology, to transfer it to other users or to stores for payment for goods and services or indeed redeem it through their network of Safricom airtime sellers. The system since has expanded and become more sophisticated beyond the airtime seller networks with major retail chains now acting as agents for the service.

I would guess that the more rapid take-up of mobile versus internet communication in emerging markets as noted by McKinsey is even more skewered toward mobile in Africa given the poor landline phone service in almost all of Africa including South Africa and of course due to the success of the Mobile banking system which I describe above and which a report by Pyramid Research estimates will be worth $ 3Billion in Africa by 2015. Even today there are more Africans making use of the mobile payment system than use Facebook.

So back to the Out of Home advertising medium. For so many years the Out of Home advertising medium’s greatest weakness has been its inability to transport a message to market at the speed of other traditional media rivals such as press, radio and television.

Whilst it has enjoyed the benefit of ubiquity and impact and even the power of illustration given its graphic ability to demonstrate in picture form the use of a product or service advertised to perhaps a partially illiterate audience in some deep rural markets of Africa, it has still taken a considerable time to print a poster, transport it to the market place and then post it in the selected geographical location. Fortunately with the advancement of the African consumer over the last 25 years, so has the Out of Home medium evolved to remain relevant to this more astute consumer base.

Not only have we witnessed the standardisation of Out of Home advertising formats across vast geographic areas but we have also seen similar attachment systems or display technology used in order to allow multi national advertisers to buy coverage of vast geographic areas with common campaigns as opposed to the earlier site by site individual localised buying model. Digital displays are now becoming more apparent especially in more sophisticated markets such as South Africa. Continental Outdoor Media by example are able to transmit over the internet advertisers copy from a central broadcast base in Johannesburg in South Africa to outdoor advertising displays located not only in major South African cities but to such diverse locations such as Lusaka Zambia, Dar Es Salaam Tanzania and Maputo Mozambique, and in addition offer advertisers the flexibility to buy “day part” .

In other words to have the choice of advertising in three different segments of the day. For example in the morning slot, advertisers may advertise breakfast cereals or the morning newspaper headlines. The afternoon slot might be more relevant to general consumer goods whilst people are out shopping and the stores are open, or in the evening slot advertisers may decide this a more effective time to advertise alcoholic products such as beers and wine or evening entertainment on offer at various restaurants or night- life venues.

So the world’s slowest medium to market some years ago with the help of internet connection to digital screens has just become the fastest. To use an American example to illustrate the effect of digital screens linked through the internet, when President Obama was first elected President of the United States first to break the news in Los Angeles California was the Los Angeles Times, but not in the traditional form in its newspaper but on digital billboards driven from a laptop and thereby beating or at least matching television to the news break.

Sub-Saharan Africa covers an area of some 17 million square kilometres and enjoys a population today of over 500 million people. The further challenge to outdoor advertising companies in Sub-Saharan Africa is to provide reasonable coverage of that large and ever growing population at economical cost. Given the competition of other far more time flexible media, the out of home medium has been under significant cost pressure in attempting to make poster flighting cycles more frequent. Here again the often overlooked benefit of being able to send an electronic image across the internet to a remote poster or billboard sites to be displayed on an electronic screen especially at regular frequency is immense and thus as capital cost or price of large electronic screens reduces exponentially and become even more high resolution and daylight visible under the bright African sun, so will the digital poster medium spread from the large urban cities as it exists now, to more remotely located larger towns and eventually cost providing, smaller villages.

Full article here

AUSTRALIA NEWS

Australia: APN Outdoor wins Sydney Airport contract

APN Outdoor, today announces that it has won the advertising rights to all external advertising at Sydney Airport and the internal advertising at the airport’s T1 International and T2 Domestic terminals.

The Sydney Airport contract is one of the largest Outdoor advertising contracts in the country. APN Outdoor has renewed its long-term agreement with Sydney Airport to manage the Outdoor advertising within the T1 terminal and the external environments. In addition, they will assume the T2 internal rights from the incumbent from October 2015.

APN Outdoor will continue to cement its position as the unrivalled leader of digital Outdoor development with its plans to invest significantly in digitising existing media and refurbishing the advertising environment at Sydney Airport.

Kerrie Mather, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Sydney Airport commented, “The tender process was extremely competitive and saw a number of strong offers received. APN Outdoor offered a winning combination of experience, an impressive record of delivery, fresh ideas and a commitment to developing new advertising that will be distinctive to Sydney Airport and we look forward to seeing it come to life.”

Richard Herring, Chief Executive Officer, APN Outdoor commented, “We are very proud to be strengthening our existing partnership with Sydney Airport, a world class facility and Australia’s busiest airport. Sydney Airport has long been known as the premium Outdoor environment and we are looking forward to taking its Outdoor offering to the same level.

Backed by an extensive redevelopment plan, we will ensure our clients have the opportunity to connect their brands with this unique, traveller audience in a high quality environment. The addition of the T2 terminal to our Airport portfolio, Australia’s busiest domestic terminal, will significantly enhance our reach of this audience and generate exciting opportunities to improve engagement”.

The win follows closely behind APN Outdoor assuming the Outdoor advertising concession at Auckland Airport in November 2014.

APN Outdoor has taken a leadership position in digital Outdoor after recent significant investments in our Airport, Billboard and Rail formats in both Australia and New Zealand.

APN Outdoor has invested more than $50 million in new digital developments and upgrades, which have included the aggressive expansion of the company’s Elite Screens Digital Billboard network, along with the launch of XtrackTV – a world first format in the rail environment.

APN Outdoor’s portfolio of airport advertising includes Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Auckland and Christchurch airports.

Australia: Adshel to deploy beacon technology across outdoor advertising panels nationally

Outdoor advertising company hopes the technology will allow advertisers to send more geotargeted and contextually relevant messaging to consumers

Adshel is rolling out more than 3000 beacons across its national out-of-home advertising network in a bid to bring stronger customer targeting and data capabilities to the outdoor advertising space.

he company said the beacons will initially be used as ‘listen and learn’ devices to build insights on consumers, as well as for advertisers.

Longer term, Adshel hopes the technology will allow advertisers to leverage their existing customer databases to send geo-targeted and contextually relevant messages to customers standing within the vicinity of an enabled Adshel panel.

The data generated through the beacons could also be used by advertisers to profile Adshel’s outdoor sites, gaining further geographic insights into a specific location and improving audience targeting. The beacons will only work with an advertiser’s beacon-enabled app installed on a consumer’s iOS or Android smartphone. The network is expected to be operating by 1 April.

Adshel CEO, Rob Atkinson, saw the beacon rollout as transforming the way outdoor media is bought and sold.

“In combination with Adshel’s almost 15,000 advertising panels, it will deliver advertisers more data, insights and accountability while utilising the unique engagement small format outdoor advertising offers,” he said.

“We want to continue working with our advertising partners in ways that deliver more effective campaign planning and reduced media spend wastage. We believe our beacons offering further demonstrates our commitment to innovation.”

Adshel’s chief commercial officer Mike Tyquin said the company had tested beacons in a number of out-of-home locations as part of its initial ‘Listen and Learn’ network offering.

“The launch of Adshel’s beacon network is in response to advertisers’ demands for mobile extensions of their advertising campaigns and demonstrates our relentless focus on being a market leader in the OOH data space,” he told CMO.

Tyquin explained Adshel offers advertisers access to its beacon network in advance of planned media campaigns to understand where their customers are and aren’t.

“Adshel’s beacon network will inform agencies and advertisers which Adshel OOH advertising panels are the best to buy to meet their campaign objectives,” he said.

Key benefits for advertisers in the first phase of the beacon offering include targeting more accurately, reducing media spend wastage and increasing campaign ROI, he said.

Under phase two, advertisers will then have the opportunity to send personalised mobile push notifications to a consumer’s mobile devices, and can couple existing customer insights with specific location and time around specific customers, Tyquin said.

Beacons are already proving a hot ticket item in the retail space as a way of better connecting digital and physical customer experiences.

A number of Australian retailers and retail shopping centres claim to be successfully trialling the technology, including Woolworths for its click-and-collect service; Bendigo Marketplace for family-oriented marketing campaigns; and Chatswood Chase for offers and customer data collection.

Globally, the proximity marketing devices are also being used by the likes of John Lewis, Home Depot, Macy’s and Apple stores.

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ASIA NEWS

Singapore: MediaCorp OOH Media platform diversifies its offerings

MediaCorp’s OOH Media platform has converted all its 12 sheet screen wrap formats inside the bus shelters in the city to “Opti-Prime” format. This includes incorporating three new differing formats namely, 4 Prime, Digiboard and Digi6.

The 4 Prime static is said to be bigger than the typical 4-sheet size and provides a medium static format for advertisers to engage audience within the shelter. It can be used in conjunction with the digital screen or as a standalone static poster.

The Digiboard is suitable for zonal activation with short and crisp tagline for call to action. It can also be used in conjunction with TVC on the digital screen to support the advertisement and generate more localized call to action.

Whereas, Digi6 can be deployed to augment the six Sheet poster network to provide additional city coverage. As it is essentially a digital screen, it can include elements of movement to breathe “life” into an otherwise static poster.

The new offerings provide advertisers with the flexibility and variety to reach a wide spectrum of demographics. Located at strategic path-to-purchase locations, these new formats will aid in helping to seal the last mile marketing frontier from home to store, said MediaCorp in a statement. The company also added that the digital offering enables “consistent engagement from home to out of home with the ability to push ads synchronously with print and time belt scheduling.”

“Advertisers’ campaigns can be made more effective with the ability to target specific audience vis-à-vis the locality,” the company added.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of celebrating family this Lunar New Year season, MediaCorp has partnered with the National Population and Talent Division on the SG50Baby community initiative.

Henry Goh, head of MediaCorp’s OOH Media, said: “The new Opti-Prime format is a very compelling media platform for our advertisers to maximise exposure to their target audiences. By just making simple formatting changes to our presentation, we are able to offer better positioning and placements for our advertisers. We are delighted to launch the Opti-Prime with the SG50Baby community initiative by NPTD. I look forward to more of such meaningful partnerships to come.”

Commuters transiting at the 20 locations with Opti-Prime formats will be able to find out more about the SG50 Baby Community initiative, including how to send a free e-greeting card plus a special discount coupon to their friends or family members who are recent parents, and about the Marriage & Parenthood Package that supports Singaporean couples to set up and raise a family.

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Hong Kong: OMD: half of global digital media buy will be programmatic by 2020

Programmatic buying has been touted as a way to increase the efficiency of the digital ad dollar. But with the slow spread of digital to platforms other than devices that we use to access the Internet, combined with the continued dominance of TV as a mass market channel, it’s hard to see when the adoption of programmatic buying will become truly widespread.

Mainardo de Nardis, global CEO of OMD Worldwide believes the development of programmatic buying in Hong Kong is very similar to that in the rest of the world, with data and technology presenting the biggest obstacles.

de Nardis said around 5% of ad placements in Hong Kong are bought programmatically, compared to 40-50% in some countries.

He predicts ad placements in so-called traditional media, such as out-of-home and analogue TV, will be bought and sold through programmatic in the future.

“Right now, programmatic buying is used to buy ads on mobile or video platforms. You will soon see programmatic buying for out-of-home billboards and TV,” de Nardis said.

“An enormous part of our business will be traded through programmatic buying. Programmatic buying is a journey whereas mobile is a platform or destination. Programmatic buying is not a big event – it’s just an evolution that has already begun and brings us more efficient methods of measurement and content integration.”

Currently, digital makes up over 20% of the world’s marketing budgets, according to de Nardis. He believes if that spending grows to 30% of total global marketing expenditure, half of digital media buy globally will be conducted programmatically, including digital out-of-home and TV.

de Nardis said he expects quicker and more widespread adoption of programmatic buying in Asia compared to Europe or the US because more millennials are present on staff, and Asia is at the forefront of the use and adoption of new technologies.

Like any new technology, programmatic buying will begin life in agencies as specialised units, operating separately from the core services of the agency. The next step is to continue growing the unit and its services until it becomes mainstream and can be integrated along with other disciplines.

Full article here