Across The Desk with Adomni’s Jonathan Gudai

By Kate Scanlan for OAAA

Published: January 25, 2023

Every month, OAAA’s editorial team sits down with an industry leader to discuss the latest insights, trends, and best practices for the OOH industry. This month, we’re excited to spotlight Jonathan Gudai, CEO of Adomni and Shoutable.

OAAA: What excites you about OOH right now?

Jonathan: There are so many exciting things happening in digital out-of-home right now. Here are my top 5:

1. The continued rise of programmatic DOOH

The programmatic DOOH ecosystem enjoyed significant year-over-year growth. We expect this growth to continue for the near term, as more adoption occurs from digital ad buyers and they make pDOOH a standard part of their digital media mix.

2. New buyers entering our space

The vast majority of Adomni’s clients are digital agencies or digital-focused marketers at brands. Last year, 70% of our clients had never purchased DOOH with us or DOOH at all. We have only scratched the surface of tapping into the large budgets of video advertisers, social media advertisers and digital display advertisers.

3. Extending social media campaigns and budgets to DOOH

We’re seeing a growing trend of social media and influencer budgets being applied to DOOH. Additionally, social media ad buyers have finally discovered that social ads + DOOH are a powerful media combo. The small screen is amplified by the big screen and vice-versa.

4. Better ad content

Now that programmatic DOOH technology has matured, the fun part of our industry’s growth and evolution can kick in. After a programmatic buyer has dialed in their audience and geography targeting, the best way to drive better results is better (and more!) creative ads. Programmatic enables brands to inject fresh, relevant information to keep the ads updated and interesting. Sports betting is one example of that, but I foresee a lot more happening with e-commerce companies and other brands that use multiple variants of ads. We also believe that user-generated content (UGC) for DOOH has tremendous potential; brands can invite their audience to participate in their ad campaigns with the end-users custom photos, videos or text. The more we can mix up the look and feel of ads within a single DOOH campaign, the more sticky the campaign will be.

5. More measurement of programmatic DOOH campaigns

We’ve seen a significant rise in pre-campaign measurement for metrics such as reach and frequency, thanks to Place Exchange’s PerView product. Last year, we saw triple-digit growth in the volume of post-campaign performance reports as well. We are pushing hard to showcase the quantitative impact of DOOH ads on business outcomes. This takes the form of KPI lift reports and ROAS reports. Reveal Mobile and their brand Mira are leading the way on lift reports and Nielsen Catalina is doing really great work on lower-funnel measurement for retail. There are lots of other measurement solutions emerging. It keeps getting better.

OAAA: Which recent OOH campaign inspired you?

Jonathan: That is a tough one because there are many that I loved.

The recent one from November/December that comes to mind as the most innovative was an Activision Blizzard Sponsored Shoutable campaign for the release of the new action pack for their video game World of Warcraft called Dragonflight. It ran in England, Germany and France.

Activision Blizzard created a custom augmented reality web app that enabled its game players to take a selfie with one of four dragons from the game. Then, you could take that AR snapshot photo and place it on a specific digital billboard or digital urban panel of your choosing at a specific time of your choosing during their campaign flight. People would go to the locations and take a photo or video of themselves and then post to TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or share with friends.

There was no cost to participate and Activision ran a contest to give out prizes to a portion of the gamers who participated.

When there wasn’t dynamic UGC content playing, we were serving WOW Dragonflight branded ad content that promoted the game, ensuring that their programmatic budget was guaranteed to be spent and their audience reached.

Here are a few of my favorite UGC examples: