Digital out of home (DOOH) is playing an increasingly important role in advertisers' media plans, mainly due to the performance impulses that programmatic advertising adds to this type of media. Today, targeting methods such as time targeting or geo-based targeting can already be automated in real-time by selecting appropriate timelines and advertising mediums (touchpoints) for required target groups.

Targeting on any real-time events such as the weather or football results is also possible via programmatic content dynamization. At present, targeting people at ad contact level can only be implemented indirectly, but the industry is working on a more advanced solution here as well.

The development of the return path in DOOH is exciting: Various systems are currently being tested to capture the viewers directly, but also to enable and measure direct interactions. One of the latest media and technology innovations in this area is real-time footfall measurement. It can enable tracking of advertising performance from DOOH directly to the cash register in shops, allowing DOOH advertisers to see the impact their campaigns had on conversions, i.e. purchases.

This new dimension becomes possible by integrating extensive consumer movement data into a programmatic booking platform (DSP). It makes digital outdoor advertising even more data-centric and automatically measurable and controllable from the screen to the check-out receipt.

The footfall measurement gives extensive transparency about the advertising impact of DOOH campaigns. It allows to systematically optimize them – even in flight – by recording and analyzing visitor flows in compliance with data protection regulations, from the advertising contact on the screen to the conversion in the store. For this purpose, the DSP stores lists of branches or places of interest. Based on the movement data, the DSP can then document these touchpoints; the change in the numbers of visitors and automatically calculate a correlation to the impact of the playout at certain DOOH screens.

The KPI that can be determined for each campaign on the basis of the locations (screens and stores) booked are:

• "screen visits" (number of people who had ad contacts with defined screens)
• “converted screen visits” (number of shop visits by users who had an advertising contact with defined screens)
• “visitation uplift” based on a control group (the increase in store visits generated by a DOOH campaign)

With realtime footfall measurement, DOOH advertising can not only be controlled more efficiently, but the associated performance verification and optimization options also give advertisers important planning security, especially in the current ever-changing environment. And last but not least, DOOH also provides an important component for the cross-media ROI determination demanded by the advertising industry.

Ralf Hammerath is CEO of ADITION technologies and has more than 20 years of expertise in media and technology marketing. ADITION technologies is the leading European provider of high-quality technology solutions for automated, data-based digital marketing across all channels from a central enterprise platform. The modular, expandable platform provides all market participants – advertisers, agencies and publishers/marketers – with individual, tailor-made solutions to achieve maximum marketing and marketing efficiency and to make the respective key assets in online marketing future-proof. ADITION technologies is part of the virtual minds group, which is a 100% subsidiary of ProSiebenSat.1 Media.