Outdoor giant oOh!media (oOh!) is incorporating artificial intelligence networks to plan campaigns for clients, leveraging large volumes of data to improve placement of its print and digital billboards.
The company hosted clients, some sharing successful campaign stories at its recent A World of Unmissable event, in which it revealed its strategy moving forward.
Brendon Cook, CEO, oOh!, says, “Out of home builds brand fame, and that has not changed.
“We have been changing the business to be audience focused, and had to change the entire business model, using data from companies like Quantium.
“In out of home, you need to invest much more than other segments, you need scale to give the same results. Our next wave of growth is beyond screens and classic (print) signs. We are training machines, and enhancing machine driven platforms.
“In April 2019 we will be creating a private marketplace where you can plan and buy your campaign.
“To deliver this we had to develop advanced leading machine learning capability inhouse and employ a tech company structure. Over the last 18 months we’ve engaged 27 software engineers, one data architect, five product people, five data scientists and five mathematicians, because that is the new capability we need.”
The company says the platform will have a clean and intuitive user interface, with data-driven decision making in the back-end to enable a campaign to be planned and purchased within two minutes and in 10 clicks or less.
While the company has been focused on increasingly digitising its assets since 2015, the new AI platform will allow data to create extra value from its print assets.
This includes the 21,000 new print billboards it has acquired from its recent purchase of Adshel for $570m.
When asked by Australian Printer about beating out rival APN to make the purchase, Cook said, “We made our bid based on how much we had valued the company at. If we would have known they were offering $540m, maybe we could have bid less, but the acquisition is part of our strategy to keep growing in scale.”
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