• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 16, 2016

While the media industry remains fixated on issues of online viewability and fraud, one interactive medium neatly sidesteps both issues: digital out-of-home advertising.

Reflecting the medium’s growing importance, last week the Interactive Advertising Bureau released its first buyer’s guide for DOOH, developed by the IAB Digital Out-of-Home Task Force.

It begins with a quick summary of DOOH’s strengths -- including its ability to reach consumers across an ever-more fragmented media universe with “un-skippable” messages, its high targetability and burgeoning options for mobile integration.

The IAB guide also notes the myriad of formats and venues on offer, while highlighting the huge potential promised by its impending integration with the “Internet of Things.”

The guide then turns to more “nuts and bolts” issues in the planning and buying of DOOH campaigns, starting with the standards, measurement, and protocols for the medium, including major providers and industry organizations like the OAAA, DPAA, TAB, MRC, and Nielsen’s On Location service.

The IAB guide further notes that DOOH is generally sold on a time basis, with a typical billboard offering eight slots in a loop, each one 8-10 seconds long, with the option of buying more slots to increase share of voice. Impressions are typically calculated over a specified period -- for example, four weeks -- with rates varying according to factors like location and demand.

The rise of programmatic buying in recent years has opened up new techniques for planning and buying DOOH inventory, allowing brands to activate against audiences by location, based on specific behavioral segments and aggregated data sets.

Examples of common behavioral data used for shaping segments include visitation-based behavior, grouping audiences that have been to a particular location; Web-based behavior, grouping audiences that have visited a particular Web site; and TV viewing behavior.

The guide also addresses new techniques for measuring DOOH effectiveness, including integration of mobile device location data in conjunction with mobile surveys, as well as established methods like foot traffic studies.

Looking ahead, the guide predicts: “As the collection and real world visualization of mobile and other sensor data continues to grow and evolve, these data sets will pair more accurately with the precise location of all DOOH structures. This opens the door, to even richer understanding of the audiences who see and interact with DOOH screens.”