Media Direction Group: Media Direction Group and oneFactor taught AI to rule OOH

For the first time in Russia, OOH advertising was shown by an artificial intelligence algorithm. This unique product was created by Media direction group, part of Omnicom, in collaboration with oneFactoran AI systems developer. The targeted OOH project changed the Russian ad industry: for the first time, big data and the latest programmatic technologies were implemented in one of the most conservative offline media OOH.
OOH got into the top-3 media channels in Russia by expenditures and TA coverage by 2017. However, transparency and campaigns update speed were behind modern requirements. Advertisers didn’t have the means to assess the real results of their campaigns or audience quality. TV and digital have the flexibility of measuring key indicators and assessing campaign effectiveness and targeting specific audiences, but OOH didn’t offer these features.
Media Direction Group used the newest online technologies to change this. They created a technology that combined telecom operators’ Big Data provided by the largest Russian AI developer with its own programmatic system for digital players in OOH allowing to target, plan, select creative messages and monitor OOH effectiveness in real time.
Media Direction Group commented, saying that big data from mobile carriers gave tremendous opportunities to analyze customers for a while already, but that no other players tried to use this tool to solve offline tasks yet, leave alone to combine it in a common system with other technologies. There was a way to use aggregated data, including geo location, in real time for offline communication.
The system uses machine learning to calculate the sociodemographic profile and quantity of the exposed audience in real time, puts together an individual media plan for each video screen and picks the necessary creative message from a range of options based on the setup of the audience currently interacting with the advertising carrier. Now advertisers have the opportunity to optimize their placement in real time, and not just in following campaigns.
"The new programmatic OOH" technology opens huge opportunities in comparison with the standard ways of showing content. It becomes possible to optimize the cost of placement both in terms of coverage and accumulated TRP. In addition, oneFactor Big Data is used by the Media Direction Group to plan and optimize geolocation for different target audiences, not only in digital sites, but also in regular non-digital surfaces, as their proportion remains dominant despite the rapid growth in the number of digital screens. The opportunities that the targeting technology gives in outdoor advertising will soon bring this media channel to a fundamentally new level”, emphasizes Andrey Brayovich, CEO of Media Direction Group.
Commercial implementation started in Novosibirsk. This new technology has now been tested by advertisers including Uber, Bayer, MediaMarkt, Metro С&C, Headhunter, Hasbro.
According to the data from the pilot project, using programmatic in OOH allows getting transparent results of advertising campaigns and to substantially increase effectiveness. As a consequence, the campaign affinity and the degree of targeting reaches up to 200%, ad recognition (the degree a commercial is recognized in DOOH) for narrow TAs is 1.5 / 2.2 times higher than the population average. The conversion effect for some categories (difference in effect by test groups) reaches 10%. Now the implementation is to be expanded to other Russian cities soon.
The new OOH ecosystem shifted the Russian advertising industry. Advertisers got the tool to assess real results of OOH campaigns, to analyze the audience setup for each billboard, and to quickly target adverts for the relevant TAs. For the first time, OOH entered a new level of efficiency, catching up with media indicators for TV and digital advertising.