When the pandemic took millions of cars off the road and shut down industry, live entertainment and events, it also took out the out-of-home (OOH) advertising industry. With no-one there to spot your billboard on the highway or digital signs in shopping malls, it was unlikely you would plaster your messages across public spaces.
In the US, according to data released last week by the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), revenue for the sector was down 29% in 2020. However, it still achieved a respectable $6bn in turnover. New SA OOH data is not yet available, but it was an industry worth close to $200m in 2018, according to PwC, with digital signage making up more than a third of the total, and growing robustly at about 9% a year. At the same time, physical OOH had been in decline every year since 2014.
The pandemic will have hastened the demise of physical, static OOH, adding yet another factor to disadvantages such as its lack of flexibility and high cost of maintenance. Until last year, the most conspicuous digital signs in malls were those one could touch to get more information about a product or store. Now, touch is the last thing consumers want to do to random objects in public places.
By good fortune and excellent vision, however, the digital signage industry has been preparing for just this kind of eventuality for some time. The technology behind digital signs, and the data that dictates the content on those signs, have come together at just the right time to save smartscreens from oblivion. Most significantly, artificial intelligence (AI) is being roped in to turn the industry into a symbol of 21st-century technology at work.
The new generation of digital screens absorb information from their environment, using an AI technology called computer vision
There is only one problem: the technology behind digital OOH is completely fragmented, according to Guy Taitz, regional director for Africa of leading Israeli digital signage software company Parsempo.
“The biggest software player in the industry has about half a million screens around the world. That sounds like a lot, but there are over 500-billion screens in public spaces in the world. That means the biggest player in this industry has got less than 1% of the market share. That shows you from a tech perspective why there are so many legacy issues in the space. No-one’s really looked at an agnostic solution for how to not only bring massive amounts of intermediaries and third parties together, but also to bring down costs in the space.
“This is a medium that, from a marketing perspective, virtually works on no viewer data. Every billboard is sold on a per-play basis. In other words, there’s no data on how the content is working, or if the consumers are enjoying the content sitting in a car driving past a billboard or in a retail store.”
Enter AI, and its tech sibling, machine learning (ML). Among other things, it can allow for instant analysis of the impact of an ad on viewers, and adapt the advertising from a content and even location perspective as it learns from its audience.
Taitz gives the example of a high-end Swiss watch manufacturer, which creates advertising content for global use in Switzerland.
“It gets uploaded onto a USB stick and gets couriered to different stores around the world to display content on their screens. It’s a little bit like going to work on a horse, aside from the fact that it’s generic content. Surely the same content can’t be as effective in every single country in the world?
“Our data changes that entire perspective, globally, and replicates the whole digital model of advertising that exists in the online world, in terms of calculating things like return on investment and conducting AB testing, which didn’t exist in digital OOH. They typically created a piece of content, it was paid on a per-use basis, and there was some form of correlation in terms of sales data and products sold, but it was extremely loose and vague.”
Parsempo and its competitors have quickly adapted to a new approach that addresses these needs as well as a no-touch environment. The new generation of digital screens absorb information from their environment, using an AI technology called computer vision — geared towards recognising objects, movement, distance, and even faces. This allows for identifying likely gender and even age bracket.
“We’ve tested this with thousands of screens and it’s not 100% accurate, but it gives you a band. Let’s say you have a 50-year-old male looking at the sign, it’ll say they’re between the ages of 25 and 54. As you have more hours on screen, the back-end system learns and adapts and starts making recommendations to the screen, either based on the location or the target audience.”
A tech too far for this market? Hardly, says Taitz.
“SA is one of the highest consumers of digital signage in the world, and Africa is second only to Asia and South America in terms of growth opportunity.”
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za.
