Consolidation of OOH can simplify. But so can tech

This week’s news that our friends Primesight and Outdoor Plus have been bought by Global Media and Entertainment to form Global Outdoor comes after much talk of consolidation of OOH. This, of course, follows Ocean Outdoor’s acquisition of Forest earlier in the year.

The advantages are clear. Consolidation of OOH media owners gives them more ammunition in the fight against other mediums for the advertiser’s purse. While for agencies, fewer owners – with larger individual inventory – makes for a far simpler and more enticing buying proposition.

Consolidation also helps in the quest for truly automated trading. The OOH ecosystem is a highly diverse and intensely fragmented one. Each media owner and agency is pushing their own automation solutions, while new platforms pop up on both the demand and sell sides offering different ways to solve the problem.

The result is a myriad of different platforms that do not seamlessly integrate or connect. They all speak different technological languages, call things different names (you say panel, I say frame) and this is even before they change and evolve according to their own priorities.

In the end, the connections are possible but in a fragmented market, those connections are hugely time consuming and expensive to set-up and maintain.

So, industry-wide consolidation is one way of simplifying the market. In this week’s example, buyers can now make one simple connection with Global Outdoor and take advantage of Primesight’s broad range of inventory across the country, while leveraging Outdoor Plus’ premium London based sites.

But there is also a way to reap the many of the benefits of consolidation, without the need to sign your commercials into the hands of someone else.

By employing a technology partner, you can do away with the complexity of making multiple unique connections. Once you’ve agreed on the commercials, you can deploy software that not only creates seamless connectivity with your buyer but acts as a pass-through, translating requests on your behalf, and delivering them to your existing systems. Better yet, not only does the software handle these existing requests, but it also manages future changes in the way your buyers make them.

It takes a lot of resources to create and handle these connections. Consolidation of OOH is one way we can, as an industry, simplify to connect and automate. But technology is another and has the added bonus of making your life easier and your business more attractive. So, if you’d rather hang onto commercial control, software that eliminates complexity in your connections, future-proof your business and prevents a headache is nearly here. Get in touch or watch this space for details.