Prediction Series 2019: Interview with Nicholas Wootten, SVP of Marketing, Billups

Tell us more about your role at Billups and what the company is doing to transform the out-of-home experience through technology.

I recently joined Billups as SVP of Marketing & Innovation. The out-of-home (OOH) industry is going through its largest transformation in technology and user adoption, so I was very excited to lead product adoption and growth for the largest, independent OOH technology and managed services company in the US

The Billups Outdoor Advertising Platform (DSP) helps clients execute smarter OOH campaigns, reaching consumers where they live, work and shop. In 2019, Billups will make its platform available directly to clients — making it easy for brands or agencies to quickly locate the best placements and reach targeted audiences with traditional and digital OOH.

For the first time, advertisers will be able to access 85% of the country’s OOH inventory from one platform, create strategically targeted OOH plans to reach precise audiences, then clearly measure the impact of each placement against real business outcomes (foot traffic, sales, growth). Currently, the Billups Outdoor DSP is only available to internal media planners and buyers, which has helped Billups become the largest privately owned OOH company in the US, servicing major clients from every vertical, nationwide.

Prior to joining Billups, I led marketing for CPG brands, AdTech companies and Performance Marketing agencies. My background is a unique fit for understanding what brands and agencies need to execute smarter campaigns, as well as a background in driving product adoption and growth for an AdTech platform.

How will Billups platform benefit your clients and brands, and what value will it bring to the market?

Billups Outdoor Advertising DSP offers clients the ability to target precise audiences with first and third-party data. By leveraging our proprietary platform and Machine Learning, brands and agencies are able to identify the best moments and locations to reach their target audience in the physical world. For the first time, advertisers will be able to transact OOH media similar to digital campaigns on Facebook and Google.

The combination of our recommendation engine and the most extensive map-based catalog in the nation brings a level of precision that has never been seen in out-of-home. Billups Outdoor Advertising DSP offers seamless workflow automation, intuitive targeting capabilities and transparent reporting mapped to real business outcomes.

To our knowledge, the Billups Outdoor Advertising DSP is also the only platform with both digital, static and non-traditional inventory — providing advertisers with access to more OOH inventory than ever before.

How do companies measure the impact of OOH and digital OOH?

Unfortunately, the OOH industry still relies primarily on DEC impressions (Daily Effective Circulation) for OOH measurement. At Billups, we utilize impressions to understand R&F for the market, however, our focus is to understand the impact our OOH campaigns have on actual business outcomes for our clients.

It’s not enough to confirm our OOH campaign has been seen. We need to know if it has increased foot traffic, increased sales, increased the customer base, increased market share, etc. And if so, which exact placements and why, so we can replicate that success with future initiatives. We accomplish this through a sophisticated attribution model, that constantly evolves our Machine Learning planning tools.

Billups measurement and attribution methodology is the closest thing to click-through data in the offline world. Marketers can see their campaign’s true impact with measurement and KPI attribution tied to real world locations.

As we enter 2019, how will the market for OOH and DOOH evolve? What are some of the biggest emerging trends or opportunities for brands over the next several years?

In 2019, we’ll see a larger allocation of the media mix shift to outdoor advertising. It’s no surprise that digital OOH is poised for large growth this year, with some estimates at 40%, but DOOH only represents a very small portion of the OOH inventory and the entire industry will enter it’s largest growth cycle. OOH media has become more accountable, easier to target and more transparent to measure, which will increase advertisers adoption and yield the largest growth cycle in OOH history.

OOH’s transformation is being driven by technological advances in measurement, workflow automation and audience targeting accuracy. OOH can now reach specific audiences based on their individual daily journeys. We can now measure the effectiveness of the OOH placement, understanding if it was the driving reason for action and role it played in that decision. Finally, OOH is now par with digital platforms for planning, buying and reporting OOH campaigns with Outdoor DSP (Demand-side Platform) similar to Facebook and Google.

These advancements in capabilities will continue to increase OOH’s share of the media mix.