A key player in the digital out-of-home advertising industry says its decision to publicly release data around its carbon emission intensity will ‘bring sustainability into the conversation’.
VIOOH, second on our MarTech 50 ranking this year, is a supply side platform which connects programmatic buyers and sellers in a premium marketplace, making OOH easily accessible. Led by a team of digital OOH and programmatic tech experts, the London firm is pioneering the transformation of the sector.
Last year it began a partnership with carbon intelligence platform Cedara to publicly reveal its impression intensity carbon emissions (grams CO2e) per ad impression – an industry first.
Its carbon emissions per advert impression in 2022 were 18% below the programmatic open web benchmark.
“VIOOH is the only programmatic digital OOH SSP that has publicly released a carbon emissions calculation, which enables the channel to become part of the conversation around sustainability,” chief marketing officer Helen Miall tells BusinessCloud.
“Previously, it was not as easy to compare environmental impact across media channels and this work from VIOOH has brought prDOOH into the conversation.
“There’s always going to be a balance between choosing the most sustainable media plan and the right mix that is aligned to the advertisers’ objectives, but it’s our role to provide the information, so advertisers can make an informed decision on their media channel choices.”
As a comparison with other media channels, a March 2023 KPMG study in France of energy performance estimated that the energy consumption of DOOH was 0.32 gCO2e, compared with a range of between 0.55-0.66 gCO2e for digital internet media, based on a calculation per audience impression.
Miall says there are no current plans for VIOOH to make acquisitions but that the business is growing ‘exponentially’ year-on-year.
“The global interest in prDOOH also continues to increase, and within existing markets, the adoption rate is also accelerating,” she explains.
“We’ll be launching our 23rd global market imminently, in the LATAM region. VIOOH has recently gone live in Portugal, South Africa, and mainland China which includes Shanghai and Beijing, and more countries are set to launch later in the year.
“In 2024, our expansion strategy is focusing on bringing on additional media owners and publishers in existing markets to broaden our inventory offering. This is very much our growth and expansion focus for this year across multiple publishers globally, rather than individual markets.”
The firm’s latest State of the Nation report found that the industry is finally moving towards a programmatic future.
“prDOOH enables OOH to be bought, planned, optimised and measured within multi-channel campaigns in real-time,” says Miall. “As a premium broadcast medium, it drives both branding and performance across trigger-based buying, data-driven capabilities, flexibility, effectiveness and efficiency.”
It has become increasingly difficult for buyers to track and identify the right audiences across the web, due to the demise of third-party data audience cookies.
“OOH has never been reliant on cookies to build audiences,” asserts Miall. “OOH media owners that invest in data and offer an audience-led buying approach are therefore able to offer a more targeted way to buy DOOH within multi-channel campaigns.”