Google has expanded its ad offering again.

But rather than adding another virtual string to your bow, one of the internet’s original giants will let you target your audience where they live and breathe.

Introducing… out-of-home advertising

That’s because digital out-of-home ads have been made available to all Display & Video 360 users. Marketers can now broaden their Google horizons to screens in public places such as stadiums, airports, bus stops and shopping centres.

Shreya Mathur, Product Manager, Display & Video 360, Google

“Digital out-of-home is an increasingly popular option that brings the best of digital technology to a traditional advertising medium. It helps brands engage shoppers at moments when they make key decisions or take certain actions such as walking in a shopping mall or lining up at the grocery store checkout.”

Google says it is making the change to help brands “reach users out in their real-world journey with the efficiency of programmatic technology.” By using Display & Video 360 ads in an out-of-home context, marketers can expand the limits of their campaign and reach people in more places than before.

Easy to use

Marketers can activate, pause and optimise digital out-of-hone campaigns in near real-time, while strategy, activation, reporting and optimisation can all be dealt with from the same place.

Display & Video 360 partners with exchanges like Place Exchange, Vistar Media and Hivestack – which gives access to large media owners around the world. Additionally, inventory can be secure via programmatic deals.

One important thing to note is that the adverts will not be personalised. No individual identifiers or user location data will be used.

Shreya Mathur, Product Manager, Display & Video 360, Google

“Instead, advertisers can reach people based on contextual information of the screen location, like a traditional out-of-home ad, but with the flexibility and ease of programmatic.”

Placing ads by screen location could be used by restaurants advertising a lunch special between 11am and 2pm in a busy pedestrian zone brimming with office workers and people likely to pop in for a bit of lunch.

However, as the billboard is digital, later in the day it could display an ad for a cocktail happy hour or the latest evening drinks special.

What’s the benefit?

Businesses can use out-of-home advertising to show adverts at certain times in more locations than is possible with a traditional billboard. It also allows them to extend a Display & 360 campaign that is known to be a winner to the streets.

All of that may sound simplistic, but it could really help you drive awareness and customer action based on what they see.

ASOS is one of the world’s leading online fashion retailers, so it makes sense that they’d give out-of-home advertising a whirl. ASOS marketers placed digital billboards in heavy footfall areas to generate awareness and interest in ASOS products.

Google says it was a great success:

• 14% increase in brand awareness was reported.
• 22% increase in brand consideration in exposed vs control areas reported.

ASOS did this by selecting digital billboards in the UK and the US using leading publishers in each country. By the end of the campaign, 22 million viewed impressions were reported across both countries.

Dom Kozak, Head of Programmatic, JCDecaux UK, via Google

“Making our out-of-home inventory available through DSPs such as Display & Video 360 enables marketers to plan and optimize all digital channels in one place. It gives brands like ASOS more control which can improve brand and performance metrics.”

A big dog celebration

In reality, the brands that will get the most from this are big dogs with large footprints. As Google says “It (out-of-home ads)  gives them a chance to reach their global audience using a single tool.”

For marketers used to pin-sharp measurement and evaluation, out-of-home ads may not hit the spot. That’s because you’ll only see an estimate of the number of people who may have seen the ad.

Google claims that the number helps advertisers measure the impact of a campaign and all publishers are vetted to ensure proper measurement methodologies are followed, but still an estimate isn’t ideal and you may have to think of your own way of measuring success.