Ooh!Media is looking to make the best use of its digital and content networks by targeting the “innovation budgets” of clients and agencies.
CEO Brendan Cook told the market during an investor call in the company's half year results that Ooh!Media was looking to boost creative use of its assets to show better engagement for clients.
“We're still teaching clients how to use the medium and we still haven't yet seen the great creative use of the medium,” Cook says. “But we've built the platform now we're working through the next phase which is how do people get used to using it.”
Speaking to AdNews Cook says out of home (OOH) is now “a much more powerful medium than we've ever been in history and that's what makes the opportunity so great for clients moving forward,” but the challenge is now convincing clients of the possibilities.
“It's a bit like moving from the horse and cart to the motorcar – it just take a little while before everyone understands how to use it,” Cook says.
“What we're finding is when we can engage people earlier, they can talk to us about the opportunity.”
An example is the Cannes Lions winning Bonds 'The Boys' campaign, which Cook says was an collaboration between media, creative and Ooh!Media to bring about a creative, tech-driven result.
To get more agencies and clients thinking about OOH and innovation, Cook says it is currently doing presentations, including at events such as ADMA and AANA.
Turning to its results, Cook says one of the highlights of the announcement was being able to reaffirm its market guidance for FY16 of $68 to $72 million. It follows a difficult day on the ASX for OOH sector with APN Outdoor announcing a profit warning in its results, impacting share prices across the board.
Cook says while there are challenging conditions ahead given the impact of an early Easter, an election and the Olympics, Ooh!Media has still been able to meet growth targets to reaffirm that guidance. He says the message to the market is that “OOH is growing”.
“Even with APN Outdoor missing its results it still had growth and substantial growth, so the OOH market is still growing,” Cook says. “Ooh!Media has great platforms and we have a great classic inventory and over 600 digital signs.
Ooh!Media also announced to the market that it is well ahead on its digital conversion, with almost 45% of revenue coming from digital. It had hoped to have 50% of its revenue derived digital by 2018.
It also now has 41 large format digital billboards, up from 26 at the start of the year, with an initial aim to have 50 towards 2018.
“We’ve been able to mange the regulatory pipelines faster than we anticipated,” Cook says. “So we're really happy around where that is proceeding and certainly the market usage of that will enable even better use of that network as we get that to scale.”
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