• by Joe Mandese , December 9, 2020

In an effort to remove some of the noise and friction in the digital out-of-home advertising industry, a group of leading suppliers have joined to create a new, simplified standardization of the major digital out-of-home advertising formats.

The initiative, which includes both “demand-side” and “supply-side” platforms that enable advertisers and agencies to buy digital out-of-home advertising programmatically, reduces the naming conventions of various biddable advertising formats by about two-thirds.

“The hope of this framework and the way the group has approached it is for this to be an evolving standard,” Leslie Lee, vice president of marketing at Vistar, which helped organize the initiative. 

Lee said the framework needs to evolve, because the nature of digital out-of-home advertising will continue to change as advertising finds its way into new locations via new, constantly evolving digital technologies, and as new types of retail advertising categories emerge, as well.

“Within retail, there is now a categories for dispensaries that never existed before,” she said, citing the burgeoning legal cannabis retail marketplace as an example of a new digital out-of-home advertising environment.

The consortium, which includes Adomni, Broadsign, Place Exchange, Verizon Media and VIOOH, worked with advertisers and agencies on the demand side, as well as trade associations such as the DPAA (Digital Place-based Advertising Association) and the OAAA, which have endorsed it.

Version 1.0 of the new digital out-of-home advertising taxonomy can be accessed here.