Talon America Powers “Connected Video” With Unification of OTT & DOOH Advertising

• Strikes Partnership with OTT Market Leader Madhive to Unlock Value of Reaching In-Home and Out-of-Home Audiences at Scale 

Talon, the leading independent Out of Home (OOH) media specialist, announced its new connected video offering, which unifies OTT and DOOH advertising. Talon is joining forces with MadHive to connect digital audiences across two of the fastest growing advertising channels in the U.S. — OTT and DOOH. Madhive joins Hivestack as a strategic partner to enhance its services and solutions to serve their current and prospective clients.

“The growth of digital video is fueling the movement from in-home to out-of-home and we’re empowering advertisers to activate their cross-channel video strategy of reaching high-value audiences at scale, whether it’s a traditional managed service or a self-service approach,” said Jim Wilson, CEO of Talon America. “As marketers look for measurable incremental reach and the ability to tie campaign spending to business results, we’re enabling advertisers to start an OOH journey in-home. By bringing to market new solutions with MadHive and Hivestack, we’re connecting audience data across OTT and DOOH to deliver outcome-based campaigns as advertiser demand on each channel reaches new heights.”

DOOH adoption is soaring in the U.S. with advertising spend projected to reach $3.84 billion by the end of 2023, according to Statista. The advent of programmatic DOOH is further enriching the medium to give advertisers even more flexibility —  U.S. programmatic DOOH ad spend doubled last year and is projected to reach $533.8 million by 2022, according to eMarketer. Furthermore, full motion DOOH is 2.5 times more impactful than equivalent static ads and delivers a powerful emotional experience that drives brand effectiveness, according to Ocean Outdoor.

Combined with the explosive growth in streaming audiences, the pairing of OTT and DOOH present new and powerful cross-channel opportunities for advertisers. According to a recent BWG survey, 64 percent of brands and agencies consider sequential messaging across OTT and DOOH to be important. Today, 18 to 64 year olds are spending more time with OOH than any other ad media except TV, based on the OAAA’s Value Guide. Furthermore, both mediums are proven to deliver high brand recall: an OpenX study found that 72 percent of OTT viewers can recall seeing a specific ad, and nearly half (45%) of American adults are noticing OOH advertising more than before the pandemic began, according to an OAAA/Harris Poll.

Combining these two channels enable advertisers to steadily drive consumers, primed with OOH signage, down the purchase funnel. Exposing audiences first to OOH creates brand awareness and recognition which is followed up in-home where that same audience can take a secondary action — like visit a website, sign up for a service, or locate a retailer.

Talon’s connected video solution brings together precision audience targeting at scale with premium video messaging to reach consumers at home or on-the-go. It allows marketers to integrate local audience targeting, control reach and frequency, and measure outcomes across both mediums. Furthermore, the recent launch of Talon’s proprietary data management platform, Ada in the U.S. generates intelligence on real and recent audience behaviors that enable more effective, data driven targeting for advertisers.

Talon will utilize MadHive’s proprietary platform to connect advertisers to premium connected TV (CTV) inventory and its end-to-end campaign planning tools for audience targeting, measurement, and attribution. “Combining OTT and DOOH makes perfect sense,” said Adam Helfgott, CEO of MadHive. “It allows buyers to plan, activate, and measure two rapidly expanding media channels that represent an even larger percentage of marketers spend. The cross-channel platform will deliver a more holistic picture of the customer journey by creating new currencies and insights on a single audience — all while simplifying brand workflow.”

OOH is an expansive and incredibly diverse medium in terms of range of formats and geographic spread, and media owners are investing in more digital display inventory across airport, transit, street shelter, retail, and experiential media. In fact, the number of digital displays in the U.S. increased by more than 43 percent since 2016 and reached 9,600 screens in the first half of 2020, according to the OAAA.

Hivestack’s Supply Side Platform (SSP) will programmatically feed DOOH screen inventory to MadHive, that will serve as the demand-side platform (DSP) for activation across OTT and DOOH leveraging Talon’s Ada audience segments. “While omnichannel is often what’s talked about these days, OTT and DOOH are two inherently connected channels in the consumer’s mindset as their journey originates inside their home, progresses outside and ends inside their home,” said Hivestack’s CEO, Andreas Soupliotis. “Talon’s innovative, new approach to dual-channel targeting enables advertisers to holistically stitch sequential, targeted messaging to consumers at historically disjointed physical touchpoints—and measure outcomes derived from exposure to either environment.”