AI and OOH Advertising: AiThority Tech Bytes Interview with Billups’ Stephanie Gutnik

Last week, we spoke to advertising technology (ad tech) experts on the new-age AI-led strategies for display and programmatic advertising. Advertisers and publishers have set their eyes on AI and OOH advertising in 2024. From content creation and ad personalization to real-time ad fraud detection intelligence tools, Artificial Intelligence is more than a buzzword for OOH advertising companies and customers. For most parts of the year 2023, the world of technology focused on the paradigm shift in businesses due to new Generative AI tools and solutions. ChatGPT, BARD, Dall-E, Bing Co-Pilot, and tons of other open-source AI tools made the world take note of the benefits and opportunities provided by these innovations. In 2024, the writing is on the wall — AI and OOH advertising would make ad tech users more effective, precise, and efficient. Breaking the fad on how AI works in OOH advertising, we spoke to a senior ad tech leader from Billups, Stephanie Gutnik. Stephanie is the Global Chief Strategy Officer at Billups, a global Out-of-Home (OOH) managed services agency.

Here’s what Stephanie had to say about AI and OOH advertising trends.

Hi Stephanie, welcome to our AiThority Tech Bytes Interview Series. Please tell us about your journey with Billups so far.

I joined Billups as Global Chief Strategy Officer in September 2023. The company was celebrating its twentieth anniversary – and there has been much to celebrate! I have been so impressed by Billups’ growth and global expansion, enabled by an enthusiastic and diligent team of Out-of-Home advertising experts, and an array of proprietary tech products that make OOH an optimizable and accountable medium.

Please tell us about Billups. What are your core offerings in the B2B space for cloud AI and web applications?

Billups is a global OOH managed services agency helping advertisers and agencies strengthen media performance through a patented analytics and measurement platform. Billups is the largest independent and privately-held company of its kind in North America and is reinventing OOH planning and placement worldwide to optimize OOH as a brand and performance channel for advertisers.

AI is at the heart of Billups’ OOH planning, optimization, and measurement products, and our patents are an example of how forward-thinking our Sciences team is when developing solutions to client needs. Our methodology is designed to function without device IDs, and the data we use is fully consented and anonymized.

Our measurement system reconstructs each device’s daily journey but only stores interactions between the OOH unit seen and a small set of locations being measured for visitation, none of the intermediates is stored. Billups’ solutions are designed to be privacy-centric at the core. We understand how OOH affects a device’s behavior at a unit level but know nothing else aside from basic demographic information.

Billups is at the forefront of this digital transformation. How does AI contribute to your marketing strategies, and could you provide examples to illustrate its impact?

Billups leads the industry with a team of experts in OOH using patented targeting, accurate OOH measurement and an AI-powered recommendation engine. Our proprietary machine-learning-based technology understands the viewability of traditional and digital OOH units, the elements most likely to be seen by viewers, what might be blocking the units and for how long the units will be viewable to a consumer.

We pair this with a scientific understanding of viewers’ journeys and we have been at the forefront of the industry with our focus on the growing value of attention metrics. Attention studies have demonstrated a positive correlation with core KPIs that matter to marketers. This also informs how we are enhancing our solutions built on privacy-compliant, cookieless measurement from upper to lower funnel, achieved through methodologies like causal modeling and media mix modeling.

Who are your customers and how do they leverage your cloud-based products/ services?

Billups partners with advertisers, independent agencies and holding companies – to provide best-in-class technology and services wherever there is an OOH need. Our global team of regional and local OOH experts uses our proprietary technology to assist across the planning, activation, and measurement process.

With the acquisition of three new companies, the appointment of multiple key leaders, and the launch of Billups Analytics, this past year has been a remarkable period of growth. What is more to come for 2024-2025?

It is both exciting and fulfilling to contribute to the growth trajectory of Billups. After I joined, we acquired agencies in Canada, Malaysia and Belgium, and the teams are learning so much from each other as we exchange best practices and collaborate on global campaigns. What makes the integrations relatively seamless are shared values on kindness to one another and raising the bar on what can be done for clients for an incredible OOH experience. This positive momentum will continue into the next year, including our recent launch of Billups’ important sustainability initiative related to carbon emissions measurement and compensation capabilities.

In this digital renaissance, technology is not just a tool; it’s the key to unlocking personalized, immersive, and seamlessly integrated brand experiences”. What is your perception?

Personally, I am admittedly slow to adopt technology for my own use unless it noticeably improves my life due to efficiency and ease. I bring a similar perspective to the workplace and the marketing industry, where I avoid technology built for technology’s sake. I evaluate offerings based on the innate value they bring to workflows and delivering results. This is again why I am so proud of Billups’ use of AI – we are implementing this technology to solve problems, namely the misperception that OOH is not measurable. There is also the high likelihood that other OOH measurement approaches reliant on device IDs will become redundant in the near future, which is why we have developed measurement capabilities that do not rely on them. Thinking ahead, it is of paramount importance to leapfrog solutions currently in the market, and critically, to understand what customers actually want to achieve.

As a Tech Leader in the digital advertising technology space, which industries do you think would be fastest to adopt AI/ML with smooth efficiency?

From a marketing perspective, it is fascinating to see colleagues and industry cohorts quickly lean into AI/ML experimentation and usage tailored to the needs of individual roles. We see it used to enable planning efficiencies, creative brainstorming, and enhancements – and of course, for campaign performance optimization and measurement. The momentum will continue, again based on the utility AI/ML brings to workers, as opposed to simply the idea that AI is a trend that needs to be implemented across all workflows and products.

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Fast adoption will happen organically, with prioritization based on need.

What are the critical challenges impeding the growth of Enterprise AI?

It is an absolute must to ensure that AI development and usage is compliant with privacy and security laws across all markets in which an enterprise operates. Abiding by best practices in this sector could potentially slow the development and implementation of enterprise AI, but taking the time to do this properly is essential. I do not see this as an impediment to growth, instead, it is a necessary step toward the longevity of proper behavior in AI.

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Privacy is of utmost concern in all of Billups’ endeavors. This strategy ensures we are ready for the growing landscape of data privacy and protection regulations. It also reflects our commitment to respecting the privacy of the consumers who engage with OOH ads while maintaining the essential targeting and measurement capabilities to causally demonstrate OOH advertising effectiveness.

Thank you, Stephanie! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

[To share your insights with us as part of editorial or sponsored content, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]