Last year, the OAAA Innovations Committee met to determine how best to educate the OOH community about the many new technologies available to enhance all aspects of the ad campaign process – from planning and buying to execution and reporting. With so many tech companies as OAAA members under the new “Technology” membership category, many of whom sat around the committee table, we decided to lay out an entire OOH tech ecosystem, breaking down OAAA tech members into more specific categories. This graphic allowed us to look at which companies can do what and for whom.
So now – we have this ecosystem listing which OAAA tech members offer data collection solutions or transactional platforms or content management systems or some other tech service – how do we let the OOH industry know these services are available and how they work? We created the OAAA Tech Hub.
The OAAA Tech Hub, which launched last week, offers members a central location to find information about OOH tech companies and their capabilities. Here you can search under different solution categories and learn about each of the providers – read blog posts, download fact sheets, watch short videos, and more.
As part of this new “tech ed” initiative, OAAA has developed a new webinar series aimed at educating members about emerging capabilities in the OOH market. The webinar series kicked off with SITO Mobile discussing real-time consumer behavior data. More than 100 people attended the webinar armed with dozens of questions, and nearly 70 percent of those who provided feedback said they plan to learn more about the technology that was presented. These webinars will take place throughout the year, and recordings of each will be posted to the OAAA Tech Hub.
One webinar attendee said, “This is great information to utilize when determining how valuable our specific locations are to potential advertisers.”
I’m so excited OAAA members are already making use of the Tech Hub and are interested in learning more about these innovative services. The Innovations Committee is working with OAAA to ensure “tech ed” is carried over into the annual convention this year, too.
One of the main workshops at the 2017 OAAA\Geopath National Convention + Expo, taking place in New Orleans May 15-16, will offer insights into how the tech world is working with the OOH industry. We’ll hear from experts at major tech corporations such as Pinterest, Foursquare, and Spyder, to name a few. These techies will likely blow our minds as they discuss ways they currently connect with consumers, collect data, and how they can help us better engage our audiences.
And, new this year to the Expo, is the Tech Hive. Here we’ll see what the “buzz” is all about! Tech companies will offer service and product demonstrations so we can see in real life how it works. I plan to spend a lot of time in the Tech Hive learning all I can about new opportunities to impress clients and consumers.
And, if you haven’t yet, I encourage all OAAA Tech Members to submit information to be included in the Tech Hub. This helps OOH professionals like myself easily find what we need to determine what might work best for our advertisers.
Download the PDFPublished: February 10, 2017