Beyond The Billboard
00:05:11 · Remi Du Preez
So early on in 2020, I got introduced to the team at BroadSign, started working with base systems, started working with, I think, the Amnet team at the time, and ran one of the very first sort of call it, impressions based buys with I think it was BMW at the time. Thereafter, I mean, that's just whetting the appetite. It just cracked open the bottle. Now you want more. There needs to be more to this. And I immediately saw that at the time the tools were lacking. How did clients buy it? I went and grabbed the high stack team, pestered the executives, got doors shut in my face. Was like, guys, you need to come to South Africa. I'm telling you, it's going to explode. You need to get here. Then started organizing webinars, etcetera. So we led with sort of just like a gut feel of what the market needed. We needed tools for clients. And then we needed the rest of the industry. Because it's no good in having one media owner programmatically connected. That's not appealing. It was meant to be across entire industries. And that's also, I think, where the heart started leaning more in into the human element. We tend to forget we were working under a lot of stress during that time. We started actually looking above ourselves and looking to the whole industry and how we can uplift everybody. And I think it's just sort of all the components just sort of fell into place. And nobody was leading in that space. And I guess I just sort of ran with it up until the point where in I still remember it was like the middle of twenty twenty one, programmatic adoption reached it adopted quite quickly in South Africa, but then it just stagnated. There weren't more media owners coming on board. I was like, no, this opportunity still needs to grow. But the only way we can get this opportunity to grow is that I need to actually step out of a media owner position and actually move into an aggregator space where I can grab everybody under my wing, show them how we can make money together, and literally just try to unite the entire continent, let alone South Africa. My aspirations have grown outside of South Africa across the entire continent. So that's sort of been how the general journey is. And as of today, it is about coaching teams to do better. It's again about how do we get agencies to do more? How can we service them better? How can they do better for their clients?
00:07:21 · Remi Du Preez, Kirsty Carlson
And how can we just those things that I wanted in 2009 in the out of home space, they are finally here. We could finally measure out of home the way I wish we could fifteen years ago when I jumped into the industry. [00:07:33] S1: Thank you so much, Remi. And thank you for just telling us that journey and just the driving force of wanting to be able to bring measurement and data to the out of home space and through the digital out of home space. What I wanted to ask you is for those listeners of our podcast that don't really understand programmatic digital out of home, could you just give a brief explanation of that to those before we deep dive into some more questions?
00:07:55 · Remi Du Preez
[00:07:55] S3: Yeah, sure. Now, it's quite funny because there's if you ask different markets and different people, you're actually going get up with a whole bunch of different kinds of answers. And I guess the only way to sort of answer programmatic in the out of home space is to sort of see the way we used to do out of home and still do, which is loop based buying. How many spots in the loop? How are we measuring? How many ads are we actually playing? And the key fundamental area from a programmatic standpoint is that a client has the entire control of what they can buy. They can choose at what time of day they want to serve those ads. It is done on an impressions based buying. So we are no longer counting how many ads are being served. Instead, we are looking at how many people are potentially or actually exposed to the ad. And then you can start going a little bit more technical in terms of the tools and text to become a little bit more granular on serving certain audiences in near real time. It is mirroring to some degree what the internet world is very much about targeted advertising at scale and at the buyer's control.
00:08:58 · Kirsty Carlson
[00:08:58] S1: Thanks, Remi. And actually, as we're speaking about this, I wanted to ask you, given where we've come from and where we are now, do you still feel that there's an education job that needs to be done across the industry and not just in South Africa, across the rest of Africa when it comes to programmatic digital out of home? Do you feel that there's a common understanding? Or is there still that education job both for media owners and agencies?
00:09:18 · Remi Du Preez
[00:09:18] S3: So there's definitely and that's actually a really nice question. I got quite a lot of angles to ponder on. Look, as far as South Africa is concerned, from a media owner front, I think the media owners generally understand it. Where they kind of lack is you're finding a lot of outer layers, like not really sure how to get connected. I mean, that's like a whole level of software and hardware integrations that we're trying to do that work to try to standardize the industry. I do notice within agencies so every agency has its own kind of setup. And I've seen some agencies excel. Like, they do quite well. And then I see some guys that are still fumbling. They're not really sure how to do change management, I would say, effectively manage teams, along with all the software and items that you need. And I think one of the key things on agency side we've seen, it's like you've got the digital team, and then you get the out of home team. And guys don't really know who's meant to be responsible for these things. Now, with a media owner cap on, the media owners want to play in the digital money because it's big. But within the agency space, it's still very much siloed of you have your out of own planners who value is positioned as very differently to the digital strategists. And I think that we're teasing that. We're aggravating that situation because we want media agencies to think a little bit differently. Even looking at the old traditional way of how out of home is built, or issue the way agencies present value. I think we need to start getting away from using discounts as the key metric for value. End of the day, clients are in the market to try to sell their product. And out of home needs to be aligned with that. If a digital is, The guys in the performance spaces are measured on how many clients are you getting to my website buying my goods. And yes, in the measurement space in out of home, it is difficult. But it's not impossible. And I think those if we can start merging those two mindsets, then we can definitely media agencies will have more value ultimately to move to clients.
00:11:15 · Kirsty Carlson
[00:11:15] S1: I have a lot of these conversations or having a lot of these conversations recently around programmatic design of home across the continent with media owners and with the likes of BroadSign, moving walls and so on. And yes, believe that there is an education job, but it's more of just helping them understand what the needs are from a tech point of view. Obviously the to take the software, but also helping them understand that it's not a loss of budget or a loss of spend that they'll be getting. And how can they actually move with the tide and understand the bigger picture. But what is nice is that we're not at a zero mark with the rest of Africa. Actually through BroadSign, their latest inventory update that they gave me was around eight markets now. So outside of South Africa, which is really exciting. Yes, majority is driven through Prime Media, but that still shows that there is movement. It's in its infant stages, but there's a lot more to growth and ground to cover, but still really, really exciting. So yes, I completely second with you. There's definitely this education job that I think as agencies and particularly people in these roles doing rest of Africa media and working with these media owners, it's also part of our responsibilities to be having those conversations with our media owners and our partners across the continent. And explaining programmatic digital out of home and why our clients are actually looking for it and why they're speaking about it and requesting it for markets outside of South Africa. So I think, yeah, that's definitely something I resonate with you. Then I think the other thing I wanted to speak around was where are you seeing now? Where are you seeing the budgets coming from to cover programmatic digital out of home? Are you seeing, I know you were mentioning that separation between digital and out of home, particularly in agencies where it's quite isolated. Where are you seeing those budgets come from? Are you seeing them more so, more percent, a higher percentage of them coming through from the digital team that's covering programmatic buys? Or are you seeing that from the out of home team?