If you’d have told me 10 years ago that I’d be doing more than just audience measurement in my research executive role at JCDecaux, I’d have laughed. But in the last decade, the Out-of-Home industry has been through a revolution in its data capabilities, with JCDecaux driving many of its notable innovations. I feel lucky to have been part of it.

For far too long, Out-of-Home media has been planned in a silo, particularly from an audience perspective. The full customer journey and how people engage with every touchpoint has never been truly understood. It’s safe to say every brand today accumulates an enormous amount of information about their customers – online purchases and browsing habits, application downloads, BVOD behaviour, for example – but very few brands connect this data with the physical world and what people are doing outside.

In reality, people don’t just see a billboard or bus ad in isolation to everything else they come into contact with every day. JCDecaux’s data strategy is to blend the on and offline worlds together and break down this silo. Marry up all the digital information collected about audience segments and understand how they behave outside in the real world once they close the laptop and put their device down.

Sometimes by looking backwards, we can better understand how far we have come.

Embracing insights

When I started at JCDecaux in 2012, my sole job was to look after audience measurement. We used Excel spreadsheets to understand which package to sell to clients – the size of the audience was the principle, and pretty much only, focus.

We gradually started to overlay insights from standardised industry tools with how people interacted with Out-of-Home, but it wasn’t until a few years later that our real data play began.

That was in 2015, when JCDecaux became the first Out-of-Home media owner in Australia to have our own bespoke research panel. The panel (The Pigeon Project) gave, and continues to give, unprecedented data and insights. After this, our data journey escalated exponentially.

In the same year we introduced our first geospatial tool, JCDecaux ORBIT. For the first time, we could look at audiences geospatially and make better asset recommendations based on proximity, audience affinity, propensities and drive-time.

Transactional data changed the game

Our data capabilities kept evolving, but in 2017 we realised we needed a formal data strategy and to dive head-first into incorporating larger data sets into our thinking and propositions to clients. Many enterprises, including the wider advertising industry, were undergoing rapid digital transformation and we needed to follow suit when it came to targeting and data opportunities.

Buying transactional data for the first time was a game-changer – both professionally and personally. I will never forget the day I walked into our IT department to tell them we had bought six million rows of data and weren’t entirely sure what do with it!

Unsurprisingly, we had to become really data savvy – really fast. For me, it meant learning data science in the evenings and studying how modelling works so we could hire the right people and use the right resources to make sense of it all. As daunting as it was, we were lucky that the data came in a very unpublished form, so it allowed us to customise an insights portal to understand audiences quickly and easily.

We built our own in-house tool, a query engine for transaction data to be easily accessed and turned into actionable insights.  We used JCDecaux ORBIT as our primary behavioural insights and strategy tool. It was the foundational innovation for our subsequent market-leading data solutions.

Acquisition ushered in innovation

In 2018 JCDecaux acquired APN Outdoor, which triggered our next wave of data innovation, as we were tasked with integrating our twin capabilities to make as sophisticated a proposition as possible.

I realised the way to do that was to build something completely new. The acquisition meant JCDecaux now had an increased network of solutions to deliver to clients. The largest change was how we sold this portfolio. While we used to be a business that sold sets of locations in networks, we were now selling individual sites (hello Large Format billboards), so a whole new strategy was required.

In the first instance, we made this specific to Large Format, stitching the geolocation data of each site to audience transactions and quickly developed a new tool (called JCDecaux UNIVERSE). This became not just a visualisation platform of where our assets were located, but a tool to help us understand how to make campaigns easier and smarter, by combining location, proximity and routes to what we knew about our audiences – where they spent money, lived, worked and, importantly, their likelihood to be exposed to our locations. Crucially, it meant we were able to map out assets specific to a certain journey to maximise audience potential and assess ideal campaign solutions for clients.

Lockdown accelerated innovation

As the saying goes, “everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face” and the unprecedented lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were no exception. However, in this instance it served to accelerate and strengthen our data strategy, as we were able to invest the time in building a keener understanding of audiences by connecting the digital and offline worlds.

We ramped up our use of mobility data to understand how to bring Out-of-Home and the digital ecosystem closer together. This data became a way for us to understand audience movements and the foundational data source that allowed us to create a solution fuelling our Adobe Audience Manager platform. Essentially, we are building our own first-party data equivalent of eight million plus unique devices.

What’s next?

When I think about the last 10 years at JCDecaux, I see it as an inverted pyramid. We started with audience measurement, then our capabilities began to build and get wider from there – we’re on course to add several more layers over the coming months.

On the immediate agenda is to work much more closely with clients and agencies and explore how our data and their data can be used together to create more effective omnichannel campaigns.

We will investigate new technologies to understand what actions people take after viewing an Out-of-Home ad. Did they go online and engage with the product? Did they become a loyal member of an organisation? Did they shop in store? This will help improve attribution and better understand the role that Out-of-Home plays in delivering an effective campaign.

This is the kind of thing that genuinely excites me. I’ve seen just how far JCDecaux, and our industry, have travelled on our data evolution. Although Out-of-Home will always remain a mass medium, I believe it will be the ability to follow the entire customer journey and bring together the on and offline worlds, that will be a key differentiator for our industry.

One thing’s for sure, our data pyramid is going to get a whole lot bigger this decade.