What you need to know:

• Vistar Media is expanding its once digital-only OOH trading business in a bid to cover the entire market end-to-end with the acquisition of traditional outdoor media trading tech firm Adstruc.
• The platform launches in ANZ this month after 14 years in the US and will initially operate as a standalone offering under the Vistar banner. But the plan is to unite static and digital via a single DSP.
• It comes on the background of agency pressure for a more integrated solution to OOH trading as programmatic trading matures. After a dicey couple of years through the Covid pandemic, the channel has now well-exceed previous forecasts that it would "tap out" around 7 per cent of digital OOH spend. It’s now circa 10 per cent – and Vistar Media's APAC MD Ben Baker reckons that could triple.
• APAC solutions sales director Alex Waters says all major local OOH providers in ANZ are engaging in the Adstruc tech, with onboarding currently ongoing. Once complete, Vistar's DSP customers will be able to use the new software to automate the static OOH transaction process with vendors. Baker says three of the six major holdcos have already signed on, as well as indie agencies.
• Adstruc's arrival comes ahead of the long-awaited launch of the OMA's overhaul OOH measurement system, MOVE 2.0 next week, with the trading tech already primed to ingest the new data - but Waters says while agencies will ask for the moon on a stick, the firm must first "make sure that both sides are comfortable with the type of data that's been coming through" before anything is let loose in the wild.

Plenty has changed in Australia’s out of home sector since OOH adtech Vistar Media launched its programmatic demand side platform (DSP) in the market in 2018.

First, programmatic trading has managed to overcome early industry trepidation – and fears it could cannabilise existing outdoor growth - to cement itself in the mainstream of the digital OOH (DOOH) mix.

What was once called by some OOH leaders to “tap out” at no more than 7 per cent of total DOOH spend, per Vistar Media’s APAC managing director Ben Baker, has seen increasingly bullish forecasts each year since the sector’s post-Covid recovery.

“When we first started seven years ago, there was a huge education process that had to take shape on why programmatic out of home was required in a market like this, and why you would want to change something that was growing at double digits as out of home was during that period,” says Baker.  

It was the first of two major hurdles the new tech had to face in its early years. Just as things started moving, Covid lockdowns sent it back to square one – literally. “Covid hit hard, and we saw our revenue go to zero. Because the flexibility that you can afford your programmatic, everyone was able to cancel on a moment's notice – and they did,” Baker tells Mi3. But when the tough times ended, the groundwork had been laid for “expedited” growth as the return to the office bolstered the OOH sector.

Fast-forward and local digital outdoor giant QMS was anticipating programmatic to account for 10 per cent of sales by the end of 2024 (up from 2 per cent in mid-2023), and that trajectory tracks across the industry – and it’s now upwards of 30 per cent for some more digitally-focused players, per Baker. And he suggests there’s potential for more still.

"In the US, 30 per cent of all digital out of home revenue is programmatic. So there's definitely the ability to get to 30 per cent plus. When you're looking at Germany, they're much, much higher, around about 60 to 70 per cent."

Globally, telecom giant T-Mobile has clocked the opportunity, dropping US$600m to acquire Vistar Media in a deal that closed earlier this year. The ad tech business will be brought under T-Mobile’s Advertising Solutions unit , a customer data-powered play that drives upwards of US$1 billion in revenue via a network of both owned-and operated and partner screens across retail media, rideshare, mobile app and connected TV.

Answering calls for OOH convergence

The new frontier for programmatic – and the rest of the OOH industry – is convergence. Agencies, which make up "98 per cent" of Vistar Media's customers, have been calling for media owners to de-silo traditional and digital formats for some time as buying moves omnichannel.

“The planner plans end-to-end, regardless of channel,” PHD national investment head Joanna Barnes told the IAB and OMA’s Powering Digital Out of Home conference last year. “We don't have a digital planner on out-of-home – it's just one planner across a whole ecosystem.”

It mirrors global sentiment, per Baker, with Vistar Media’s 2024 acquisition of traditional OOH trading platform Adstruc heeding calls from both the demand and supply side to streamline transactions.

"It's not programmatic or traditional," he said. "Most campaigns, if I'm being honest – and most agencies will say [the same] – put 30 per cent of the revenue to digital and 70 per cent to traditional."

"So if you could now do the same advanced targeting, automation and measurement over the entire out-of-home buy... If you could put all your out-of-home buy on one map, not just your programmatic - and you can make out of home far easier to transact, that would be a huge win for all of us." 

He notes the plan had initially been to build something native, but the blown-out costs and timelines involved drove the ad tech business to look at what was already on the market. Adstruc – the “world’s first and largest traditional out-of-home planning tool” per Baker – had already achieved 100 per cent media owner adoption in the US after 14 years in the market. The tech rolled out under the Vistar Media banner in the US in late 2024 and is live in Australia and New Zealand as of this month. Baker says in Australia the Vistar DSP counts five of the six multinational advertising groups as clients, with three using the Adstruc tech. 

Alex Waters, who joined the business from OMG post-acquisition to drive APAC sales, clarifies the solution is more of a “workflow automation” tool than a DSP – i.e. centralising and automating the direct IO booking process.

Locally, it’s still early days. Waters said Vistar is currently in the process of onboarding media owners, with approval from all the major providers in ANZ. He’s careful to emphasise that Vistar isn’t taking the negotiation stage “away” from the media owner – and said so far they’ve so has minimal push back, unlike the squalls that blew up when Vistar first rolled out its programmatic tech.

“Those media owner sales reps still need to be out there working and doing their thing and selling their unique offering, which only they know best,” said Waters. “We're just trying to make sure that we're creating a platform and centralising that conversation in one platform, so that it's a speedier process, but also that the data is consistent, so that there's also other automation formulas that we can attach to agencies.”

“We can combine all their data into one Excel sheet – their media plans – and they can download and send that off straight to their client. They don't have to cut and paste and go through this Excel or this PowerPoint.”

Not there yet

While the sell is on streamlining traditional and digital transactions, the Adstruc platform is for now a separate offering from Vistar’s DOOH DSP, meaning there are still silos. But Baker said the medium-term plan is to integrate them.

In the short-term, measurement is a priority – and with the Outdoor Media Alliance's (OMA's) MOVE 2.0 system launching next week, Waters said there is intent to integrate the MOVE 2.0 API directly into the Adstruc solution.

Before that can happen, Vistar will have to "work out with the media owners what that looks like and what they're comfortable with us showing", he acknowledged. "Of course, agencies are going to want the world, but we want to just make sure that both sides are comfortable with the type of data that's been coming through."  

Aside from the new industry currency, Vistar is working on building out its currently "programmatic-heavy" internal measurements products–- like footfall attribution and brand uplift studies – into the realm of traditional OOH.

"We're going to introduce [metrics] that capture the entire brief, so you can do both traditional and static-based measurement alongside your programmatic and start to see the efficiencies that both of those two mediums play together."