oOh!media took over the Overseas Passenger Cruise Terminal in Sydney’s Circular Quay last night for a swish if short, upfront session spruiking its expanded digital-first and premium inventory across Sydney and Melbourne, growing retail media sophistication and ability to act smarter, faster and harder.
CEO Cathy O’Connor and the rest of the oOh! team took to the stage for a presentation on five key media megatrends facing the industry and that oOh! is straddling. These are retail media, audience fragmentation, a shift to outcomes, the need for scale and — of course — the AI revolution.
Premium Locations & Consumers, or, “People”
Chief among the announcements from oOh! were network expansions. oOh! now controls the Waverley Council in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. If you’re not from Sydney, these are where the flat white-sipping sunrise beach yoga types live. In fact, oOh! said that it now controls 100 per cent of the OOH assets close to where Sydney’s most affluent residents live.
“We saw with the hypothetical day in the life that consumers, otherwise known as people, are extremely busy and it’s getting harder to get their attention,” said Josh Gurgiel, head of Poly, oOh!’s creative studio.
It is also expanding its presence in Sydney’s Northern Beaches with 293 bus shelters from Manly to Palm Beach. oOh! will add a further 13 large format digital sites as part of the Eastlink Motorway contract in Melbourne and it’s also adding Melbourne’s forthcoming Metro to its new Sydney Metro contract.
“It was a nice way to kick [upfronts season] off — on a Wednesday, not too heavy, 5pm start time and an hour presentation, which was fabulous,” Daniela Rocchi, head of partnerships Sydney at Initiative, told B&T.
For Rocchi, oOh! having its Outfronts right on the doorstep of Sydney Harbour was apt. For her, its domination of premium spaces makes for a compelling proposition.
“I can see where they’re wanting to take their brand and they want to fit in that premium space. It felt for a long time that oOh! had so many assets but in so many locations. They might have a panel here, but it isn’t the best panel. It feels like they’re starting to really think about and clean up their product to act as a premium supplier to get on top of the likes of QMS, for example, with its City of Sydney contract being very premium,” she said.
“If you look at [oOh!’s] new rail network, it’s beautiful. There’s nothing like it in Sydney… They’re winning Waverley and the Northern Beaches. The scale of the premium network is really good and they want to own it, you can see it. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
However, Chris Walton, managing director, Sydney, at Nunn Media, saw the event as oOh! still playing catch up.
“They can say they’ve got all this stuff. But I’m talking about how they engage with the market, how they present themselves to the market, how they trade with the market and work with the market. They needed to close that gap on some of their competitors, at least in Sydney, specifically with QMS and JCDecaux. This went a way to doing that. They certainly talked a very good talk,” he told B&T.
Tech-First, Fleet-Footedness
Towards the end of the presentation, almost flying under the radar for some media buyers (and perhaps B&T staffers, too) already thinking of the bar, Cassandra Cameron, oOh!’s group director of strategy, said that the business had listened to the market.
“You’ve told us that you want us to be easier to do business with and we’re investing heavily in advanced technologies, including AI, to streamline our end-to-end campaign process to deliver you a better campaign experience,” she said.
Cameron said that it was developing machine learning models, along with “predictive analytics tools to supercharge our proprietary planning platforms,” as well as a “plethora” of additional data sources to deliver “data-driven, highly targeted and customised advertising solutions at speed”.
Her colleague Andrew Every, the company’s chief strategy and transformation officer, added that over the coming months oOh! would be making its brief response times “significantly faster” with the help of AI.
Those playing buzzword bingo in the audience had pretty much full cards by the end of the spiel.
“Call me cynical, but you don’t need AI to pick up a phone, you don’t need AI to respond to an email… If I were them, I would put a lot of focus on how they service the market,” said Walton.
“Another trend I would have added, maybe not a megatrend but certainly an operational trend, is what I call the tacticalisation of the market. It’s short-term and tactical, there isn’t a lot of visibility. But that’s how business is being done… It’s not an ideal situation and it’s not good for long-term brand building. But it’s the situation that we’re in. Therefore, I’d be making sure that I’m the most accessible, responsive, dynamically moving outdoor supplier and media owner that there is. In Sydney, that should be a special focus.”
Rocchi, meanwhile, said that AI was set to, once again, be a buzzword at the industry’s upfronts this year. However, in her mind oOh! still needs to speed up its transactions.
“Everyone’s talking AI… You just need to see the results from it. They didn’t really elaborate on what they are doing. It’s pretty easy to implement AI in the backend. A lot of businesses should already be using it to make things more efficient and faster… A lot of the comments around it come from slow transactions, so making their transactions with agencies a lot quicker and more efficient [would be beneficial],” she said.
Her Name is reo & She Dances in the Stores
oOh! also announced that its reooh retail media arm would be rebranded to reo — chiefly to avoid anyone pronouncing it “re—oooh” rather than pronouncing it like “Rio”, as we should have.
Neil Ackland, oOh!’s chief content, marketing and creative officer, said that in 10 months since it announced its first two reo partners, it had been busy listening to feedback and improving the omnichannel experience.
“Today, I’m excited to announce that reo is now offering full sales monetisation for retailers across their entire media ecosystem. Our goal is to enable you to buy across multiple retail media networks simply and easily.”
Bel Harper, oOh!’s executive group director of product strategy, meanwhile, took the chance to dispel some “myths” about retail media — chiefly that new entrants to the market (Cartology, Westfield, VMO) had a focus on “outdated” metrics.
Using Location IQ’s 2024 iQ Provision Benchmarks report, Harper showed that while it lagged behind VMO and Cartology in terms of the number of retail centres, it far exceeded them in retail coverage and footfall, and its panels were in shops that amassed nearly $20 billion more in spend than closest competitor Cartology.
“I’ve seen it all before,” said Rocchi. “Retail is another buzzword, right, and it’s big and growing. The slide showed that they were number one in all areas… but then what does that mean? What does it mean for me? What does that mean for my clients? OK, it’s great that you’ve got scale, I get it, it’s good for coverage.
“But they should really be talking it up. I’ve got a ton of clients here at Initiative that are retail clients and it’s very important to us to understand what’s happening in that space. We utilise oOh!media and their retail assets frequently. So, yeah, it’d be good to see what they’re doing in the space and how they’re developing it.”
Let’s see what the next year holds.
On the whole, though, oOh!’s Outfronts were a success, if not spectacular.
