Dentsu Australia partners with thorndyke for DOOH verification

SYDNEY, AU – JULY 16, 2021 – thorndyke pty ltd, a global leader in verifying DOOH media, today announced a partnership with Dentsu Australia to independently verify its Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH) activity across all Dentsu agencies for the Australian market.

Programmatic DOOH has been a key talking point over the past 12 months, driving digitisation across OOH as the demand for more transparency across the channel increases.

Dentsu ran a competitive request for proposal (RFP), looking closely at all vendors in market and ultimately chose thorndyke as its preferred vendor.

The team behind thorndyke are all ex-Integral Ad Science and have a strong track record in verification and measurement. The thorndyke verification platform helps agency teams and the media owners with real-time insights into delivery issues that may have otherwise gone undetected, allowing these to be resolved faster.

Emma Hegg, head of outdoor for Dentsu said: “We are very excited to partner with thorndyke, as we continue to navigate the evolving DOOH landscape on behalf of our clients.

“The last 12-18 months has seen a huge demand from advertisers to have more transparency in OOH and as a result, a number of verification providers have entered the market. For Dentsu, our objective was to not only ensure independent verification for our clients, but also to partner with a provider whose technology was scalable for the future.”

Jason Cooper, MD of thorndyke added: “We’re delighted to have been selected to partner with Dentsu. We’re looking forward to working with everyone across the group and providing essential verification for DOOH campaigns. DOOH is probably the last digital medium to be verified.

“This deal gives DOOH measurement parity against other digital environments: independent verification that delivers exposure, share of voice and time-in-view, which are table stakes in digital today.”

Dentsu Australia is thorndyke’s third major deal in Australia alongside Publicis & Cartology.

The Future of DOOH in ANZ

Digital out-of-home has gone through some significant changes over the past few years. This has presented not only opportunities but challenges for advertisers.

Listen to our industry experts, Jessica Miles, Country Manager AU, Laura Wall, Head of Programmatic at Shopper Media Group, Phoebe Chan, Operations Director, Performance at Publicis Media and Jason Cooper, Founder and MD of Thorndyke as they discuss how advertisers can navigate their way through DOOH and what lies ahead for the ANZ market.

thorndyke featured in oOh!media Pulse Report

oOh!media produces a monthly ‘Pulse Report’ that is shared with their customers and keeps them updated of all the latest data and trends. In September 2021, thorndyke was interviewed for their ‘Future of OOH Planning & Buying’ special. Jason Cooper spoke about the trends in verification and measurement in DOOH:

The time for DOOHs Renaissance

According to Statistica outdoor is one of the few mediums expected to grow in the next 3 years. The outlook is positive, however the growth isn’t by any means explosive or meteoric. But this the time is ripe for this medium to experience a renaissance especially when digital is facing many issues.

On paper DOOH should be raking in the dollars from the digital budgets that are fraught with issues such as privacy (GDPR/CCPA anyone?) and the forthcoming deprecation of the cookie in Chrome (goodbye uniques, reach & frequency.. hello context.) Talk to any digital media buyer who’s having to deal with brand safety, fraud and viewability issues (anything 50% + viewability is perceived as good). DOOH should be a breath of fresh – except that growth is modest and the digital and DOOH agency buyers for the same client, aren’t even in the same room. But the wider, macro issue with DOOH is a lack of independent measurement.

The digital buyer has had access to a plethora of tools for tracking measurement and ROI; ad servers; publisher & agency side, verification pixels, audience measurement & more. But for the large part DOOH’s been a walled garden, a locked down environment that hasn’t allowed 3rd parties in. It’s an industry where the technology has been designed and built by the sell side, for the sell side with little to no input from the buyer. That in part has hampered investment in the medium. We talk about taking budget from the digital pot, but what tools does the digital buyer have to measure success in DOOH when they’ve always had – and expect, measurement tools at their fingertips?

Until we have independent 3rd party measurement as de facto (this includes verification, 3rd party ad serving..) in DOOH, the big digital budgets will struggle to justify the investment into an unmeasurable medium. This is something that was solved recently for mobile in-app. Arguably for in-app the challenge was harder – and it took a solid effort from the major verification vendors and the IAB Tech Lab, together with a handful of key publishers to agree on a solution. The Open Measurement Working Group was formed and developed an SDK that could be adopted to solve for amongst other things, viewability and transparency into the app environment. For DOOH media owners, the solution is even simpler – open up your firewalls and processes and embrace 3rd party measurement.

The good news is change is on the way. Here in Australia a few of the major agency groups have recently conducted a review of verification vendors solving for DOOH. Programmatic is also starting to move into this medium that will bring about change – Vistar have launched an office in the region. And global verification heavyweight Integral Ad Science are making moves into DOOH.

At a time when digital is fraught with issues, investment into DOOH should be an open goal – but let’s give the buyers the empirical, evidence based data that is independently measured.