Vertical Impression is an elevator advertising network with a story like no other. The co-founders were in class together at university when one of them had their car towed for missing a notice that was posted on the building’s bulletin board. The experience led them to question if there was a way to improve how buildings communicate with tenants. From there, the idea of putting screens in elevators to display important, targeted messaging was created.
Today, Vertical Impression is the largest residential elevator network in Canada with over 1700 screens across 30 major markets. With rapid growth in Quebec, Southwestern Ontario, and across Canada’s east coast, the company is showing no signs of slowing down as they project a network of over 2000 screens by the end of the year.
We sat down with Nicolette Leonardis, Vice President and Co-founder of Vertical Impression, to get her insights on the role place-based DOOH has on reaching the right audience at the right time with contextual messaging.
How digital marketers can adopt DOOH in their campaigns
What sets Vertical Impression apart from other out-of-home networks is the fact that its screens are powered by privacy-by-design certified AI, enabling ads to be served in real-time based on who’s looking at screens or riding in an elevator. This provides valuable information by allowing the company to capture first-party data on their audience’s engagement.
There are a lot of metrics that can be acquired when running a digital campaign. Marketers often prefer digital advertising thanks to its flexibility, targeting, and measurement capabilities, but OOH is quickly becoming a more popular channel as technology advances. The ability to purchase OOH programmatically is enabling more and more marketers to include it in their strategies, but as Nicolette explains, there’s still a lot of education missing to get advertisers to look at OOH as a strong data capturing method:
DOOH as a location-based performance channel
According to Nicolette, marketers who include OOH in their campaigns should shift their focus towards measuring actual engagement over exclusively looking at impressions. Going beyond measuring how many people saw your ad to really evaluate the quality of an impression is important in understanding if audiences can recall what they saw.
For Nicolette, large format out-of-home messaging is the best route to take if a marketer’s goal is to drive mass reach and impact. For a more targeted approach, or to reach more segmented audiences, indoor ad space like elevator screens should be considered. Check out what she has to say:
The evolution and future of DOOH
Thanks to increasingly sophisticated and innovative advertising technology, DOOH has evolved extensively in the past 5 years and will continue to do so in the future. With the looming elimination of third-party cookies, digital marketers will have less data available to them than they’re used to, amplifying the importance of capturing contextual data through OOH channels.
We’d like to thank Nicolette for taking the time to chat OOH with us.
To watch the complete interview, click here.
Want to learn more about incorporating DOOH into your next omnichannel campaign? Check out our eBook The Media Buyer’s Guide to Programmatic Digital-Out-of-Home.
