Amsterdam’s got extensive canals, beautiful architecture, and some of the tallest people you’ll ever meet. When it comes to digital signage, it’s also home to some of the most forward-thinking networks around.
From impressive installations to early adoption and exploitation of programmatic DOOH transactions, there’s a lot to admire in the way Amsterdam, and the Netherlands more generally, has adopted DOOH.
With everyone headed to Amsterdam to take part in ISE this week, we thought we’d take the occasion to share some of our favourite examples here.
Some of the installations we love
Amsterdam Central Station screens (Exterion Media)
About 250,000 people pass through Amsterdam Central station every day, making use of one of the city’s many trams, buses, ferries, or trains to get around the city. If you find yourself passing through this location, keep your eye out for some of Exterion Media’s screens.
About 70” in size, these screens put big, bright advertising right at eye level throughout the station. Supporting full motion, they’re top targets for brands hoping to connect with the huge number of passengers the station sees each day.
Highway billboards (Interbest)
Amsterdam is probably best known for its trams, bikes, and ferries, but if you’re the kind of person who drives into the city, you might admire some of the cool roadside billboards along its highways. Geeks that we are, we’re fans of the aspect ratio on the Interbest screens, and North American visitors might also be struck by the low height of the screens as compared to billboards back home.
The IJ “Giant Flow” screen, Amsterdam Central Station (Ngage Media)
We’re double-dipping on Central Station, but we think there’s good reason for that. The station’s main entrance, known as IJ Hall, is home to a massive and extremely impressive screen operated by Ngage Media. Here, viewers can see a mix of advertising and beautiful images of city sights. It’s an impressive welcome for new arrivals to the city, and one of our favourite DOOH installations in Amsterdam.
Public transportation screens (CS Digital Media)
Digital signage and public transportation are frequently paired, but not always this beautifully. CS Digital Media’s screens, which can be found in Amsterdam’s metro system and, yes, also in Central Station, are bright and bring ads to stunning life the way good screens should. That’s not the main reason we love them, though. Where so many screens look generically screenish, these ones have a beautiful, simple design that makes them stand out all on their own, never mind what they’re playing. It’s rare that smaller screens catch our eye quite like these ones do.
Some of our favourite programmatic campaigns from the Netherlands
For a little while now, we’ve been noticing that the Netherlands has been ahead of the pack when it comes to programmatic DOOH. Networks are throwing their support behind it, creative teams are coming up with great programmatic campaigns, and we can’t get enough. Here are a few of our favourite programmatic DOOH campaigns from the Netherlands.
The Pepsi MAX Challenge
Pepsi wanted to reinvent its Pepsi challenge for 2018 and extend the reach of its campaign beyond the head-to-head soda showdown between Pepsi Max and its biggest rival. The solution: Pepsi incorporated programmatic DOOH to retarget participants with ads later on. The campaign was a hit, and allowed PepsiCo to maximize results without their having to spend huge amounts.
XITE’s Multichannel DOOH & Mobile Festival Campaign
XITE is the Netherlands’ home for music videos and the people who love them, and it wanted to build on that connection by reaching music festival attendees across the country. With programmatic DOOH and mobile, the brand was able to effectively and affordably deliver a multichannel campaign that reached 250,000 festival-goers over the course of the summer.
Peugeot drove stronger sales with roadside billboards
One of the great strengths of programmatic DOOH is the way it helps target media spend to those moments where each dollar will have the biggest effect. In 2018, Peugeot ran a programmatic campaign in the Netherlands that exemplified that idea. It delivered DOOH ads for corporate minivans only when small and medium-sized business owners were most likely to be on the road. It was a flexible, intelligent solution that helped the company reach more of its audience than it would have with a typical DOOH campaign.
If you’ll be in Amsterdam for ISE this week, be sure to stop by booth #8-G280 to meet the Broadsign team and talk DOOH and digital signage!
