Pattison Outdoor Advertising is changing with the weather.
The company has completed the rollout of its proprietary smartAD advertising technology—a feature of its 2,500 interior signs for several years—to its 207 digital exterior products.
The rollout began in March and was completed in mid-June, said Ian Gadsby, vice-president, digital technology for Pattison in Toronto.
The technology gives advertisers the ability to update ads on Pattison’s exterior digital posters and spectaculars according to environmental factors such as the weather, date or time of day, or in response to market conditions.
“It provides context in a world of clutter,” said Gadsby. “It’s not just about putting up tomorrow’s creative a little bit faster, it’s about reacting in real-time to things that are happening—maybe a sporting event, maybe the weather.”
Coca-Cola is one of the advertisers utilizing the smartAD technology, with ads for its Simply Lemonade product appearing only when the temperature reaches 25 degrees Celsius. (Toronto’s unseasonably cool summer has added an unforeseen layer of complexity to the campaign, said Gadsby.)
While such functionality did exist on a limited basis before the introduction of smartAD, Gadsby said the technology adds a combination of speed and refinement to the process.
“A lot of [out-of-home advertising] is still done in a JPEG world,” he said. “We can change things quickly, but it requires a lot of production work and workflows are often not as fast as some clients need.”
Gadsby said advertisers are beginning to treat digital out-of-home as a dynamic medium capable of reacting to external factors, rather than like its print-based predecessor.
“Out of home is still very much a print industry, so in the past digital has been [nothing more than] a digital version of a static product,” he said. “It’s like thinking about a billboard or a subway screen as an extension of the internet. Rather than a digital version of a paper billboard, think of it as a very large banner ad. It has all the functionality of the internet space in a public environment.”
Pattison does charge advertisers a small upfront production fee for the smartAD service because it requires some additional coding, but there is no premium for advertisers to utilize its capabilities. “We consider it part of why you should choose Pattison,” said Gadsby.
