Anna Bager, OAAA

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The Outdoor Advertising Association of America represents and guides the interests and activities of some 850 member organizations across the US, including the biggest media companies, brands that do a lot of outdoor, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers.

That's billboard, of course, but also the other formats for advertising, from transit shelters to place-based media networks on TVs in venues like bars, clinics and workout studios

The OAAA has been around since 1891, and these days is seeing rapid growth for the medium, especially on the digital side. If they're not already doing digital, most OAAA members are going down that path and also adopting technologies like AI.

I had a really good chat, about a bunch of things, with Anna Bager - the association's President and CEO.

We get into the state of the medium, which is particularly busy because of ALL the money flowing into political advertising. We also touch on issues like a need to simplify the planning, buying and distribution ecosystem, and the OAAA's perspective and activity around something that's huge in other regions like Europe - sustainability.

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TRANSCRIPT

Anna, thank you for joining me. This is going to be a simple question to start out with, but can you tell me what the OAAA does and why it exists? 

Anna Bager: Absolutely, so we are the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and we are what I would call a classic trade association. We focus on two things. We want to protect the industry and we want to grow the industry. So on the protection front, we have a pretty big government affairs unit. We do state and federal lobbying on things that really matter to the industry, such as the First Amendment, anything real estate, infrastructure, and the Highway Beautification Act, which controls the number of signs or at least roadside that you can have in the US and privacy is another area that we're increasingly interested in privacy and data regulation. Keeping an eye on what's happening, making sure that there are no laws that don't work well for the industry that is being passed or hopefully not, and, also looking for opportunities, where we can, as an industry where we can maybe benefit from some of the legislation and more things that are happening in DC or state level that can work well for the industry. 

So that's one part lobbying and government affairs and a lot of legal operations, and then the other part is the growth side, and for that, we do research on behalf of the industry. We do a lot of promotion of the industry at our own events or other events. We're out there talking to advertisers and brands about why they should be. Spending more money, and investing more out-of-home, and then we create guidelines, standards, and frameworks that help the industry operate better and make it easier to buy and sell. I think that sums it up. 

It’s a member organization? 

Anna Bager: It's a member organization. We are the largest out-of-home association, I think, in the world, actually. We have probably close to 800 members and pretty much everyone who is in the out-of-home industry in the US and some other international members. 

So this would be Lamar all the way down to an almost hyper-local kind of media owner?

Anna Bager: It would definitely be but it could also be a gas station TV. It could be a cinema. It could be Airports and transit, so we cover it all. It's not just the roadside, it's all the different formats. 

Is there a cutoff? I'm curious about some of what they call faster consumer TV networks like Atmosphere and Loop and so on that are in bars and it's a streaming app.

Anna Bager: They are members too.

Okay, so where would you cut it off? 

Anna Bager: I don't cut it off. I think we welcome anyone as a member if they're in out-of-home advertising, which is, we're called out-of-home, but if I had been the one to take a pick, I probably would have called it location-based media because that's really what we are, right? Wherever there is signage or any type of ad that's there because of the location, and the context that is there it seems to be a good place to reach consumers or business people because they're there at that time and they might be receptive to a message.

So anyone who's in that could be retail media networks. It could be retail organizations, could be place-based. It could be a point of care, like doctor's offices, but we typically don't have those companies as members, but they could be. Also, one thing that I think is common for most of our members is that we're one too many advertisers. We're not targeting individuals so it can be seen by many. So anyone who's doing that could be a member of the OAAA. 

You mentioned retail media networks. I was going to ask about that later, let's get into it. You mentioned it. I'm curious because of the rise of that and how you're starting to see more and more activity around the in-store piece of it and not just the online and mobile parts. Are they different budgets? 

Anna Bager: I think so. I think it depends. It's certainly a growth opportunity for the industry. Retail in general is taking place in a store, a lot of it online, but you have to get people there or you have to get them interested. You also may want to amplify a message before they're in the store, you want to serve them an offer and that's where we can come in. 

The retail media networks themselves, buy a lot of media also on behalf of their advertisers. So it could be a Coca-Cola, right? They buy media for them. I think that out-of-home is a natural part of media that you should buy to create the most bang for the buck for a company, it's not just in the stores, it's everything around and creates an audience extension, et cetera. So there might be other budgets. It's definitely a different type of buyer, but I think we're uniquely positioned and I think we play an important role in the world of retail media, reaching consumers on the go or even at home. 

I think what these networks have can be very useful, especially now that out-of-home has become more digital and you can increasingly use data and target in a very different way and also change out messages really fast. These guys have first-party data, from loyalty programs or consumers basically leaning in and allowing them to use their data and the ability to then use that data on the knowledge of where consumers might be or on the go, or, the interest they might have and use contextual and location-based advertising makes it just so much better. I think it's a great match. The ability to use the data to do that. 

So what's the state of being out-of-home at this point? In your keynote, which I think was for your annual conference, you talked about double-digit growth. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I mean out-of-home has had an interesting journey since the pandemic. Before that, we were growing very steadily every year, then obviously we had a dip in the pandemic and then we had an amazing year in 2022, where I think out-of-home were faster than any other ad media. And since then, it's been steadily going up. This year is particularly interesting. There's a lot going on. We have an election that's coming up that's driving a lot of ad dollars and also not just ad dollars into out-of-home, but also into other media where other brands then look for a positioning somewhere else. So there's just a lot of movement in the market right now.

It’s an economy that hopefully will start growing again. So it's been a good year. We keep growing and I think next year is going to be hopefully even better than this year. 

And does digital now represent the overall kind of installed base and also a percentage of overall revenue?

Anna Bager: Digital is interesting. So I think it's probably around 30 percent of all the installed base, but it's close to half of the revenue and most of the growth is coming from digital, so definitely an area that the industry is investing in and I want to keep moving forward. 

Is it harder and harder to sell static?

Anna Bager: No, I don't think so. I think it's just really easy to sell digital. I think you can still sell static. Static has a lot of benefits too. You have a message up for a very long time, right? It's very sturdy and you know that it works and then again, you put a billboard up, for example, it's going to be there for 30 or more days. So It's the same message that just is engraved in the sense of a little bit of a mini landmark, right? So static works really well too and for certain types of advertisers. It's absolutely key. But obviously digital has the ability to switch out content fast, use data, and do some interesting creative executions too because it's a huge growth area for us.

We talked about retail media before the ability, you can do that with static too, and you can get static up fast today, but the ability to include out-of-home in more of an omnichannel media mix, it's far greater over digital because it's just there. You can just kind of plug it in.

Is efficiency the big attraction? The fact that you can book something very rapidly. 

Anna Bager: For digital? It all depends on the goals of the advertiser. Obviously, to be able to get a message up really fast is important. Also, to be able to switch out a message really fast, if you need to, is important. The ability to again, be able to use data. If it's raining or if it's sunshine or if there's a specific event going on that day or in that place or in that moment, you can use that knowledge to put up better ads, but it's also sometimes, the creative opportunities you have with digital can allow you to do really cool things. Anything spectacular and amorphic, brands love that, right? That's mostly digital. So there are just so many different things you can do. It all depends on what the advertiser wants to achieve. 

You mentioned anamorphic, the idea of 3D visual illusions, is that kind of the bright shiny object, and there's a bright shiny object every 2-3 years that comes along and the old object gets abandoned?

Anna Bager: I don't think so. Out-of-home is so many different things. Some call it iconic, some call it spectacular. Within that category, definitely it's the anamorphic or things like the Sphere. I think that's just a different part of being out-of-home, which I think will always be very interesting to brands who want to make a big mark.

Clearly, you can get a lot of earned media through great executions because It's very socially shareable and you can give it global legs, it's done really well. So I think that's one type of out-of-home. I don't think it's a shiny object, even though it is a shiny object. I think it's just something that brands are very interested in right now, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there are other types of digital boards or signage, and not just roadside stuff, that works really well for brands in certain ways. I think the power of our industry is that we can reach pretty much everyone at any point in time, anywhere, right? And it doesn't really matter if that's static digital or anamorphic. It's just the reach that we have that then, through social media and other channels creates a sort of an interactive space too. That's not just a physical space. The power of the medium is the reach and it doesn't really matter what type of signage it is, I think. 

It's interesting with the anamorphic stuff, I've seen it in person, and I've seen tons of videos around it. Most of it's not very good. It's something spinning or pushing out of a screen and who cares, and it begs the larger question, when I drive around in a big city and I see a lot of digital out-of-home billboards, I think most of the creative isn't very good. There's too much on there, and I just find it weird for an established medium that so many creatives just don't get it.

Anna Bager: Out-of-home is probably the most prestigious thing you can do as a creative if you want to go for those really big campaigns, but it's also really hard and that's why it's so prestigious. Less is more. Simplicity works really well. Don’t overdo it. Think it through. But it's an art form.

I think there's a lot of bad creative but there's also some really amazing creative. The interesting thing is you remember both. So from my perspective, and it doesn't necessarily take away from your opinion of the brand if you don't think the ad is great. You still remember and you see it and you register and you might go and buy the product.

But obviously, I think, I wish everyone did better, because there's so much you can do with out-of-home because you own the whole campus, it's all yours to do something with, there's nothing but a location surrounding it, you can do really cool things, but, yeah, there's good and there's bad, but like I said, you still remember it, and I think that's the real key point, but I think with out-of-home market, just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should, and I think, I agree with you, but it's very subjective, what you like, obviously. But with that type of signage, still a lot of experimentation, I think, on let's do something really cool, and then does it really make sense or does it have a connection to the product? Maybe not, but yeah. 

Yeah. I suppose it's like any advertising. There's really great national advertising and big-budget campaigns, but there's a whole bunch of more local and even hyperlocal ads and they're not produced by big agencies with top-tier creatives.

I was in a rental car recently driving through Toronto on the 401, so 401 is slow, so you got lots of time to look at billboards, and I still couldn't absorb everything on some of these because there was just so much stuff trying to be jammed in there. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. You have to think about that. You have to think that the audience is going to have very little time to look at it, right? Unless there's a traffic jam. Therefore you have to make it so that they can see, they can register, they can get it. They also maybe can remember that one little thing that you want them to Google, it shouldn't be too much on them. I agree.

But I have to say that, and I just came back this morning from my, event that we did in Las Vegas where we had a lot of our members present, different interesting creative executions, and there were a lot of great local out-of-home. You don't have to be, like, one of the biggest creative agencies on Madison Avenue to create good content. There are a lot of locals out-of-home that play to them, it is very local, just knowing the audience. 

I'll give you one really cool example. There's a law firm called Morgan & Morgan and they are pretty much everywhere, they're big out-of-home buyers, you would consider that local advertising, even though they're in many parts of the country. I think this was last year, they took some of their billboards and put graffiti all over, the Morgan & Morgan information called Morgan & Morgan and what ended up happening was that they got so many calls. Where people said, Oh my God, your billboard has been vandalized. Are you aware? And people really paid attention to it to the point where they had to take them down because people couldn't get through. Because there are so many calls. If you're very smart about it and you're speaking to an audience that is there and feels a certain connection to it because it's local, you can do really cool things and I think there's great advertising on both sides and bad. 

Is the profile of media owners evolving? I asked because I used to think of media owners as just being the media companies, Mars and Patterson up in Canada and so on. But I have been hearing that property owners and commercial property owners are blocking and tackling big LED displays on the corners of their new builds or renovated builds, and then engaging a media company to sell their stuff. So they own the display as opposed to the media company leasing that space. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I don't know if that's more now than before I can speak to that. That's definitely a phenomenon, right? And you see not just in the U S that all over the world. If you own property and you're smart about it, if there's an ability to put up a sign there, of course, you should do it if it doesn't make the building uglier or cause problems in any other way, and I think we see more and more of that and then they usually use media companies to sell it for them because out-of-home is not that easy.

Yeah, I've been in this for 25 years, and I still remind people that advertising isn't as easy as you think it is. 

Anna Bager: No, it's supposed to look easy, but very hard. That's for sure, and there's a lot that goes into I think especially with out-of-home I am fairly new to the industry. I've been here five years. I come from the regular traditional digital media side, and it's fascinating, like the know-how location and real estate and just like how to best leverage the space that you have, that this industry has, that is not the same in other places, even though the concept is the same, it's just very different. 

In the keynote you did earlier this year, one of the things you said is we need a clean, simple supply chain without too many intermediaries. What did you mean by that? 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I think that's very important. Basically as the industry becomes more digital, and not just the industry, as advertising as a whole is more and more transacted in an automated or programmatic fashion and you can do static in that as well. It's important that once you start doing it that way, you lose a little bit of control of what's going on, and there are a lot of middlemen that can insert themselves along the way, and there can be a little lack of transparency as to who's actually making money or who's taking cut where.

And that's something that digital media on the traditional side, as programmatic started growing and automation struggled quite a bit, and it wasn't just under the transparency and understanding of kind of how, what the supply chain looked like from a commercial point of view, it's also from a brand safety and fraud perspective, you want it to be very clean, very simple, and very straightforward what goes on in the supply chain.

So the media owner knows what's happening between them and the brand actually posting the ad, and the other way around, it just makes things a lot better, and I think we have an opportunity as an industry because we're building this now to avoid a lot of the mistakes that I think did happen, when digital media came up and if you look at digital media today in programmatic, there's like 30-45% fraud or impressions that never get served. Now, our industry doesn't really have that problem. Our ads always get served pretty much, but, so maybe we don't need to have verification in the same way, but there's still, a lot of things that happen there that where there's a waste, and we don't really know where that money goes, but I think we can avoid, on our end. So that's what I meant, and I think these next couple of years are going to be critical. We're going to need a lot of people to learn a lot of know-how we're going to need to learn. There are a lot of interesting companies that can help, but there are also a lot of players that are just going to try and make a buck because they can and don't necessarily add any value to the overall transaction.

When I look at the ad tech landscape, I get cross-eyed very quickly because there are so many companies selling their capabilities and they all describe what they do a little bit differently. It must be daunting to somebody taking a look at this. 

Anna Bager: That's exactly it. There's a very, who you may know, smart banker, but he's also an industry figure, Terence Kawaja from Luma. He's created something called a Lumascape, which kind of illustrates, and yes, you can get lost in that pretty quickly. We want to keep it as simple as possible. There's like an ad tech company for everything. There's been a lot of money to invest in those types of companies, but in the end, you really have to provide value and improvement to the transaction, otherwise, you shouldn't be in there. 

You also said in the keynote that more than 50% of media owners are now using AI. What hit me with that is why it is so low? 

Anna Bager: That actually was a survey that we did, I think at the end of last year. So I'm sure it's higher now and I think it's growing exponentially. At the time I thought, huh, interesting. I think everyone uses AI these days and I think you have to, if for nothing else, because everyone uses it. So you're going to be way behind if you don't, and I think in our industry, same things as everyone else, great creative solutions, great ways of just getting content out faster, making sure that you take into consideration all the different data and things that you might need to know to do a better job. So I think AI is critical. There's a lot of bad with AI, but there's also a lot of good.

I think the industry this year, since we did the survey, is probably a lot higher now. We should probably do it again. But we haven't done that yet, but it might be more, it might be closer to a 100%. 

Yeah, it strikes me as it's not the highly visible stuff, the creating ads from scratch and so on. It's much more about automation and the things that can be done to increase efficiency and accuracy. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. In the end, that's where it really can help. That and content creation. Of course, you just have to be very careful with AI because you really need to know where the data is coming from and how it's being used and be able to argue that if somebody were to challenge you, right? There's a lot of privacy, and regulatory murkiness around the whole thing. So you gotta be responsible and try to know what you're doing when you're using it. But obviously, it's an incredible tool. 

You mentioned earlier, that this is an election year, which no one can't help but know that these days. I'm curious in terms of budget and financials and forecasts and everything else, does a presidential election year have to be weighted in terms of every four years, there's a bit of an anomaly in terms of spend and then we go back to normal? 

Anna Bager: Obviously big elections, definitely there's so much more money on the market, but out-of-home as a platform is great, every two years there's an election, there's a lot of local elections all the time, there's a lot of advocacy groups and others that are out there with political messaging and our platform lends itself really well to that.

Out-of-home is not just an advertising platform, it's also a platform for public service messaging. A lot of that, right? And we're there, we can reach any consumer. Consumers who might not trust the media, who might not speak the language, whatever it might be, you can put a message up and reach them through signage. Political advertising, depending on how you defend it, I think it's a growth area for out-of-home and something that's not on or off, but obviously this election is also how it's happened, right? There's a lot going on at the very end. I think for everyone, it's a huge opportunity and then we'll have to deal with the aftermath of whatever that might be. 

Oh boy, hopefully not too much of an aftermath. 

I've been over in Europe a couple of times at conferences in the past year and speaking on panels and one of the things that would come up over and over again was sustainability which is a huge issue in Europe for digital out-of-home companies and all digital signage operators and I was asked, "What's happening in Canada and the US?” And I said, it's nowhere near the issue. I'm curious what the OAAA's take is. 

Anna Bager: Oh, we have a sustainability task force. We are very closely monitoring what's happening in Europe. We have a lot of members or not a lot, but we have a few members that have operations there too.

I think it's not as much of a focus here as it is in Europe, but I think it will be, and if you look at big global brands and agencies, they are going to ask for a better insight into how sustainable something was. So you need to pay attention to it. I think what's interesting with out-of-home is though, we might see him as a non-sustainable medium because you drive cars or you ride on airplanes or, But given that we are a one to many media, one ad can reach so many people, and it sits up there for a reasonably long time and it pretty much always reaches an audience, and it doesn't consume as much electricity or power as a lot of other media, in particular, digital does, the production of the ads can be very efficient.

There's something called the Green GRP. We are probably the ones who are best positioned there. We are far more sustainable in other media formats. So what we're focused on is how we better tell that story without greenwashing, and how we can help our members grow with the increasing demands that will come both from the government and from the brands and the agencies around these issues.

So I think it's important. I also think it's important, right? Like whether you believe in it or not, there's definitely something going on with the environment. So it's good to be protective of it, and I think our industry is very responsible. A lot of our members, even if they're in the US have sustainability officers and are constantly looking at how we can improve and make our industry better from that perspective. 

So no, it's a very important thing for us, and we are really looking into both who we can partner with and also what's going on in other markets, to see if we can learn. 

Is the adoption of the change going to be driven somewhat by starting to understand the impact on power bills and realizing, Oh yes, we can do work to address climate change, but we can also reduce our operating costs? 

Anna Bager: Sometimes, probably yes. There can be efficiencies and that's always good, but I think it really depends. I don't think everything reduces the operating costs, but some might, and then that's a form of sustainability too. Yeah, I think you should take all things into consideration. 

I think it's definitely something everyone should be aware of and take a close look at how they're running their operations, and see if they can make changes. 

I met recently with a company that does specialty displays, primarily focused on the digital out-of-home market and one of the things they're tinkering with is large format e-paper displays. So very energy-friendly. I know e-paper quite well, I've been looking at it for years and years. It's getting quite good but there are compromises in terms of color reproduction and everything else, and I asked, what do the brands think of this? Are they fine with it? 

And I was surprised to hear that, yeah, they get it. They understand we don't have maybe the exact color reproduction that we want, but it does other things for us. 

Anna Bager: That's a great example. You don't let perfection get in the way of good, or whatever it is that you say.

Look, we all have a common interest here, and I think if there's something that you can use that's more efficient or more sustainable, maybe less costly, I think that's a good way to convince the brand to do so. That's good news, I think. 

It's also smart to go and ask them for us before developing something, saying here, “Look what we did”, and then they go, “Yeah, I don't like that.”

Anna Bager: That's a a very good point, for sure. 

Happens all the time, but people keep doing it. 

Anna Bager: That is true. 

Alright, thank you for your time, this was great. 

Anna Bager: Thank you, this was really nice and good to speak to you.