The trials and tribulations of bringing digital transformation to a traditional media business

As the recent raft of agency forecasts show, marketers are increasingly investing in Digital Out of Home (DOOH), with growth forecasted to hit 20 percent by the end of 2017. For Clear Channel UK, just two years ago, DOOH represented 15 percent of our revenue.  Now it’s more than 50 percent. 

This spike in demand is likely driven by two main factors:

• The shift toward urbanisation, with more people moving to metropolitan areas and spending more time out of home; and

• The advancements in DOOH screens which can now deliver more relevant campaigns, that reach more of the right people, at the right time, in the right location, with the right message.

But as our technology progresses to provide more digitally-capable inventory, so too comes more complexity and the need for industry automation. The reason being that a classic print OOH billboard can typically host a single creative message for 14 days.  Today, if we were to replace that site with a digital panel, we have the capability to rotate a different creative message every 10 seconds, which brings the capacity of the site to over 120,000 creative assets per fortnight!

Naturally at Clear Channel – and many other OOH players – a tech-driven transformation is underway to support this, but the transformation is by no means straightforward.

From transitioning towards delivering relevant ads, activated in near real-time, based on data, we’ve picked up a number of key learnings so far on our journey:

The importance of strong governance, leadership and teamwork 

For a project that’s run on agile principles and impacts so much of our business, we’ve needed to make very rapid decisions.  The support of an executive leadership team that is informed, with a clearly communicated vision and strategy, has been crucial to driving forward at pace.

As a multi-market organisation, it’s also been vital to learn about how the central project team can best collaborate with the local teams in-market – a dynamic no doubt familiar to anyone who has worked in large, international businesses. Figuring out the right consultative approach to take and ensuring all markets maintain enough freedom to differentiate while maintaining a unified approach, has been challenging. Recognition of key milestones, as well as underlining the project’s central vision, has been crucial in this area.

The need to maintain a laser focus on the ultimate commercial objective

During a complex project, it’s easy to get pulled in different directions.  Spending time at the beginning of the project focusing on what it is that advertisers want to achieve – and delivering a solution to meet these needs – was core to our strategy and on-going success. 

We then looked at how we can deliver results, and decided how much we wanted to focus on revenue protection and risk mitigation vs new and incremental revenue.  Whenever analysis paralysis sets in, we go back to our three advertiser needs pillars - flexibility, creativity and measurability - and check that we’re moving towards delivering against one (or more) of these.

The human element

Finally, the biggest takeaway is probably the most obvious.  Success hinges on people as much as technology. While digital transformation is driven by technology, the budget line for our tech-fuelled transformation comes under ‘IT’ when we’re pitching to the Board. We’ve had to learn, as a team, how to achieve the best combination of man and machine. Initially we may have underestimated the project’s breadth in terms of people change-management.

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far in my first year at Clear Channel. We’ve successfully started to transform the oldest advertising medium to meet the needs of 21st century brands.  While we still have a long way to go, I’m sure there are a number of other valuable learnings to gather along the way. I’m excited to be in this medium and in this industry at such a time of transformation and growth.

By Cadi Jones, commercial innovation director at Clear Channel Outdoor. Follow her @cadielisejones