A growing number of startups are emerging to compete for TV ad dollars in the crowded territory between digital out-of-home (DOOH) and connected TV (CTV).
Loop Media, Atmosphere TV, Taiv and GSTV are just a few examples of companies that combine mass reach and targeting to sell video ads in public places (bars, restaurants, gas stations, etc.).
One company that recently showed up in my inbox is BarBoards, an Austin-based startup that launched in February as a DOOH tech platform that runs ads on screens in restaurants and bars across Texas.
If that range seems pretty narrow, it is.
According to BarBoards, the company differentiates itself by best serving a very specific demographic: young consumers between the ages of 21 and 35 who watch sports, have disposable income and live in Texas, said co-founder and chief risk officer Ben Woods.
In other words, they’re the kind of people you’d find in a Texas sports bar.
This target demographic explains why most of its roughly 45 brand clients are in categories such as alcoholic beverages (such as Milam & Greene bourbon), tourism (Visit San Antonio is also a client), consumer packaged goods (such as Rev Gum), sports betting and food service.
Barboard, which plans to expand nationally to bars outside of Texas next year, is hoping to attract more advertisers with the promise of reach, measurement and low costs.
To do that, the company is straddling the blurry line between CTV and DOOH, an increasingly common tactic among DOOH companies hoping to capture advertising revenue by focusing on the similarities between pure streaming and TV.
Matching the CTV model
The challenge facing all DOOH companies competing for TV ad dollars is explaining to potential buyers what exactly they are.
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Outdoor TV is a gray area for buyers because it doesn’t fit neatly into either CTV or DOOH. To attract demand for this relatively new channel, vendors in the space are trying to figure out how to best describe themselves to brands. Some are calling themselves CTV OOH or OOH TV in bid streams, while others are calling them premium video or just TV. For BarBoards, they haven’t decided on a specific label yet.
“Our goal is to stay in that grey area for now,” Woods said.
DOOH companies have a commercial incentive to present their inventory to buyers as CTV, or an extension of CTV, as brands seek what they see as premium placements: long-form content that can capture audience attention.
BarBoards sells brands inventory that works like CTV but costs much less: Woods says brands can get targeted video inventory for a quarter of what they would pay for traditional TV.
Digital signage, meat bar
But traditional advertisers want more than low prices: they also need scale, and in BarBoards’ case, scale is still limited.
BarBoards works with bar and restaurant owners to install advertising hardware in their establishments for free, allowing business owners to earn advertising revenue and promote their own events and happy hour deals amongst their brand advertising.
The hardware connects to a bar owner’s TV cable box, detects when a commercial break starts, and serves an ad from the BarBoards network instead. This inevitably means fewer impressions for advertisers who buy ads within the TV show itself, but technically it’s fine.
“We don’t do any editing associated with the broadcast itself,” Woods said. Instead, the company’s equipment alters the TV output before a designated ad airs. Competitor Tyve employs a very similar strategy.
Reaching a narrow, targeted audience can be a selling point, but it also means BarBoards is limited in scale: The company operates in about 50 bars, and outdoor distribution allows for high potential reach at each venue, with the company saying it serves more than 10 million impressions each month.
Who is it?
Beyond target reach, another selling point is the detailed measurements that can also be used for campaign planning.
The company’s devices are equipped with sensors that analyze the composition of people in a room, including how many people are in the room, their gender, their approximate age range, and whether they are watching a TV screen.
We’re not aware of any other companies in this space touting this kind of surveillance technology. But as creepy as it may sound, BarBoards argues that its approach is technically fine because it doesn’t pass on any biometric information that can be used as a permanent identifier, says co-founder and CTO Calvin Giddens. Plus, the sensors don’t pick up audio, so most BarBoard venues inform customers about them, he adds.
BarBoards also tells advertisers what time their ad aired, what programming preceded it and how long people were looking at the screen.
Woods said advertisers can use the report to plan their campaigns. While targeting is inherently limited when dozens of people may see the same ad, the location of the ad itself is a form of targeting. Advertisers can, for example, choose establishments that primarily target women or customers of a certain age group.
Brands can purchase BarBoards inventory directly or programmatically, such as through private marketplace deals through Vistar Media. Deals are packaged by location and based on the audience demographics that frequent those bars.
But will brands embrace it?
Woods said if Barboard can convince more advertisers that its content is “premium,” the ad dollars should start flowing.
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