Amazon Prime and GroupM Bullish on DOOH Growth in LATAM

By E.B. Moss

While the video industry has been a tale of two cities, balancing revitalization and transformation, the out-of-home (OOH) industry has been the Cinderella of post-pandemic perseverance. Two insightful sessions, in front of packed and vibrant crowds during the recent POSSIBLE conference in Miami, focused specifically on the come-back story of OOH advertising in Latin America. Both were hosted by DPAA, the global OOH trade and marketing association.

One of the two moderators, Claudia B. Damas, CEO & Partner at Altermark, summed up the success story, echoing both Magna and Group M projections that ‘The numbers for out-of-home post-Covid are now ... where we should have been in 2025 ... It looks like OOH will have complete recovery this year at $33.5 Billion in revenue. And Latin America has a huge piece of that pie and we're growing every day. People realize they love to be out of home’.

Panelist Lucio Schneider, CMO of Eletromidia, offered a more succinct explanation, to great applause: ‘I think – and I say this for Brazil – that we are turning into a sexy media option!’

However you describe it, the day's consensus was that a key factor in OOH growth is its increasing digitization. White the panelists spoke to programmatic issues and opportunities supporting the out-of-home buy, DPAA CEO Barry Frey, who introduced the sessions, pointed out that ‘programmatic and digital best practices transfer cross borders quite easily’. Frey also noted that DPAA works intently with its global membership, brands and ad agencies to accelerate the industry's digital evolution. That includes embracing programmatic trading, impression-based buying, new data and attribution sources, QR, AR, VR and certainly aggressive screen deployment.

Leading the Charge in Brazil

If OOH is considered "sexy," at least in Brazil, Eletromidia could be considered an "influencer," as both the country's largest purveyor of out of home and the first Brazilian media company to be publicly traded overall (ELMD3). Leading the charge, their more than 60,000 panels, or touchpoints, cover 10 of the country's 10 biggest ad markets, of which 70% are now digital. They’re also now offering inventory in commercial and residential elevators, transportation, malls and airports.

As Schneider told moderator Hector Gonzales of Hivestack: ‘We have a mission to transform the cities where we’re present... to be more effective, bringing more information, more alternatives to our clients and agencies. ... One of our top priorities is now selling by audience as an additional option. It's a very important change for us. We normally sell by location. The other priority is continuing to grow our inventory, to be in more cities -- and offer good technological improvements. We're always looking to increase digital for all out-of-home markets, not just for Eletromidia’.

Driving Opportunities in Brazil and Beyond

In support of their tech and information growth strategy, Eletromidia purchased a company last year that Schneider plugged as having ‘the best in DOOH technology and the instruments to plan and have consistent metrics across all verticals’. This has gone hand in hand with the company's focus on growing programmatic capabilities.

‘When we have a lot of campaigns that are digital and out-of-home together, advertisers have the opportunity to use programmatic to do better campaigns, to choose their target audience better’, said Schneider. ‘It's also an opportunity to secure different budgets from some companies that have only digital budgets, and’, harkening back to Frey's point, he added, ‘allows other countries to explore the Brazilian market for advertising, too’.

In LATAM, and Brazil specifically, Schneider adds, ‘people love new technology. Brazil is an early adopter of everything. So, when you have a lot of competitors doing great things, you have to be fast, you have to be looking for more advanced solutions to be in this position in our market. ... But we love creativity, too’. So, while other countries may be more advanced in programmatic, he acknowledged, creativity and strategy are helping drive DOOH forward.

That strategy led to Eletromidia developing their platform to better support the small and midsize business (SMB) market. ‘SMBs have a lot of difficulty in using OOH as easily as they use the online marketplace. And we imagine this could be a huge market in the future’.

In addition, Schneider is thrilled to see the return of the old events most have come to associate with Brazil, such as Carnival, and the newer Lollapalooza Brazil, Festival RPB, which all bring people from out of home to the streets.

Schneider threw down a challenge for marketers that ‘it's important for to use out of home as a media, as television and online platforms in Brazil have a strong presence’. But in Brazil, he noted, with more advanced technology, expanded inventory and measurement capabilities now in OOH, ‘we believe that we can integrate and be even more sexy’.

Brand marketer João Ferraz de Mesquita picked up that gauntlet years ago, including OOH across a decade of marketing Unilever, Mars and Swatch Watches in Portugal. Then, as a 20-year resident of Brazil, he observed that ‘not many people go to the beach there. They go to the shopping mall and spend all the time in elevators going up and down. I mean, the amount of screens Brazilians get in front of their eyes, it's amazing’. As such, he pushed to be the first to leverage out of home for the Canais Globo-owned Pay TV service, Rede Telecine, followed by doing the same for Amazon Prime Video, where he now serves as Marketing Director, LATCANZ.

His marketplace observations also included that when it was just ‘print, radio and free TV, and GRPs were still accepted’, if begrudgingly, OOH was ‘a million different companies and very messy and confusing’. In those 1990s days he couldn't necessarily prove the attribution of billboards for Unilever and Mars, but when at Swatch with no budget for TV, he spent ‘like 90% of the budget in OOH. We would see spikes from 200% to 500%. So that was very clear. A few years later, every other watch brand was also dominating OOH’.

When he went to include transit advertising to promote Telecine, he overruled his ad agency recommendations and dropped print to ‘go hard in out-of-home. In Sao Paolo we bought huge posters and the awareness of our brand just skyrocketed.... The funny thing is, a few years later, HBO and other Pay TV channels were also advertising in OOH’

While, as moderator Damas pointed out, Amazon Prime Video is a digital streaming company watched primarily on home screens, Ferraz de Mesquita noted that all the streamers are advertising in LATAM OOH these days, even more than on traditional TV. ‘So, that probably means something. We do need to find the right way to measure’, he added with caution. ‘Amazon is completely obsessed with measuring everything. ...So, we need you. I see us all working together and pleasing the consumer’.

As Director of Business, Data, and Intelligence (LATAM) for GroupM, Ruben Gomez added the finale of the finer points on out-of-home in Latin America as it stands now, and where the agency projects progress.

‘It's amazing’, he noted, ‘that three years ago, people planned this media the same way that we planned out-of-home 20 years ago. Talking about data, audiences and measurement sounds good. But in Latin America, we need to walk the talk, because we have two different worlds: the world of the big OOH companies – the JCDecauxs, the Clear Channels -- that are leading the markets in terms of thinking, technology, and data. And then we have the thousands of local partners in Latin America that need to bet on technology; they need to start to change their minds in terms of activating data’.

Scale, Gomez noted is one of the main assets of this media, but, he advised, "that massiveness doesn't necessarily drive intelligence and accuracy in terms of activating data... which is the most important thing right now’. He acknowledged that ‘aside from digital, it's the only media that is growing double digit year over year’. But continuing that trajectory will require ‘being very clever in combining that massiveness with data and tech’.

Two years from now GroupM feels all the digital assets of digital investments in out of home in Latin America will represent around one third of the total investment. And globally around 45% to 48% of the total investment will come from all digital assets.

Programmatic billings in the region now, however, are very small – at approximately 1.6% - 2% of total investment, which ‘may seem very far from global ... but is not as far as many people may think’. Furthering that growth will drive more participation by SMBs, sharing what Schneider also noted.

Speaking the Same Language

But another necessary element for Latin America's growth in digital out of home, Gomez said, is to find alignment: ‘Something that is very problematic in Latin America is that we don't have a single source or a key partner for alignment in the market in terms of behavior, of technology, of data. And it's very complicated in Latin America: We're not one country’

Damas pointed out that there's currently no source, no company that can symmetrically measure each country in the same way, so the challenge is clear for the GroupMs of the world. Gomez concurred, but noted that ‘we are working very hard on that, with Taptap Digital, for example, and obviously Hivestack as an important partner for us and the industry across the region’.

Balancing Gomez’ math equation for growth is his passionate appreciation for OOH, which reminds us of the moral of the story: 'This media is magic', he said. 'Clients love this media because it allows you to let your imagination fly and create things.'

LC