JOLT, the digital out-of-home (DOOH) media and EV charging network, has seen its national footprint double since this time last year, according to CEO Doug McNamee.
As a result, the Australian company has seen a “huge increase” in both client spend and client diversity.
“You would naturally align certain categories with us, like auto or energy, but what we're really seeing now is that broader customer base saying ‘we can see the value that that JOLT plays in a street furniture buy’ in being able to increase reach and frequency and improve performance of campaigns, in addition with other vendors,” McNamee said.
That growth is reflected in the wider market too, with out-of-home (OOH) net media revenue increasing 8% to $593.1 million for the half year to June, according to the Outdoor Media Association.
DOOH revenue accounted for 74.4% of total net media revenue, an increase over 71.9% for the same period last year.
For JOLT, the increased investment from the market comes amid the launch of Spark Intelligence a month ago, a data platform designed to change the way out-of-home media is planned, traded and reported on.
Spark Intelligence is modelled from 18 million users and thousands of audience segments, blended with JOLT’s first-party data and geo-spatial planning data, and industry measurement tools.
It allows advertisers to harness smart analytics, optimise their campaigns in real-time, and offers attribution and measurement across JOLT’s omnichannel network.
McNamee said that Spark Intelligence was introduced as part of the company moving to an audience and impression-based selling model, with the wider OOH industry also needing to meet and exceed the expectations that marketers have around digital.
“It’s about that audience-based approach to finding who you want to talk to, where you want to talk to them, and how you want to talk to them, and making sure that DOOH can be flexible and deliver that,” he said.
“We're delivering over 250 million impressions monthly across Australia and New Zealand, so it’s about making sure that we're able to understand who's going past the panels - when, where, how - and that we can surface that information from our clients to our customers."
McNamee said the key challenges for the market revolve around how to transact more efficiently, as well as ensuring advertisers have consistency in an omnichannel buy to follow the same audience through all of the different touch points available.
He said being able to surface that data to advertisers has been “really well received”, with JOLT already starting to see clients transact using the platform and brief responses happening as a result.
“I think what all clients want is to be able to improve ROI through more efficient targeting,” he told AdNews.
“They want to be able to make sure that they can see the effectiveness of a campaign, they want to be able to get insights that allow them to tweak a campaign during the duration and they want flexibility to transact. Those things that we're starting to see are obviously powering the programmatic uptake.”
The adoption rate of programmatic advertising into Australian DOOH campaigns will reach 35% of media plans within the next 18 months, according to research by supply side platform VIOOH.
Australian marketers' investments on programmatic DOOH advertising are projected to increase by an average of 28% over the next 18 months, with a 12% rise in marketers planning to allocate new budgets specifically for programmatic DOOH campaigns.
JOLT, which expanded its operations to Canada a number of weeks ago after an earlier expansion into the UK last year, plans to further utilise its first party data to create opportunities for advertisers and brands.
Already having rolled out an in-app advertising solution, providing a one-to-one connection with customers while charging their EVs, JOLT’s senior data, strategy and insights manager, Randall Taylor, said measurement and attribution is incredibly important.
“What the digital channels have done so well in terms of creating that measurement conversation at the fingertips of anyone from the brand advertiser all the way to the agency - that's a similar vein that we're really looking forward to ramp up in 2025,” he said.
McNamee said that outdoor has traditionally been traded very similar to linear TV – brands have a spot that they buy for a fixed period of time with an always-on rotation – but movement to an audience-based selling approach allows advertisers to target down to a single impression.
“You can say ‘I only want to talk to this client at that time’ or ‘I only want to talk to this customer segment at this time in this specific area’, so being able to be much more flexible aligns a lot more with performance and digital based campaign planning, which really is a huge strength for outdoor,” he said.
“If you can be buying in the same sort of hyper-flexible way at a broadcast level that you can on a one-to-one level in the OOH space, you're able to really drive ROI for clients, and that's what we want to do.”
McNamee said that the fusing of creativity and data is an “exciting frontier”, referencing a campaign JOLT carried out with Polestar, the Swedish electric car brand, at the end of last year as an example.
The first campaign component used live, dynamic technology to power a content-led series featuring the headline, 'Round Trip, one charge', showcasing driving trip locations in NSW within a 655-kilometre round trip from relevant JOLT charging/OOH sites, and highlighting the Polestar 2’s driving range.
“Having tons and tons of data is awesome, but what do you do with it? Bringing Randall into the team and being able to surface those insights at a brief-response level, to fuse the creativity with the data, is what's exciting the end consumers and what excites the brands as well," he said.
Looking at the DOOH space into 2025, McNamee said he predicts continued investment in the sector, as DOOH has been able to provide that broadcast reach and efficiency that the market is asking for.
“As the conditions have tightened, outdoor’s continued to grow, because it’s delivering results for clients. I think that programmatic is going to be a theme that continues to grow too,” he told AdNews.
“When the dust settles on this year, we will have seen programmatic grow significantly and I think it'll continue to grow significantly into the future. I think that as the market starts to understand that channel more effectively, they will utilise it for various campaign tactics.
“From a JOLT perspective, we’ve stated publicly that we're planning to grow. For us that’s really about meeting the demand that we've got, both on our EV charging business and from our advertising business as well, so that includes more sites in the eastern seaboard and trying to drive our network expansion, which we've been active with this year and next year.”
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