Q and A with Jemma Enright – QMS General Manager – City of Sydney:
Q: What are the key innovations QMS has brought to market with the new City of Sydney street furniture network?
A: The City of Sydney is an all-new, digital first, contemporary designed network - setting a new benchmark in street furniture globally.
In renewing this network and increasing digital inventory by ten times, we have delivered advertisers a whole new way to impact Sydney. The scene is now set for innovation where digital and data capabilities can be used to activate campaigns in unique ways.
Digital technology brings benefits for advertisers like immediacy, giving clients the ability to react to a real time environment through data-driven dynamic creative or execute a time-based communication at scale, like launching a campaign immediately following a corporate announcement, as one of our telecommunication clients recently did. Adapting at speed and in short time frames, is an innovation a largely digital network like ours has been built for.
Dynamism in creative strategy is rewarded by improved engagement as proven through Neuroscience. We have shown that even small dynamic changes to creative over a week can achieve a 38%+ improvement in effectiveness.
Our City of Sydney technology strategy utilises cloud-based technology and data solutions, delivering a connected network that can constantly adapt, now and in the future. With this new world thinking, instead of utilising hardware like sensors and cameras, we can tap into data APIs be it weather, traffic, pollen counts, online content or social feeds, with ease which opens up a wider realm of creative and strategic opportunities for advertisers.
Q: How is buying the new network different to buying the old network?
A: The network sits at the heart of the biggest market in Australia and 90% of its advertising inventory is digital. That means we have been able to package the offering in a more effective way to drive powerful results for brands. With over 30 smart, easy-to-buy packs, advertisers can mix and match modular packs to create tailored, optimised and activated campaigns. Our pack portfolio spans across broadcast, category, theme and activation packs enabling brands to tap into full funnel channel marketing. This is truly a innovative and comprehensive way that advertisers can now buy City of Sydney.
In expanding digital right across the 26km2 footprint, our packs deliver strong CBD plus surrounding precinct coverage, meaning brands can reach more high-value consumers through their digital buys.
The feedback we are getting in market is that our network sits in a class of its own and stands up well as a format that can deliver both the stature of large format and the audience and frequency of street furniture. Digital Large Format is very limited within Sydney’s CBD so our City of Sydney network provides a really important opportunity to cover this geography with a premium digital format. Our panels are bigger, with brighter screens and the network should be considered a starting point for any brief wanting major audience reach within the most prestigious OOH footprint in Australia.
Q: How and why did you create the more than 30 packs?
A: Armed with our own Q-Data inputs, we created new packs with customer driven objectives and audience targets in mind. Each of our new packs provides a lot more depth of targeting for brands, with data sets prioritised to achieve ROI requirements. For example, a luxury retail pack might use both proximity to luxury retail precincts in the CBD and qualified transactional data from Hemisphere enabled by Visa on luxury brand spending to identify the best performing panels in the network. Within the packs we also have options like a Technology and Innovators’ pack, a Health and Wellness pack, and an Alcohol pack that takes into account all regulations and guidelines, to name just a few.
Q: How does data inform the packs, and the network in general?
A: We’re utilising sophisticated and layered data sources including transactional data via our partnership with Hemisphere enabled by VISA, as well as GPS and other location and profile data. This means advertisers can accurately target consumer segments where it matters for them, like cinemagoers near cinemas, grocery buyers near supermarkets, finance professionals in business districts or even home improvers in the homemaker mecca of Alexandria and Moore Park. With each brief, we try to understand exactly what the right combination of these data sources is to achieve the best outcome for each client’s campaigns.
Q: What level of demand are you seeing from marketers and agencies for the City of Sydney network?
A: We continue to receive significant interest from both global and local brands with sales to date exceeding our forecasts. Since launch, we have had extremely high levels of occupancy for the first few months and availabilities are definitely tightening up as we run into Christmas.
Finance, entertainment and media, and luxury have been really strong categories, but we are also seeing new categories getting involved like hardware and home improvement. We’re also seeing strong demand into 2023, as audience numbers continue to strengthen, the rollout of the network nears completion, and brands look to get involved with next year’s marquee events and occasions, such as World Pride, Valentine’s Day and Vivid Sydney and SXSW Sydney later in the year.
Q: How are clients using the network for brand activations?
A: We’re seeing smart activations being booked across the network, with brands leaning towards tentpole occasions in the city like festivals, sporting events and key holidays. Already, our launch partner Diageo dominated key panels and CBD locations around Sydney’s World Class Cocktail Festival, while another launch partner Stan continues to capitalise on the flexibility of the digital network to showcase weekly streaming suggestions to the broad audiences we can help them reach. We are also seeing some very creative use of our consecutive panels where brands are using digital flexibility to tell a story with evolving creative like AirBnB’s “OMG” and “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie” creative that celebrates the different type of houses you can stay in but at the same time makes a huge impact by taking over multiple screens along the streetscape.
Q: Audiences are returning to the City of Sydney, both the city and its surrounding suburbs. What are your audience projections across summer and into 2023, and what will drive audience growth?
A: We’re back to more than 90% of the pre-pandemic audience levels of 2019. Of course, we know that working habits have shifted and relationships with the CBD have evolved, but the city is still a hub of high-density residential, retail, dining and culture that is experiencing a serious resurgence. It’s also important to remember the City of Sydney is a lot more than just the CBD, covering 33 of Sydney’s most desirable suburbs including Paddington, Potts Point, Redfern, Alexandria and Surry Hills – suburbs that have high levels of pedestrian and vehicle traffic.
The City of Sydney has a number of initiatives planned across this summer and into 2023 to help bring even more people into Sydney including Sydney Streets events across Surry Hills, Pyrmont, East Sydney, Redfern, Haymarket, Glebe and Kings Cross, the Night Noodle Markets in Hyde Park, Sydney Festival and Lunar New Year in early 2023 and more.
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