Interview with Barry Frey, President & CEO of DPAA.
DPAA runs the Video Everywhere Summit taking place on October 12 in person, and then a global broadcast on October 14 and 15.
What is the topic of this year’s Video Everywhere Summit?
This year’s important theme will be Resilience, Reinvention and Revitalization! It has certainly been a challenging time, yet we are finally and certainly seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Advertising is the fuel for the global Digital Signage world and the rules of marketing have once again been rewritten during this pandemic period.
We’ve assembled a great group of marketers who will talk about how they’ve managed their brand through the last 18 months. This is akin to a master class given by brands such as Walgreens, American Express, Burger King, Unilever, Clorox, L’Oreal, MilkPEP, Vice Media and others.
The speakers will talk about how they continue to engage with consumers, their marketing, media and out of home efforts.
This year, you can attend the DPAA conference in person or online, but it’s different from the hybrid model many conferences are doing. Can you explain.
We’ve done a lot of research and it seems a number of people really want to come out and see each other, learn from the speakers and safely network, so we are having our in-person event on October 12 at Chelsea Piers.
New York has been very diligent in safety efforts and many sports, music, conferences Fashion Week and other events have been successful in recent weeks.
The venue requires proof of vaccination to enter, plus we’ll be following all requirements and guidelines and adding in additional features for safety and comfort.
Then, for those who cannot make the in-person event we will have the global online broadcast of the event on Thursday, October 14 and Friday, October 15 from 11am to 2pm Eastern Time, each day. The global broadcast will have all of the content, plus some new speakers, production elements and more DPAA elements that surprise and delight.
This is quite different than what most conferences do when they do hybrid. Why this plan?
Again, we did research and we found out (and it makes sense) very few people will log onto their computers for a full 8-hour conference day. It made much more sense to do it this way. Entertainment shows do this all the time. They tape 5 episodes per sitting and then broadcast it a day or more later.
Many in the Out of Home (OOH) industry were expecting this to be the big come back year, what are you seeing now?
We see brands and agencies coming back and buying OOH and Digital Out of Home (DOOH). All the holding companies have OOH media spend significantly up this year and up next year.
Early in the year, projections led to a feeling that everything will go back to 2019 instantly, since then we have learned that pandemic is anything but predictable. However, the data shows that people are out and about in increasing numbers and we are certainly on the right path now for a very successful 2022.
How did you see DPAA’s mission evolve or change during the Pandemic period?
As the Global DOOH trade and marketing organization dedicated to the digitization and revenue generation of OOH; we are always closely in touch with our global community and brand decision makers. We dug down deep to build and create an array of products, connections and myriad services enabling individual members and the total ecosystem to get through this period personally and professionally with tools, knowledge, support and some of what I might say is the DPAA “special sauce”.
Of course, we have all been challenged during the pandemic. In the “silver lining” look at things, there must have been some good coming from all of this?
There are three very positive trends that have emerged during this challenging period.
Firstly, Programmatic DOOH technology now allows advertisers to easily pause, push or move ad schedules to where spend levels and audiences were needed.
Additionally, this more fallow period enabled our industry to focus on connecting the programmatic pipes between all platforms and media across all selling and buying positions.
Lastly, as the deprecation of cookies and IDFA’s continue along with questionable brand environments; OOH serves as a brand safe, trustworthy environment where context really matters. These factors of trust, impact, connection, flexibility and agility will serve us very well now that ad monies are once again beginning to climb.
You can register at www.videoeverywheresummit.com.