Melbourne-based Seedooh verifies and standardizes campaign delivery data from various platforms for both digital and static out-of-home. Seedooh’s Founder & CEO, Tom Richter, recently told Digital Signage Pulse about his company’s business.
Please tell us what problem does Seedooh solve for the OOH industry.
Campaign delivery reporting in OOH has always been an onerous process. The systems operated by media owners differ greatly in the types of technology they use. This leads to differences in the output of self-generated ‘Proof of Performance’ reports.
Growth in DOOH, along with Advertiser demand for third-party verification and transparency throughout the supply chain in all media channels, will increasingly challenge reporting standards in the OOH sector.
Seedooh connects to, standardizes and verifies campaign delivery data, for both digital and static out-of-home. This data is then made available in almost real time, if required, to both buy and sell-side participants. This way everyone with an interest in the campaign knows exactly what message has been displayed, where and when.
By automating all elements of campaign reporting, Seedooh offers greater efficiency and confidence in the campaign execution reports. We believe this type of independently verified proof of delivery data a catalyst for the future growth of OOH advertising, especially when it’s available at scale.
Seedooh OOH campaign reports
You mention “connecting, standardizing and verifying” OOH delivery data. How is this accomplished?
The data required to verify campaign delivery at scale already exists within a publisher’s network. But, it’s usually housed in multiple, disconnected systems and is often unstandardized. This makes it very difficult to access in its complete form and almost impossible, or incredibly expensive, to streamline verification and reporting.
We designed, built, tested, refined and commercialized our proprietary methods of connecting, standardizing and verifying OOH campaign data. Our methodology is now widely used in Australia.
It’s not ‘magic’ or mysterious, it’s common sense applied in close consultation with leading businesses who buy, sell and facilitate OOH campaigns. This approach has enabled us to design and implement the right tech and system architecture to provide an independent, agnostic solution, tailor made for validating the delivery metrics that everyone cares about.
With a deep understanding of the various publisher systems and using the best practices that comply with global standards, we are at a very logical place after four years.
Following the first production release in 2017, the Seedooh Platform:
• Has reported on 18,000 OOH campaigns, on 15,000+ locations monitored continuously;
• Is now processing 1 Billion+ installations and/or play events each month;
• Is event streaming campaign delivery to over 1000 active buy- and sell-side users.
What type of OOH campaign data do agencies see, and in what type of format?
Publishers using Seedooh to report can quickly generate pdf exports, or invite their customers to view the data within the platform. When multiple publishers are connected, as they are in Australia, agencies and advertisers can access standardized delivery data from any campaign they have booked across multiple publishers, via a single aggregation platform.
In either the publisher or agency platform, the dashboard is a really simple summary of what happened, or is currently happening in the field, compared to what was contracted to happen. From there, the user can quickly dig deeper into a very granular analysis by campaign, creative, location, by month, week, day, hour, minute or millisecond.
It’s a very intuitive and easy user experience, with every bit of data available in the same place, including professional marketing shots where relevant. Reports can be built and shared securely in a few moments, or a correctly permissioned user can instantly invite others to view the data within the platform UI.
Who are some of your clients?
We provide a complete publisher reporting solution to oOh!media, JCDecaux and ODNA in Australia and to LUMO Digital in New Zealand. They use it to provide reports to all their customers.
Most other OOH publishers in Australia are also connected in the same compliant method, but don’t use the platform to report to all their advertisers. Their Seedooh-verified data is only available to agencies and advertisers via the Seedooh aggregation platform, which caters for buy-side requirements.
We provide unlimited access to Posterscope Australia and Publicis Media Australia for all of their clients’ connected data and we have a few independent agencies. Advertisers are also beginning to see the value in immediate, easy access to their complete campaign data via an independent third party.
How many OOH campaigns and/or DOOH screen locations do you monitor monthly?
We’re up to about 25,000 site-locations now and on average we report on over 3,000 active bookings per month. Obviously, most of the data is from DOOH networks, this month we will report over 1.5 billion installation or play events from eight publishers who collectively represent over 90% of the OOH sector in Australia.
A lot of that data is event-streamed via the Seedooh aggregation platform to agencies that oversee more than a third of the OOH sector’s investment and take their responsibility very seriously. Increasingly, campaigns are planned and booked to deliver dynamic messages to specific audiences, so it’s crucial for both buyers and sellers to keep a close eye on what message is being displayed where and when.
What were some of the challenges you faced as you moved toward launching your Seedooh platform in 2017?
Australia is a forerunner in connected, independent OOH reporting. The demand for standardized, third party validation really began in 2016. Fortunately, we had a robustly tested alpha version in 2015, so we were well prepared from a technical perspective, but the journey towards accountability at scale has been quite polarizing.
Leading publishers recognized early that the future potential of the sector, and of DOOH particularly, was dependent on buyers being confident that they were getting what they booked. Leading agencies recognized that their advertisers would expect improved reporting for more complex bookings.
We were fortunate that these progressive businesses led by example, but at times the debate was intense, as we sought to engage the whole sector on both sides. Happily, the intensity of the debate over the last couple of years has made the platform stronger and better able to provide a scaled solution to a similar challenge in new markets.
The Seedooh platform is very advanced, but still evolving. We are deploying enhancements and improvements fortnightly, based on feedback from over 1,500 active users on both sides of the sector.
The announcement of Seedooh joining DPAA mentioned that your company is “Australian-born.” Where do you currently have offices? Are you operating in the U.S., or have plans to?
Yes, Seedooh was first conceived and delivered in Australia, our proof of concept market. It’s a very innovative market in general media terms and also for OOH. It was a late blooming DOOH market, for various reasons, but over the last eight years has seen tremendous rates of digitization, growth and consolidation. These are ongoing global OOH trends, of course, and the reporting challenges are very similar in most developed markets.
We have a highly skilled development team based in Southeast Asia; our head office is in Melbourne, but we will probably relocate it to a more globally central location soon. And yes, we have just appointed Kenta Shimizu as SVP of North America, so he will lead our US operations. Kenta has been with Seedooh for almost two years as Director of Confidence and Commercial Partnerships. Previously, he was at PwC for eight years, in New York, Tokyo and Sydney, specializing in non-financial data assurance in the tech sector. He is the designer and compliance guru of the Seedooh Controls Framework, which provides the confidence of global best-practice, built into the data verification functions of the platform.
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