Place Exchange completes spinout from OOH publisher Intersection
Programmatic OOH gains ground for marketers who value streamlined ad management and reporting.
Place Exchange, an SSP for out-of-home, completed its spinout from its former parent company Intersection, a major OOH publisher. Ari Buchalter, who served as CEO for both companies, now takes over as CEO of Place Exchange. Previous COO of Intersection, Chris Grosso, replaces Buchalter as CEO of the publisher.
In anticipation of vaccine rollouts and public spaces opening back up, OOH was expected to be a leading channel for advertisers in 2021. According to Buchalter, the expansion of programmatic capabilities within OOH saw triple-digit growth for Place Exchange, even during the worst times in 2020. And in the first four months of 2021, Place Exchange had already matched the sales of the previous year, he added.
So while many advertisers were pulling back on their OOH spending overall, the introduction of more programmatic inventory and reporting functions offered something new for advertisers to try in the heart of the pandemic. Place Exchange was always open to other publishers, even when it was operated by Intersection as parent company. But now, Place Exchange looks to continue to evolve the OOH space by introducing more independence.
“It’s critically important to have an open, transparent and independent SSP fully aligned with media owners,” said Buchalter.
With programmatic OOH, advertisers can integrate their spend in the channel with other programmatic media. “When we integrate the SSP with a DSP like The Trade Desk, Amobee or others, advertisers are experiencing the exact same workflows, same exact reports, and attribution in a way that no other supply-side platform has done,” Buchalter added.
Advertisers can now choose from a great deal of premium inventory to cover national or local markets and select the screens that index high against their target, he said. On the flip side, advertisers using Place Exchange can also measure performance after the ad exposure, in the form of other actions taken by consumers on digital channels and in-store.
Why we care. OOH as a programmatic channel is a gamechanger for marketers looking to reach consumers who are out in the world and close to purchase. By streamlining the OOH buy, brands save time and extra cost incurred when OOH is managed offline through individual sales calls. Another part of the OOH ecosystem we’re watching is the way in which publishers are generating non-ad content on video OOH displays to entice viewers. Marketers will find this inventory more brand safe than running the same ads on social platforms alongside controversial user-generated content.
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About The Author
Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.
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