A new high margin business opportunity for retail chains in the post covid-19 world

When preparing to return to a new normal after the outbreak of covid-19, companies will be eagerly looking for new ways to recover from losses with new business ideas. Retail is one of the industries that has gotten hit hard by the virus. Luckily, it possesses an asset that has largely gone unmonetized until now: a store space with an audience ready to shop. Add smart digital screens and a channel to buy advertising, and you’ll have a new platform to make revenue.

Digital out-of-home (in short; DOOH) advertising is amongst the fastest growing marketing mediums together with mobile advertising. It’s a medium where advertisers still can stand out and get noticed by the consumers in the last mile of the shopping journey when they are the most willing to spend their euros.

Traditionally, DOOH has been dominated by the big media sales companies that have taken care of the sales on behalf of the network owners. This has resulted in high sales commissions and that the big intermediaries are really not that interested in other than large networks with big audiences.

It has also impacted advertisers as DOOH has not been the most economic medium to advertise in. As the screens have been sold in slots and there has been a very limited number of screens to advertise in, the advertisers who have chosen the medium have been willing to use quite a lot of money to get noticed. This has also limited the number of companies that have the resources to use the channel.

The opportunity

For retail chains and speciality stores, digital-out-home could, however, be a substantial high margin revenue stream when done right. Any retailer can act as an advertising network for advertisers to effectively reach specific audiences. Furthermore, retailers can utilize their unique customer insight data to target the consumer segments at the right time & place.

Many retailers already have some screens on their premises but aren’t really happy with how they can utilize them. To overcome this, Custobar and Doohlabs have partnered to capitalize retail spaces and to maximize revenue by utilizing customer data.

Doohlabs has developed a platform to connect DOOH-networks to programmatic advertising ecosystems and to target audiences with the help of different data sources. With Custobar’s data on brick & mortar customer segments, we are able to reach very specific audiences and maximize the effectiveness of advertising reach.

The partnership enables us to build a unique digital-out-of-home media sales network for Midsize retail in which the various companies ad inventories can be sold to a wide audience of buyers through one joint channel. We connect the advertisers both directly and from programmatic channels to ad networks and enable the retailers to make revenue from their targeted audiences in no time.

For example, an event advertiser looking for 20-30 audience with a high interest in culture and fashion could target audiences in bookstores, cinemas and fashion chain outlets near the location of the event for the week before the happening. All this efficiently from various retailers’ networks with one-time purchase.

We are currently searching for pilot companies to be the forerunners in this new business model. Get in touch now to start making new profit with us!