Digital Billboards Without the Traditional Commitment
For many businesses, outdoor advertising has traditionally felt like a completely different world from digital marketing.
Google Ads and Meta Ads allow businesses to choose their audience, control their budget, launch campaigns quickly and monitor performance. Billboard advertising, by comparison, has often involved longer booking periods, larger budgets and considerably less flexibility.
Platforms such as CAASie are changing that.
CAASie is a self-service Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising platform that allows businesses to access digital billboards and other outdoor screens online. Advertisers can select screens, control when advertising appears, set budgets and monitor campaign delivery.
For the right business, this creates an interesting opportunity: using targeted outdoor advertising alongside Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO and other digital marketing rather than treating billboards as a completely separate medium.
What is CAASie?
CAASie essentially provides an online platform for buying digital outdoor advertising.
Instead of approaching individual outdoor media companies and arranging separate bookings, advertisers can access a large network of participating digital screens through a single platform.
Depending on availability in your location, these can include:
- Digital roadside billboards
- Shopping centres and retail environments
- Bus shelters
- Train stations
- Street furniture
- Gyms
- Fuel stations
- Medical centres
- Office buildings
The principle is straightforward: choose where you want to advertise, determine when you want the campaign to run, upload your creative and set your budget.
This makes buying outdoor advertising feel considerably closer to managing a digital advertising campaign.
How does CAASie advertising work?
The platform operates in a way that will feel reasonably familiar to businesses already using online advertising.
1. Choose where your advertising appears
CAASie allows advertisers to browse available digital screens and select locations relevant to their campaign.
That can be particularly useful for geographically focused businesses.
A builder, for example, might concentrate advertising around suburbs where they want to generate more projects. A medical business could target screens surrounding a particular clinic. A retailer could advertise close to its physical locations.
Rather than simply buying broad exposure, businesses can be much more deliberate about where their advertising appears.
2. Choose when your advertising runs
Campaigns can also be scheduled around particular periods, days and times.
This creates opportunities to match outdoor advertising with customer behaviour rather than necessarily having an advertisement running continuously.
A hospitality business might prioritise certain days. A trade business might focus on commuter periods. An event campaign could dramatically increase exposure in the days immediately before the event.
3. Upload your advertising creative
Creative can be uploaded digitally and assigned to compatible screens.
This also means campaigns can potentially use different creative depending on the location, promotion or audience being targeted.
That flexibility is a significant change from the traditional idea of booking a billboard and leaving the same advertisement there for weeks.
4. Monitor the campaign
One of the most useful aspects of digital outdoor advertising is improved reporting.
Campaign delivery can be monitored through the platform, providing businesses with considerably more visibility than they might associate with traditional billboard advertising.
It doesn’t make outdoor advertising as directly attributable as a Google Search campaign — someone can’t click a roadside billboard — but it gives marketers much better information about where and when their advertising has been delivered.
You don’t necessarily need a huge billboard budget
Outdoor advertising has traditionally been associated with significant media commitments.
Programmatic Digital Out-of-Home advertising changes that model.
Instead of automatically committing to a major long-term billboard booking, businesses can control their campaign budget and choose the screens they want to use.
That makes the channel accessible to a much wider range of businesses.
A local company doesn’t necessarily need to dominate every billboard across Brisbane or the Sunshine Coast.
It may make considerably more sense to identify a small number of strategically useful locations and concentrate the budget there.
Where it gets particularly interesting: combining CAASie with digital marketing
We wouldn’t generally recommend thinking about CAASie as a replacement for Google Ads, Meta Ads or SEO.
Instead, it can complement them.
Imagine a potential customer driving to work and repeatedly seeing your business on a digital billboard.
Later, they search Google for the service you provide.
Your Google Search ad appears.
They visit your website but don’t enquire.
A few days later, they see your business again through Facebook or Instagram advertising.
Eventually, they search for your brand directly and make contact.
No single channel necessarily created that customer.
Together, however, those channels have built familiarity, recognition and trust.
This is where combining outdoor and digital advertising becomes much more interesting.
Using digital billboards to support Google Ads
Google Search advertising is excellent at capturing existing demand.
Someone searches:
solar installers Sunshine Coast
or:
commercial builder Brisbane
Google Ads can put a business in front of that person at precisely the point they’re looking for the service.
What Google Search doesn’t necessarily do is create the initial brand awareness.
A strategically placed digital billboard campaign can introduce the business before that Google search occurs.
When the potential customer subsequently encounters the same company in Google, the name is no longer completely unfamiliar.
For businesses operating in competitive markets, that additional brand recognition can be valuable.
Using CAASie alongside Meta Ads
Meta Ads operate differently again.
Facebook and Instagram are particularly useful for generating awareness, communicating visually and repeatedly reaching relevant audiences.
Digital Out-of-Home advertising can extend that awareness into the physical world.
A coordinated campaign might include:
Digital billboards: A simple brand message designed to be understood in seconds.
Facebook and Instagram: More detailed creative explaining the offer, service or point of difference.
Retargeting: Further advertising to people who subsequently visit the website.
Google Ads: Capturing potential customers when they actively search for the service.
Instead of four unrelated advertising activities, they become different components of the same marketing strategy.
Geographic campaigns become particularly interesting
One of the strongest potential applications for CAASie is geographical targeting.
Consider a builder wanting to generate more projects in a particular growth corridor.
The marketing campaign could combine:
- Selected digital outdoor screens within the target area
- Google Ads targeting searches from the same locations
- Meta Ads focused on surrounding suburbs
- Local SEO
- Google Business Profile optimisation
- Dedicated website landing pages for the target region
The potential customer begins encountering the same company across multiple environments.
This type of strategy could potentially suit businesses including:
- Builders and property developers
- Solar companies
- Trades
- Real estate businesses
- Medical and cosmetic clinics
- Professional services
- Retailers
- Hospitality businesses
- Gyms and fitness businesses
- Automotive businesses
- Events
The objective isn’t simply to “get on a billboard”.
The billboard becomes another touchpoint within a coordinated marketing campaign.
Digital billboards can also work for short-term campaigns
The flexibility of digital outdoor advertising creates some interesting tactical opportunities.
A business could potentially use CAASie to support:
- A new location opening
- Product launch
- Major promotion
- Event
- Recruitment campaign
- New housing development
- Trade show
- Seasonal campaign
- Brand launch
- Expansion into a new geographic market
This makes the medium useful for more than long-term brand advertising.
Billboard creative needs to be treated differently
One important consideration is that billboard creative should not simply be a resized Facebook advertisement.
People may only have a few seconds to process the message.
Effective outdoor creative generally needs to communicate quickly:
One idea.
One strong visual.
Very little copy.
Clear branding.
Trying to squeeze a headline, paragraph, phone number, website address, six services and three calls to action onto a roadside billboard is unlikely to produce the desired effect.
Creative therefore needs to be developed specifically for the environment in which people will see it.
Can you measure whether it works?
Measurement requires some care.
Google Ads can tell us that somebody clicked an advertisement and subsequently completed a tracked action. A billboard doesn’t work in quite the same way.
Campaign delivery data can tell us how the outdoor campaign performed from a media perspective.
From a broader marketing perspective, we can also monitor changes in:
- Branded Google searches
- Direct website traffic
- Google Business Profile activity
- Website enquiries
- Phone calls
- Geographic lead volume
- Overall campaign performance
For particular campaigns, dedicated landing pages, QR codes, memorable URLs or promotional codes may provide additional measurement opportunities.
The important thing is not to pretend that every billboard impression can be directly attributed to a sale.
Instead, Digital Out-of-Home advertising should be considered as part of the wider customer journey.
Viva Digital can manage CAASie campaigns for you
Although CAASie provides businesses with the technology to manage their own campaigns, not every business owner wants another advertising platform to learn, manage and monitor.
Viva Digital can manage CAASie and Digital Out-of-Home campaigns on behalf of our clients.
More importantly, we can integrate them with the digital marketing you’re already doing.
Our management service can include:
- Campaign strategy
- Identifying suitable locations and screens
- Geographic and audience planning
- Budget recommendations
- Campaign scheduling
- Creative direction
- Campaign setup
- Ongoing monitoring and optimisation
- Reporting
- Coordination with Google Ads and Meta Ads
- Website and landing-page optimisation
- Broader campaign analysis
The important distinction is that we’re not interested in putting your business on a billboard simply for the sake of saying you’re on a billboard.
We want to determine where outdoor advertising fits within your overall marketing strategy and how it can support the other channels you’re already investing in.
Is CAASie right for every business?
No.
For some businesses, the next marketing dollar may still be better invested in Google Ads, SEO, Meta Ads, improving the website or fixing conversion tracking.
But for businesses that already have those fundamentals working — or businesses that need to build strong awareness within a defined geographic market — Digital Out-of-Home advertising provides another interesting channel to consider.
The attraction of platforms such as CAASie is that businesses can approach outdoor advertising with many of the characteristics they have become accustomed to with digital marketing: geographic control, scheduling, flexible budgets, reporting and campaign optimisation.
That makes outdoor advertising considerably more accessible than many business owners might assume.
Interested in adding digital billboards to your marketing?
If you’re already running Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO or other digital marketing campaigns, Viva Digital can assess whether CAASie and Digital Out-of-Home advertising could complement your existing strategy.
We can plan, set up and manage the campaign for you, from choosing appropriate locations and developing the creative through to monitoring the campaign and coordinating it with your existing digital advertising.
Talk to Viva Digital about managed Digital Out-of-Home advertising.
