Astral: 31,000 OOH Ad Faces Across Canada… and Counting
Mel Scott, Tuesday April 10th, 2018
Karine Moses, President of Astral Media, the OOH (out-of-home) advertising division of Bell Media, spoke with Mel Stott for this Digital Signage Pulse exclusive.
Please tell us about Astral Media’s OOH assets. Where are your advertising faces, what types are they and how many are there?
Astral is one of Canada’s leading out-of-home advertising companies with more than 31,000 ad faces strategically located in the British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Québec and Nova Scotia markets. We have built one of the country’s most innovative media platforms that keeps up the latest technological trends. This allows us to deliver powerful messages that engage and connect with consumers on behalf or our advertisers.
We have five product lines: Outdoor, Digital Large Format, Airport, Transit and Street Furniture. 10% of our faces are digital and we have a five-year growth plan to convert a number of static faces to increase the number of digital faces.
One of the big launches this year was the unveiling of our new digital wrap, named the Roofscape, at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto. It’s the longest horizontal full motion digital display in Canada and is a major addition to Astral’s high profile portfolio.
Also, in partnership with Toronto Pearson International Airport, we introduced two new large- format digital superboards in close proximity to the country’s largest airport. The new structures are designed to resemble the tail of an aircraft and provide information about the airport while offering an advertising opportunity reaching millions of commuters and passengers annually.
We are constantly expanding our footprint across Canada.
In December, you announced the launch of a new programmatic solution for large – format digital OOH inventory. How has that been received by advertisers and agencies?
We launched the first ever, automated, self-serve digital OOH programmatic platform and our agency partners and advertisers are eager to run their campaigns through it.
This automated buying platform cause a great deal of interest on the part of media planners. We discovered that digital (online advertising) planners, are most interested in this new tool as well. This mechanism follows the same workflow they use to buy all online media so it gives them another tool in which to optimize their cross-media campaigns.
In Q1, we’ve already had tier one advertisers use the platform and are pleased with its delivery.