Say RIP to the RFP: Why Real-Time Availability Data is a Game-Changer for OOH Advertising

It’s October 25th, and the countdown to Halloween has begun!  We’ve got exciting news to share about our ever-expanding access to real-time OOH inventory availability data – but first, in honor of spooky szn, let’s begin with a frightening tale of an out-of-home media planning process gone terribly wrong…

The Nightmare on Madison Avenue

Nancy is a hard-working marketer planning a huge new product launch campaign.  She diligently prepares a comprehensive RFP, sends it out to dozens of vendors, and anxiously waits to receive detailed proposals outlining available out-of-home ad units.  

A week later, as she reviews the proposals, she becomes giddy with excitement. They include exactly what she’d hoped to find: a handful of stunning, high-impact ad units – and a few others that are perfectly positioned to reach her target audience. These, she decides, will be the cornerstone of the entire buy… she just needs to convince leadership to shell out a few more bucks.  

First, she turns to her creative department and begs them to quickly create a mock design for a few of the oddly-shaped spectaculars. They are busy, but they owe her a favor, so they deliver within a couple of days.

Then she crafts a detailed argument outlining exactly why these units are absolute must-haves – complete with the beautiful new mocks.  She books a meeting with her bosses.  A few days later, she delivers the pitch flawlessly, and – hallelujah! – secures the incremental budget.

Nancy eagerly reaches out to the vendors to book the campaign and finds – to her horror – that her cornerstone ad units are all gone! In the time it took her to get approval, the units were sold to another advertiser – leaving Nancy with a gaping hole in her media plan and in an awkward position with her leadership team.

The Problem with RFPs

As Nancy’s nightmare illustrates, the old RFP process is deeply flawed and doesn’t align with the realities of modern marketing. The pace of marketing has sped up exponentially.  In today’s dynamic marketplace, marketers must move fast.  A digital, real-time pace has become the expectation and the norm.

Of course, the trend toward ever-more-agile marketing has been evolving over the past twenty years, but it was – like so many others – amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Over the past two years, marketers have been forced to further embrace a mindset and level of marketing agility that is unlikely to change in the near future.

And the old RFP process is simply not able to keep up.  It’s too slow and too cumbersome – especially when you’re dealing with an out-of-home ad market like the one we see today, with limited supply and skyrocketing demand.

The Modern Solution: Real-Time Availability Data

Now, what if you could just log into a platform, apply a few intuitive filters and data layers, and – BAM! – see everything that’s available immediately, in real-time…? This level of fully-transparent, real-time availability data would be a gamechanger, no?

In some cases, such as those initiatives for which you already know exactly what you want, you could avoid the RFP process entirely – shaving weeks off of your timeline. (After all, if you can already see, in real-time, everything that’s available, you don’t need to take the time to ask about availability!)

Of course, there will always still be some campaigns for which you want to brainstorm with media owners and OOH specialists… and that’s one important process that an RFP facilitates.  In this case, an OOH media buying platform featuring real-time availability data would allow you to level-up these conversations – by focusing on your business goals, campaign KPIs, and the ideal OOH media strategy to help you achieve both.  (Here at AdQuick, our team of OOH experts loves that they’re able to focus on strategy over the minutiae of campaign execution!)

Either way, real-time inventory availability data provides the degree of transparency that modern marketers require to execute agile campaigns. It allows marketers to:

• receive RFPs faster,
• maintain an accurate, real-time understanding of which inventory is available,
• see when inventory is in high demand and moving fast, so they can manage internal processes accordingly,
• optimize their campaigns with ease, and
• make media planning decisions faster.

…sounds pretty good, right?  We think so too.  That’s why we’ve made direct API integrations enabling real-time inventory availability a top priority.  It’s good for our customers and good for the industry.

In fact, AdQuick has direct API integrations and more real-time availability data than any other OOH buying platform.  And our access to real-time availability data keeps growing, as we build out new API integrations with some of the biggest OOH media owners in the industry.  This means more accurate inventory data, even faster campaign planning & execution, and increased flexibility for campaign optimization.

Halloween may be just around the corner, but you shouldn’t let your OOH planning process become a nightmare.  In a world where speed is a competitive advantage, AdQuick’s lightning-fast OOH planning and execution – including real-time inventory availability – helps our customers win again and again. If only someone had told Nancy…

Interested in learning more about how AdQuick modernizes the out-of-home buying process? Schedule a call with one of our OOH experts, today.

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