What are some challenges that you’re working to overcome at the moment?

Having been in the market since 2020, I would say that Seventh Decimal overcame some significant challenges in terms of spreading awareness and getting the endorsement of major stakeholders on the measurement methodology. Now that Streach is rolled out and is heavily used by the industry, some new, yet smaller, challenges emerged that we are focusing on, such as:

1. Remaining relevant in what we are offering to all stakeholders.
2. The level of customisation on the system.
3. Its interoperability and connection with other ad tech (like DSPs/SSPs) or trading desks, among others.

Additionally, I would also like to highlight that some challenges exist in the industry that impacts us as a measurement system but are beyond our capacity to solve solely, and that is why we invited stakeholders to a round table on a technical committee to discuss those challenges and prioritise them based on the industry demand.

I believe that you’re creating a technical committee. Would you please tell us a bit more about this? How is the formation of the technical committee progressing?

Oh yes, indeed, a technical committee to launch a JIC (Joint Industry Currency) was created and includes representatives from the media agencies (MCN Group, Publicis Media Group and Omnicom Group) and media owners (Al Arabia, BackLite Media, Elevision, Hypermedia, and MPN).

The technical committee will have to take collective decisions to standardise, enrich and empower the existing OOH media measurement system.

The topics of the round table include:

• Standardisation of Ad formats

• OOH Inventory naming conventions and unique identifiers

• Metrics Nomenclature, definitions, and calculations

• Transit and place-based media

• Introduction of additional qualitative metrics

We were extremely happy with the warm welcome that stakeholders showed to our initiative, supporting us in driving a mid to long-term roadmap for the OOH media measurement system in the UAE.

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What are Seventh Decimal’s plans for the near future?

This year advertisers have started looking at OOH measurement and data to analyse their campaign’s performance and rethink their OOH strategies. Consequently, we are forecasting major growth in the industry.

We will continue to support agencies and advertisers in their efforts to highlight the potential of OOH; Through the measurement data of Streach (Reach/Frequency/Impressions), advertisers can now accurately model and fairly value the contribution of OOH to their overall media mix and assess their ROAS. Seventh Decimal will extend its support to provide data for agencies with the ultimate goal of increasing the OOH’s share of the omnichannel marketing spend.

One such initiative is the partnership between Seventh Decimal, BackLite Media and Reprise/MCN Group, which we announced a few weeks ago, to collaborate for studies dedicated to the understanding of OOH’s return on ad spend (ROAS) across MCN brands.