Digital strategy streamlines customer engagement

ExterionMedia is a leading Out-of-Home (OOH) media owner in the UK. The company, through their impressive portfolio of assets (traditional and digital) across Bus, National Rail, Tram, and TfL Rail networks enable brands and advertisers to get their message to the hearts of the people across the UK.

Exterion’s vision is to be the first choice for advertisers, franchise partners, and employees in the Out-of-Home industry. From a market perspective, the OOH market is growing significantly and the global spending on digital out-of-home advertising (DOOH) is expected to grow 10% this year and to account for more than 50% of the OOH spend.

In this context, ExterionMedia wanted to revamp their customer engagement strategy to respond faster to changing customer expectations, improve collaboration by automating their workflows and facilitating a 360-degree view of inventories and assets managed by them.

ExterionMedia partnered with Thoughtworks to drive this strategic initiative to create a convergence of automation and business process. The objective was to facilitate a unified view of the engagement for brands and agencies and eliminate siloed interactions. The traditional buying process in the OOH industry involved several interactions with direct sales and operations teams. The direct sales teams had to manually cross-check availability of inventories, and constantly connect with back-office operations team for pricing and offer related queries. ExterionMedia wanted to automate the entire order lifecycle to enhance the experience, productivity and improve inventory yield.

Thoughtworks worked with ExterionMedia to build an inventory trading platform, AdFloe, that would transform the entire OOH operations delivery, right from asset management to scheduling to art/content management to execution of outdoor campaigns. 

The approach enabled ExterionMedia to connect with several buyers through a single platform and increased the occupancy rate.

AdFloe also suggests the most suitable asset options based on the customers’ desired outcomes. The AdFloe platform acts as a connecting tissue in bridging various workflows to deliver market-leading innovation and brand outreach for ExterionMedia’s customers. Today, ExterionMedia’s sales team get real-time access to inventory availability to deliver flexible and dynamic campaigns for their customers while enhancing the experience quotient. The automated approach simplified the media buying process and increased revenue for ExterionMedia.

The AdFloe platform significantly simplified inventory/asset management and helped ExterionMedia drive dynamic and time-based pricing based on demand. This, in turn, improved sales team productivity and response times for customer requests regarding outdoor campaigns that ensured better customer engagements and revenue enhancements.

Thoughtworks adopted agile and lean principles towards streamlining the engagements and leveraged advanced languages, new age frameworks and robust cloud-based infrastructure to drive this transformation for ExterionMedia.

Our approach reduced the effort incurred by brands to check current inventories and asset's availability from 3 hours to real time. The solution also streamlined overall operations and enhanced the inventory occupancy rate by 10% year-on-year. ExterionMedia now intends to grow their inventory platform strategy to a larger ecosystem and bring brands, agencies, and media houses onto a single platform.