Scott Searcy

Director of Analytics, OUTFRONT Media

We understand that to brands, audiences are everything. OUTFRONT provides an integrated platform to connect brands to their target audiences in the real world. We leverage the power of technology, location, and creativity to drive reach, influence, and engagement with consumers. OUTFRONT delivers truth, trust, and transparency. Impact where it matters. 

Supernova Award Category: 
Marketing & Sales Effectiveness
The Problem: 

OUTFRONT Media identified an opportunity to visualize their advertising assets in relation to political districts for targeted advertising. OUTFRONT Media needed to blend analytics, visualization, and data storytelling together to seize this opportunity. This small-scale mapping project began in Houston, aimed at aiding a city council campaign, and caught the CEO’s interest due to its potential to significantly enhance the precision and effectiveness of all forms of advertising campaigns, a key revenue stream.

The Solution: 

OUTFRONT Media utilized mapping visualizations within Oracle Analytics Cloud to revolutionize their asset representation, beginning with a modest initiative for local political campaigns. This strategic approach involved leveraging geolocation to transform data perception, recognizing that visual maps spurred more engagement than traditional spreadsheets, expanding from a simple asset-location map to incorporating political districts, starting with Houston and scaling up to a national level. Tactics included sourcing competitor locations, mapping administrative boundaries, and developing user-friendly interfaces for non-technical sales teams to generate strategically targeted sales proposals effectively, and this project quickly evolved from a small idea to a comprehensive sales tool, now integral to national political and general sales strategies.

The Results: 

The Oracle-enabled solution has not only improved the sales process, but also enabled the company to target and capitalize on political advertising, which presents a real revenue opportunity during election cycles. The mapping tool changed how sales and marketing teams approach campaign strategies, leading to more informed and efficient decision-making. Also, productivity increased as complex revenue querying was reduced down to seconds. Oracle Analytics Cloud becane the window into the company and helped create a pathway for OUTFRONT Media's foundation for AI.

Metrics: 

Analytics is run across 45k billboards, 465k Transit (bus/rail) signs which have 14.1 billion weekly impressions. Being able to filter specifically for the political advertisements allowed to better understand the impact during campaigns. 

The Technology: 

Suite of Oracle products used: 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) includes all the services needed to migrate, build, and run IT in the cloud, from existing enterprise workloads to new cloud native applications and data platforms. OUTFRONT Media used the following OCI services and technologies:

Data persistence

  • Oracle Autonomous Database: Oracle Autonomous Database is a fully automated service that makes it easy for all organizations to develop and deploy application workloads, regardless of complexity, scale, or criticality.
  • Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse: Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is the world’s first and only autonomous database optimized for analytic workloads, including data marts, data warehouses, data lakes, and data lakehouses.
  • Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing: Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a fully automated database service optimized to run transactional, analytical, and batch workloads concurrently.
  • Oracle APEX: Oracle APEX is the world's most popular enterprise low-code application platform.
  • OCI Object Storage: OCI Object Storage enables you to securely store any type of data in its native format. OCI Object Storage is ideal for building modern applications that require scale and flexibility, as it can be used to consolidate multiple data sources for analytics, backup, or archive purposes.

Data governance

  • Oracle Autonomous Database Data Studio: Data Studio is a new set of no-code data tools built into Autonomous Database. Learn more about all the new enhancements and capabilities.
  • OCI Data Catalog: OCI Data Catalog is a metadata management service that helps data professionals discover data and support data governance.

Data refinery

  • Oracle Data Transforms: Data Transforms combines all the elements of data integration—data movement, data synchronization, data quality, and data management—to ensure that information is timely, accurate, and consistent across complex systems.
  • Oracle Data Integrator: Oracle Data Integrator is an extract, load, transform (ELT) tool that offers a graphical environment to build, manage, and maintain data integration processes in business intelligence systems.
  • Oracle Integration: Oracle Integration provides prebuilt connectivity to all your SaaS and on-premises applications, run-ready process automation templates, and a low-code visual builder for web and mobile application development.
  • OCI Data Integration: OCI Data Integration allows you to easily extract, transform, and load (ETL) data for data science and analytics.
  • OCI GoldenGate: OCI GoldenGate is a managed service providing a real-time data mesh platform, which uses replication to keep data highly available, and enabling real-time analysis.
  • OCI Data Flow: Data Flow is a fully managed Apache Spark service that performs processing tasks on extremely large datasets without infrastructure to deploy or manage.

Data access and interpretation

  • Oracle Machine Learning: Machine Learning in Oracle Database supports data exploration, preparation, and machine learning (ML) modeling at scale using SQL, R, Python, REST, automated machine learning (AutoML), and no-code interfaces.
  • Oracle Spatial: Oracle's spatial database is included in Oracle's converged database, allowing developers and analysts to get started easily with location intelligence analytics and mapping services.
  • Oracle Graph: Part of Oracle’s converged database offering, graph databases eliminate the need to set up a separate database and move data. Analysts and developers can perform fraud detection in banking, find connections and link to data, and improve traceability in smart manufacturing, all while gaining enterprise-grade security, ease of data ingestion, and strong support for data workloads.
  • Oracle Analytics Cloud: Oracle Analytics Cloud supports the entire analytics workflow, offering various ways to connect, prepare, and analyze data. Support business users by enabling self-service access to relevant data no matter where it resides in cloud infrastructure.
Disruptive Factor: 

The impact of OUTFRONT Media’s platform received public acknowledgment from the victorious city council member on social media, evidencing its real-world impact.  Internally, the initiative sparked a shift in how teams perceived and utilized data, fostering a culture of innovation and data-driven strategy. Additionally, the tool’s ease of use and effectiveness led to a behavior change among sales teams, who transitioned from traditional methods to adopting this dynamic, digital approach.

Shining Moment: 

The visualization tool's impact was profound. Initially designed in response to a single city council race, its expansion to a national political sales tool was pivotal. OUTFRONT Media saw a potential revenue opportunity for the 2024 political cycle.

About OUTFRONT Media

We leverage the power of technology, location, and creativity to drive impact and engagement where it matters.