This Tactics + Insights guide, sponsored by Vistar Media, explores the opportunities that arise from integrating branding and performance marketing channels. As part of this report, Digiday and Vistar Media surveyed 113 marketing professionals to learn more about how they balance and prioritize budgets and objectives across both approaches.
Marketers face constant pressure to build brand recognition while driving bottom-line results. However, branding and performance goals are typically executed through separate campaigns and distinct strategies, escalating costs and leading to missed opportunities for optimization and cross-channel synergy.
This challenge is evident in a survey of 113 marketing professionals conducted by Digiday and Vistar Media. When asked about the biggest obstacles to achieving their marketing goals, the top responses were cost restrictions and siloed data operations.
Additionally, marketers overwhelmingly cite difficulty measuring the impact on sales as the biggest hurdle to balancing brand building and performance marketing — highlighting a critical lack of visibility into campaign effectiveness.
Thanks to technological advancements, marketers can more seamlessly connect their media channels and gain clearer visibility into the relationship between short-term results and long-term brand equity.
“Advanced analytics can now measure the influence of branding campaigns on conversions,” said Faryn Brown, vp of addressable activation at Kinesso. “This evolution unlocks new opportunities for marketers to reach incremental audiences, experiment with media and creative, improve efficiency and maximize conversions.”
But change can be difficult. Institutionalized thinking and outdated processes that pigeonhole media channels are significant barriers to progress. The belief that certain advertising channels excel at only one function prevents marketers from seizing opportunities and adapting to evolving platforms.
“Media teams are often siloed, which results in budgets and objectives being confined to their respective groups,” said Lucy Markowitz, general manager of the U.S. marketplace at Vistar Media. “The challenge is designing the media around the objectives, rather than the other way around.”
When branding and performance strategies are integrated, marketers can use campaign analytics to allocate resources more efficiently. This approach ties branding efforts to conversions, offering clearer insights into the elements driving results.
Digital out-of-home is a good example of a media channel historically used for branding purposes that has been recently transformed by new technology. With millions of connected screens tied back to large-scale omnichannel campaigns, DOOH’s effect on performance can be measured with corresponding KPIs like web conversions, foot traffic and actual purchases.
Survey results indicate marketers are looking to DOOH to satisfy a broad range of marketing objectives, with high reach, innovative formats and flexibility topping the list of benefits.
DOOH adoption is strong, with 84% of surveyed marketers already using it and nearly half (49%) planning to increase their spend in the next 12–18 months.
“Out-of-home was notoriously known as an inflexible channel,” said Laura Brandes, vp of growth at OOH agency Rapport. “Traditionally, it involved long lead times and fixed four-week runs with no ability to adjust to changing circumstances. Digital out-of-home brings programmatic capabilities into the mix, which makes it easier to adapt and ensures ads are more impactful in the moments that matter.”
The evolution of technology and data has enabled marketers to build smarter and more relevant campaigns. With the right approach, brands can connect with consumers and influence action at key moments in the purchase journey, creating personalized experiences in unexpected places.
A recent campaign for Kia’s EV9 all-electric SUV demonstrates the untapped potential of situationally aware advertising. The programmatic campaign utilized EV charging stations with digital displays, featuring technology to identify the make and model of any automobile receiving a charge. Using this data, Kia designed a dynamic campaign with three tailored messages — evergreen creative when charging stations were idle, conquesting ads for non-Kia owners and loyalty messaging for Kia drivers.
Using real-time insights from first-party data, this AI-powered DOOH campaign drove a 517% increase in unaided awareness, a 33% lift in consideration, a 27% boost in purchase intent and an 8% rise in actual car purchases. Further, the campaign catalyzed a significant 171% increase in sales across Kia’s entire electric vehicle lineup, indicating that EV9’s DOOH ads drove broader interest and purchases in Kia’s offerings.
“Personalization can refer to a wide range of variables, whether that’s an audience, environment or real-time data inputs,” said Markowitz. “The question then becomes: How can you achieve that at scale? With programmatic out-of-home, brands can seamlessly integrate these factors to ensure their messages remain relevant in the moment — even when campaigns span 20 different media owners across various DMAs, countries, cultures and languages.”
Branding campaigns that account for their environment — setting, mood and timing — have substantially enhanced audience engagement. A study from Sapio Research in collaboration with DoubleVerify revealed that 69% of consumers are more likely to look at an ad if it is relevant to the context in which it appears.
Travel Texas ran an omnichannel marketing campaign that leveraged context to boost engagement and conversions. The plan included DOOH, TV, audio, digital, social media and print, with the DOOH component using hyper-local creatives to connect with travelers based on their location and behavior. This included dayparting to showcase activities like hiking during the daytime and fine dining during evening hours to help meet consumers with messaging corresponding to their assumed mindsets.
DOOH emerged as a standout channel in the campaign, validated by multiple measurement studies. Among consumers exposed to the out-of-home ads, travel to Texas was 176% higher than those unexposed, with 60% of visitors returning to Texas multiple times. The campaign also drove significant gains across other KPIs, including a 22% lift in consideration, a 78% rise in future travel intent and a 94% increase in visits to the Travel Texas website. This success underscores how DOOH drives both top-of-funnel awareness and critical lower-funnel outcomes.
Forward-thinking marketers recognize that impactful brand interactions can influence lower-funnel objectives. By connecting brand awareness with performance goals, they gain a clearer picture of the marketing channels driving the best results.
“We run DOOH campaigns that drive doctor appointments, increase store visits and even inspire travel, all through contextually relevant ads,” said Markowitz. “It’s safe to say we have all experienced the power of OOH — especially when it’s aligned with the moment. By integrating DOOH into omnichannel strategies, marketers can seamlessly connect consumers’ online and offline interactions, deliver a cohesive brand experience and amplify the results of their campaigns.”
Omnichannel marketing has proven effective, but there is plenty of untapped potential. Integrating new channels into the programmatic media mix allows marketers to analyze cross-channel performance, identify emerging target audiences and bridge performance and branding goals for deeper insights into attribution and optimization.
“Thanks to programmatic buying, DOOH is increasingly connected to the wider omnichannel mix,” said Markowitz. “While it’s great at driving awareness, it also plays a crucial role in achieving mid- and bottom-of-funnel objectives.”
A global technology company measured the true impact of DOOH in its marketing mix using a technique called device ID passback. This solution allowed the brand to understand who was exposed to its DOOH ads, anonymize them in a privacy-safe way and retarget them across other channels, including audio and online video.
DOOH, paired with these retargeting efforts, outperformed the standalone channels in the brand’s media mix, together driving an 8% lift in video completion rates and increased click-through rates for audio (5x) and online video (2x). Cross-channel measurement like this provides much-needed visibility for the 66% of marketers who struggle to measure the effect of brand efforts on sales, according to the Digiday and Vistar Media poll.
“By analyzing audience media exposure, we can determine which sequences drive faster conversions,” Brown said. “Are consumers who see a DOOH ad before hearing an audio ad or watching CTV more likely to take action? Are they converting faster than those exposed to only one channel? More of our clients are starting to understand that even if DOOH traditionally falls into the realm of an awareness campaign, it is ultimately often helping to drive conversions.”
In this fast-changing media landscape, striking the right balance between performance and brand awareness is an ongoing challenge. Surveyed marketers rank data management and measuring ROI as two of their top three challenges in achieving marketing objectives — after budget constraints. To navigate these obstacles, brands and agencies must rethink how they approach media channels. Even traditionally siloed placements should be evaluated within a broader strategic framework. When executed correctly, a single placement can serve multiple functions across the funnel.
“Each campaign component should reinforce efforts across complementary channels,” said Markowitz. “For instance, programmatic DOOH should integrate with a brand’s broader digital strategy — drawing from channels like search and social, while simultaneously contributing to them.”
Additionally, during periods of change, experimentation and a creative approach are essential to determining the right media mix. Advances in technology are equipping media with new capabilities, but turning these into opportunities requires flexibility, patience and a willingness to adapt.
“Testing and learning are part of the process — how can marketers ever know what works if they don’t experiment?” said Brown. “It’s okay to fail, but only if you establish the purpose of the test and define the success metrics at the beginning. This will help them fail quickly, learn from it and test again.”
Despite past struggles to balance brand-building and performance marketing, technological advancements have led to a more efficient connection of branding efforts to conversions of all types, ultimately improving campaign optimization. DOOH is just one strong example of this shift as it has evolved from a traditional branding tool into a measurable, performance-driven channel with increasing adoption among marketers seeking flexibility and efficiency.
Advancements and innovations have led to highly personalized, situationally aware campaigns that drive brand impact and business results — demonstrating the power of programmatic OOH advertising at scale. The same principles — contextually relevant branding campaigns, such as those that align messaging with consumers’ location and mindset, lead to substantial bottom-funnel results — can be applied to many other traditionally brand-level channels and formats. Integrating them into the omnichannel media mix enhances cross-channel measurement to bridge branding and performance goals with deeper attribution insights and greater impact.
About Vistar Media
Vistar Media is the home of out-of-home — providing brands, marketers and media owners with the world’s first truly intelligent platform for buying and selling OOH. Vistar hosts the world’s most extensive digital out-of-home inventory globally, offering the scale, data and expertise that allow brands to capture a better kind of attention. With a full suite of platforms to choose from — demand-side platform, supply-side platform, ad server and Cortex CMS system — Vistar has built the world’s largest marketplace for OOH transactions.
Headquartered in New York, Vistar has a presence in more than 30 countries, working with hundreds of brand marketers and media owner networks to power an OOH that’s both timeless and future-proof.
For more information, visit www.vistarmedia.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
