Out of Home, outside the box – Talon partners with streaming services Screach to deliver OTT ads to pub TVs

OOH media agency, Talon

Britain’s biggest independent OOH media agency, Talon, is to partner with the first streaming service designed and purpose built exclusively for pubs and commercial premises – Screach.

Screach allows the 27,000 venues that currently show live sports, on an estimated 125,000 TVs, to stream matches and show engaging video content without the need for a conventional pay-TV subscription or Sky box. Crucially, it also offers advertisers a programmatic screen network with the potential to deliver contextual ads to a captive audience of over 1.1 billion annual pub-goers.

The streaming service uses split screen displays and Digital Ad Insertion technology to run any combination of adverts alongside video content and live sports coverage on a venue’s TV screens, giving brands total control over what ad is shown and when.

As a purely digital network, Screach offers a transparent advertising asset that can be purchased nationally or venue by venue. This not only appeals to national brands but also to the ‘long tail’ of smaller advertisers, thanks to its unique ability to target micro-geographic areas with budget controlling capabilities akin to Google Ads.

The platform already offers real-time audience measurement, including consumer dwell times, while its fast-evolving AI technology ingests increasing amounts of data about both the venue and the audience profile. In time it will also track bar sales in real-time, which its algorithmic brain will then use to show contextualised ads to exactly the right consumers at exactly the right time.

Such capabilities and insights were previously the exclusive preserve of online advertising, and Screach’s partnership with Talon is designed to offer brands big and small a more cost-effective way to reach their target audiences across environments.

Talon, which plans and buys OOH across a range of media agencies and clients, including Omnicom Media Group, Havas Media Group and several independent agencies, is now adding Screach to its stable of advertising partners and platforms. It launched its proprietary technology platforms Plato and Ada earlier this year.

Robert Rawlinson, CEO of Screach, commented: “We’re delighted to be working with Talon to open up our unique platform to brand advertisers. Talon have built their success by offering clients innovative ways to reach their audiences, and by making smart use of technology and delivering better impact measurement.

“Screach offers brands of all sizes and budgets a way to combine the reach and power of OOH advertising with the data-led, precision targeting of programmatic content.

“Pub patrons are the ultimate captive audience. The average dwell time per customer is more than an hour, and in a pub showing live sport it is one hour 45 minutes. Compare this with the average viewing time of a typical digital OOH ad – just 4.1 seconds – and the difference is clear.

“We at Screach are looking forward to adding value to Talon’s customer offering and delivering them incremental revenues.”

Barry Cupples, CEO at Talon, added: “Screach offers one of the missing links in OOH advertising. It blends the reach of broadcast with the data-led programmatic nature of digital online and will allow us to tailor ads to suit the audience, thereby increasing relevance. Coupling this function with the capability to deliver ads embedded in engaging, live sports content makes Screach a potent new channel for brands, and an important addition to our portfolio.

“Its AI technology may be in its infancy, but even at this stage the insight and power it offers is compelling. This is a bold new form of OOH, and particularly for those categories which face restrictions in how they advertise elsewhere, the potential is huge.”