Public Funding for Enigma Code Limited

The UK's OOH advertising industry faces many problems in a world defined by COVID-19\. The general economic downturn and reductions in outdoor audiences have resulted in an 80% drop in OOH spending from March to June 2020\. Furthermore, long-standing industry issues have conflated with the unpredictable advertising landscape and consumer behaviours. A lack of standardisation, flexibility and limited opportunities for granular demographic targeting in digital OOH means that advertisers have lost confidence and are reluctant to spend their budgets on this channel vs online, TV, radio and others. Where OOH campaigns are booked, these are currently low cost, have short turnarounds and incur high risks due to unexpected COVID-19 developments. This situation is also adversely affecting the industry's overall sustainability and ambition to implement clean growth and net zero initiatives. DOOH.com is proposing research to create an online, comprehensive digital OOH campaign management platform and workflow called DELIVER that uses reusable and flexible 'container' files to be run on digital OOH screens. By providing greater flexibility, accountability and granularity of messaging as standard, overall risks will be reduced and efficacy increased for advertisers. In this way, DELIVER will help to restore advertiser confidence and spending in OOH. Not only will DELIVER help the UK's OOH industry in the short-to-medium term by protecting related businesses, it will also help it to 'build back better' by encouraging more advertisers to run their OOH as digital, flexible and granular campaigns. This will help the hundreds of thousands of workers involved in the UK OOH ecosystem and also directly put back money into local government services, where local councils/authorities receive revenue shares as landlords for OOH sites.

This project aims to create a software platform that can analyse multiple broadcast feeds in real-time and enable the placement of virtual advertising, both highly accurately and reliably. The project is led by Move.ai who have core expertise in performance data acquisition, volumetric animation and static instance visualisation, all using computer vision. The project partner is Enigma Code Ltd, trading as TVR, who are a virtual advertising agency with strong links with the world's leading and largest sports marketing and advertising agencies.