TRAD DAD – how Outdo is using the latest in AI and Digital to inform its traditional media growth

When Outdo talks about the Power of One, it’s showing how traditional, fixed media underpins outdoor advertising. It's how it generates value from the increased recognition, attention, and relevance to a brand’s audience, giving a different experience from the rapid fire digital channels where sometimes a blink is enough for a miss.

While our assets may be trad, our approach is anything but as we embrace the latest trends in digital and AI. And as you might expect from Outdo, we don’t just talk about it, we do it. We recognise that AI adoption needs to be cultural as technological, with initiatives to build and support the team. Here’s how that AI is becoming part of our makeup, and how it’s supporting Outdo’s industry-beating growth. 

In the last quarter we have employed a new AI lead to help steer the company towards becoming tech leading rather than simply tech enabling. To aid this adoption, we have run a series of company-wide training days, running through what AI is and what it isn’t, as well as when and how to use AI to get the best out of it.

We have found overwhelming support for embedding AI into our processes across all facets of our business. For example:

·       The sales team uses AI-assisted company analysis as well as aiding in pre-sale design generation. 

·       The finance team uses AI to assist in reporting and data culmination through power apps, and assisted with generative AI to speed up the learning curve to just a few days, already saving over 0.5 FTE in time, and increasing insights into financial data.

·       For revenue operations, we are working on a ground-breaking project to automate enquiries across all mediums. Utilising the latest LLMs we can now quickly build sentiment analysis tools to accurately read intent from enquiries to automate responses and processes. This single process alone moves us out of the past, saving upwards of 500 hours monthly for our marketing teams, and allows us to continue innovating and paving our way in the OOH sector.

Recognising the human capital requirements for AI, we now have an internal AI super team, consisting of our most AI-literate team members across the business to help superspeed development and adoption, and setting Outdo up for future scalability. Pairing this with some of the best training modules available, we are setting the stage to turn this team into fully fledged and accredited AI experts that can keep up to date with the ever-changing rapid developments in AI.

No one can underestimate the impact of AI across our businesses and our lives, and at Outdo we’re making sure that this is a positive impact for our teams and our customers. We’ll keep you updated as we embrace new developments, and next up we’ll be talking more about our digital and data innovations.

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