When the Client Goes Ooh
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When the Client Goes Ooh

PAOLO DOSI, CEO OF CLEAR CHANNEL ITALIA, TELLS HOW IT IS TO MANAGE BILLBOARD ADVERTISING AND BIKE SHARING

The first thing you run into when you enter Clear Channel’s Milanese HQ is a bicycle of BikeMi, the bike sharing service that the company has been running since 2008 in partnership with the City of Milan. A few rooms to the right, in the office of CEO Paolo Dosi, there is a huge photo on the wall of a driving wheel of a Ferrari F1 racing car. Instead of the usual buttons, there are listed the key drivers of the company: “global”, “smart”, “distinctive”, “innovative”. Bocconian, class of 1965, Dosi is at the helm of the media company, which has been active in the field of out-of-home advertising (Ooh) since 2013. The word “billboard” is insufficient to describe the operations of Clear Channel which, in addition of 6,100 commercial posters, manages thousands of urban fixtures, as well as digital advertising stations.

What kind of challenges you had to face when you took the position of CEO?

The company was chronically in the red. I started a major and painful business reorganization, as I decided to focus on the core business, while outsourcing the maintenance and posting of billboards. We were 210 employees, now we are 150. Since the contract in 2013 with Aeroporti di Rome, we have made a strong push for expansion, especially digital expansion. In 2012 we had 43 digital stations, at the end of the present year we’ll have about 700, in 2016 we forecast growth beyond the 1,000 mark. In 2014, our revenues grew by 40%, and we have started to hire again, particularly people with marketing and IT skills.

What are the trends in the Ooh market?

It’s not a healthy market at the moment: new innovative solutions must be found to attract spending budgets back that are now invested elsewhere. We must broaden our spectrum, by building mockups of stations, going digital which is the European trend, and by investing in bike sharing as we have done in Milano and Verona. The advertising billboard is no longer the driving business and that’s why now there’s talk of out-of-home 2.0: before there was just the billboard, now there are aggregation places where people can interact with brands, such as railway stations, airports, city centers.

Bike sharing is a service but also a communication product. How did you go from posting billboards to co-managing fleets of bicycles?

Until 2012 it was considered a service which enabled a relationship with the city administration: Clear Channel managed it in exchange for the installation of advertising stations across the city. Over the last few years, we have exploited it from a commercial point of view. Recently, we have installed electricity-aided e-bikes in BikeMi station, thus introducing the first integrated bike sharing service in the world. It’s a communication product that works well in times of geolocalization: local businesses can brand the bike sharing stations of their area.

What are the specificities of Italy?

In Italy, the competitive arena is too fragmented, and suffers from a lack of rules. Milano meets the standards of the best European cities, but it is an exception. For instance, Rome has the worst outdoor advertising in the world.

What’s the future of Ooh?

Already today, whoever has a smartphone can intearact with certain advertising stations. Tomorrow, we should be able to include our systems in programmatic advertising, the system by which advertisements are sold in real time by accessing the average profile of those present in a certain shopping environment, like an airport or a mall.

by Claudio Todesco
Translated by Alex Foti


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