Ben Gibb was appointed QMS NZ’s national sales director late last year and officially took on the role in January. He shares his views on the current state of the out of home advertising market and the company’s future prospects.
What is the biggest opportunity for the NZ OOH industry?
Programmatic DOOH (pDOOH). What needs to shift is the perception and even education of how it can enhance OOH. PDOOH is sometimes seen as remnant or second tier, when in reality it’s where powerful capability can thrive. You can activate across a whole city at a specific moment, serve different creative to hundreds of screens simultaneously based on live context, or switch a campaign on and off in minutes. Those are tools TV and digital buyers already reach for instinctively. Our job is to make sure they’re thinking of DOOH in that same way. Getting that message across to both existing OOH spenders as well as those who’ve never considered outdoor before is a big focus this year.
What have been your priorities since you started in January?
Three things: people, market and brand. The team had done a tremendous job before I walked in, so I could go straight into building agency and client relationships, identifying where our biggest commercial opportunities are and sharpening our go-to-market approach. Alongside that, we’re transitioning from MediaWorks Outdoor to QMS, which takes real care to get right. My job is to manage that internally, so clients don’t have to think about it; they just get the new QMS.
How will QMS NZ work with QMS in Australia?
There’s a lot of shared expertise across the Tasman, from digitisation strategy to audience data to how we package and sell inventory. We’ll be drawing heavily on what QMS has built in Australia – particularly with the City of Sydney street furniture network – to accelerate what we do here. And for trans-Tasman clients and agencies working across both markets, common ownership creates real efficiencies, with one conversation and a consistent approach across two markets.
What new opportunities will be created for marketers and agencies by the common ownership?
A genuine ANZ offering is the big one that we are really excited by. Clients running campaigns across Australia and NZ can work with one partner: consistent data, consistent reporting, consistent capability. Never before have clients been able to own both Sydney and Auckland CBDs like they now can when we combine Auckland Transport with the City of Sydney. It also means we can bring innovation to NZ faster. The pipeline of what QMS has already proven in Australia is substantial and we get to accelerate a lot of that here, be it data products, programmatic infrastructure or creative tech.
