Media company Global has brought programmatic trading for radio and outdoor advertising onto a single platform, DAX, and is recognised in Tech Monitor‘s inaugural Technology Leaders Index.
The award-wining DAX platform had already been acknowledged as a disruptive audio innovation when it launched in 2018, before media company Global — which runs radio brands Capital, Classic, LBC, Smooth and Radio X — acquired nearly 35% of the UK’s out-of-home advertising market.
Global’s DAX platform for radio and out of home gives customers the ability to buy digital outdoor campaigns through demand-side platforms (DSP), putting digital-out-of-home on the same footing as other programmatic media such as audio and video.
Chief technology officer David Henderson said that building the platform is the biggest development project Global has undertaken, with more than 40 staff and suppliers in four countries – the US, Russia, India and the UK – collaborating to bring DAX to life. This mammoth effort, particularly in light of the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, has earned the company a place in the Technology Leaders Index for its effective partnership working, as well as its innovative use of the cloud and data.
A truly disruptive use of technology, DAX enables advertisers to integrate their audio and outdoor buying, particularly in areas such as geolocation and demographic targeting. It deploys a variety of data sets and programmatic technology to accurately target audiences and measure the outcome.
Originally developed as a radio-only platform, the core project team was led by Henderson and showed its agility by pivoting mid-way through DAX’s development to also include the outdoor offering.
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The team overcame technical hurdles to build a system able to insert adverts live into a radio stream without the listener detecting audio sound level issues. On the outdoor advertising side, DAX can connect to screens with different playout technology and screen resolutions thanks to the team’s work creating custom rendering and playout software.
DAX already has plenty of admirers in the industry. Pete Markey, CMO of marketing agency TSB, says: “The platform is ahead of the game in that no other product in the market gives us access to such a large variety of audio content. The potential to fuse audio with outdoor in a programmatic, highly targeted, way is really compelling.”
