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DOOH, Advance or Retreat?
Interview with William Uy, GM, Kinetic Investment & Trading
William Uy, General Manager of Investment & Trading Department at Kinetic China who
is an experienced figure in the China OOH industry – he has spent three years in Hong
Kong and fourteen years in domestic China.
Why did Kinetic opportunity appeal to you?
A new Exco member for the China family, William admits Kinetic do provide him with a
really big challenge. As we know, Kinetic is the biggest OOH media agency in China,
running more business volume than any other counterparts. Compared with the past
seven years in OMG, he believes Kinetic can offer more learnings, challenges,
opportunities and more diversified career development. These are why he jumped at
the chance.
Besides DOOH, what other trends we are facing with now?
Ever since the beginning, OOH media communicates to target audience only in one-way
all the time. The introduction of DOOH brings interesting interaction elements through
the screens to the audiences. Digitalization of outdoor media enables people to express
their personal opinion amidst brand communication. The focus has now switched to the
response of the watchers which means much more to the advertisers. Evolution of
technology has led to “big-data” era. Lots of interesting demographic and people profile
can be obtained for analysis and designated brand communication. In the coming years,
precision marketing will be fine-tuned and be deployed in a natural way, without
causing much harassment among the “selected ones”. Purchase will happen on the
right people at the right time and place.
Besides interaction function, DOOH also pushes the development of O2O business
model. O2O is a pretty new trend for us, but it will gain great strength in the near future.
After we get the data and analyze it, the results will pay off. The key part of it is whether
we can deal with and analyze these data properly. All in all, we are still in the infant
period of O2O and look forward to more.
What Media Owners and Advertisers really care about?
Since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, waves of OOH market re-shuffling swept through the
whole country. These regulation of OOH ecosystems gave the foundation for
development of digital billboards. With less resources available owners tended to
accept more clients by lowering the entry barrier on billboard sites by switching to

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digital. At the end of the day, all they first cared about was to make more revenue
rather than keeping faith in one client occupying their valuable site.
For Advertisers, DOOH bring to them the concept of supplementing their GRP and at the
same time being able to stake a claim in the landmark areas. In this area, Focus and
White Horse lead the way as they spent loads of time in bridging up their OOH campaign
with GRP calculation.
What obstacles we are bumping into with DOOH?
William thinks lack of a commonly recognized OOH currency is still a universal problem
we are facing with. It holds back OOH development as it is hard to categorize the target
audience. Clients have different benchmark and strategies to liquidize these non-
comparable figures and come around with a way to create a platform for all media.
However, what we really need is a set of methodology that, after input of campaign
details and relevant info, can deliver sensible, readable and effective reach. It will be an
interesting project to work with our Knowledge Team to provide some clues in this area.
To launch events or to analyze data?
There comes the dilemma – just launch the event looking for greater sales or to analyze
the data we obtained. We all know the ultimate goal is to improve sales volume and
gain profits. In his opinion, we shouldn't give up any of them. Save for example the
H&M Valentine Day’s campaign launched by Kinetic really brought sensation at that
time. So the question lingered in his mind recently is whether we choose event launch
or spare efforts to analyse the data we have obtained. With advancement in technology
(like iBeacon), perhaps we have already found the answers.
Amidst his busy schedule, this whole conversation was brought to a close, and was a
pleasant one indeed! Bravo, William, Thank you so much!