Rolling power cuts are crippling digital out of home media

As South Africa's electricity crisis worseness, DOOH faces challenging times ahead.

KONKA in Pimville, Soweto

Kena Outdoor’s expansion into the Digital Out of Home (DOOH) media space has been a triumphant one as we have expertly adapted to the needs of the market. However, with over two hundred days of load shedding predicted during 2023, the DOOH space faces darkness.

Our countrywide digital offering includes programmatic technology that allows for the automated planning, buying, selling, and measuring of adverts placed on digital screens. What makes this technology so exciting is that it allows us to provide targeted solutions to our clients. However, due to loadshedding as the planned blackouts are referred to in South Africa, many digital screens go dark as soon as the lights go off.

Katherine Street, Sandton

OOH in South Africa is a longstanding advertising medium and the introduction of digital screens has brought the same dynamism as television and cell phones to an age-old format. DOOH has been proven to have the same kind of audience retention as the aforementioned mediums as it offers an interactive solution where brands can time their advertising to their targeted audiences’ peak times.

In fact, it has been reported that DOOH has seen an increase in audience size as the innovative solution brings TV-like advertising to the audience’s daily commute. However, the consistent blackouts have affected audience size and overall retention, making integrated solutions not as effective as they should be.

Katherine Street, Sandton

As Kena Outdoor, an entity that prides itself on being innovative and responsive to the demands of the market and the ever-changing circumstances, we are currently working on implementing a solution that will render loadshedding-related outages a thing of the past for our clients. Our solutions look to make use of renewable energy and other resources that will make 24/7 capabilities a reality. It’s often in times of great challenges that, great innovations happens. We are excited at the prospect of adapting and continuing to serve our clients even in these uncertain times.

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