Clear Channel Brochure Jan 2021

Clear Channel International’s Digital Transformation IN ASSOCIATION WITH

CLEAR CHANNEL INTERNATIONAL

DIGITAL REPORT 2021

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Clear Channel International’s Digital Transformation

JANUARY 2021

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WRITTEN BY

WILLIAM SMITH PRODUCED BY

MIKE SADR

www.c l e a rc ha nne l i nt e rna t i o n a l. com

CLEAR CHANNEL INTERNATIONAL

Chief Technology Officer Ola Reppling discusses how Clear Channel International’s ongoing digital transformation is enabled by its culture

O

la Reppling holds the role of Chief Technology Officer at Clear Channel International, an out of home advertising

and infrastructure business. The company has a heritage dating back over a century, and has a bold vision to create the future of media.

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“We have 17 different markets in Europe,” says Reppling. “For over 100 years, we’ve been helping brands meet people on the move. As a result, the culture is very customer-driven and focuses on solving customer problems.”

In recent times, the aim has been to combine that heritage and experience with new technology into a cohesive whole. A large part of this is to integrate Clear Channel International’s markets together, as Reppling explains, “we’re bringing all territories together as a single cohesive team, with a shared vision, purpose and mission.”

As CTO, much of Reppling’s work has been in enabling that transition and unification, to place more integrated processing at Clear Channel’s core.

One of the ways Reppling is doing this is by partnering with companies such as network solution

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“We’re in the transition phase from being 17 small companies into becoming a corporate entity” — Ola Reppling, CTO, Clear Channel International

www.c l e a rc ha nne l i nt e rna t i o n a l. com

BROADSIGN AND CLEAR CHANNEL: DIGITAL PARTNERS IN OUT-OF-HOME Chief Revenue Officer Martin Dollevoet on Broadsign’s partnership with Clear Channel and momentum in out-of-home advertising Broadsign is a global company providing software for out-of-home networks. “We work with almost all of the world’s largest out-of-home networks and not just on the digital side, but also paperbased out-of-home networks,” says Maarten Dollevoet, Chief Revenue Officer at Broadsign.

“Clients use the Broadsign platform for anything from ad serving to network operations, and also to manage and optimise their sales workflows - as well as connecting to new channels, like programmatic buying.”

The out-of-home industry has experienced considerable growth on the digital side, with market leader Broadsign being ideally placed to influence trends. One is digitisation, the evolution from posters and printed billboards to digital signs. “With the move to digital, advertisers are able to leverage its inherent flexibility to react in real-time to content changes, audience movement, as well as the ability to use data for improved audience targeting and to dynamically change screen content,” says Dollevoet. “Content is King, but context is everything. While we aren’t close to the Tom Cruise-style, Minority Report type of targeting, we can deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

One example was a recent campaign for takeout food, where the content automatically displayed a ‘pick-up’ message when the sun was shining, versus promoting the ‘home delivery’ option when it was raining.

When Clear Channel International was looking for a best-in-class content management system to support its digital transformation, it chose Broadsign and its offering. “The relationship has really flourished and has become a strong

Maarten Dollevoet @Broadsign

partnership. After the CMS, the team at Clear Channel wanted to leverage more of the platform to help them scale other parts of their business.

It added Broadsign Direct, a tool to help them scale their sales organisation so salespeople were able to respond to customer requests and RFPs quicker, and sell more of their network at a premium. What started out as an initial relationship on the CMS side has become a true partnership for the rest of the business.”

While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had an undoubted impact on out-of-home advertising, changes in the online space have revealed fresh opportunities. “With the impact of what’s happening in the online world with privacy concerns and the disappearance of the cookie, we actually believe the momentum for out-of-home is bigger than ever.” broadsign.com

E X E C U T I V E P R O FILE :

Ola Reppling Title: CTO

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Industry: Advertising Ola Reppling holds the role of Chief Technology Officer at Clear Channel International, a position he has held since July 2020. Reppling has been with the company almost two years, driving technology transformation in different roles.

In his role of CTO, Reppling is currently focused on building an effective and efficient ‘technology factory’ that will serve all business units with the technology needed for tomorrow’s business challenges.

With Reppling’s belief in rigidity at the core to enable flexibility at the edge, his work focuses on alignment, standardization and modernization, while also building a high performing team across 17 countries.

Reppling has a long career bridging technology and business to drive tech-fueled transformations in many industries including IT, Manufacturing and Telecoms. Reppling holds a MSc in Information technology alongside a MSc in Business from Uppsala University. www.c l e a rc ha nne l i nt e rna t i o n a l. com

CLEAR CHANNEL INTERNATIONAL

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“Going digital means, one panel offers hundreds of thousands of opportunities” — Ola Reppling, CTO, Clear Channel International

provider Meraki. “With Meraki, we’re getting a real baseline of the right infrastructure,” he says. “We want to have SD-WAN and a proper network across all of Europe that we can rely on. Historically, we’ve had 17 different networks, and we had at least 10 different data centres with varying degrees of different clouds.”

The cloud itself is another focus, but Reppling is conscious of getting the balance right between a cloud-first vision and he reality at hand. “We want to get rid of physical servers, but the reality is that some of our applications

Clear Channel International: Creative Advertising CLICK TO WATCH

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www.c l e a rc ha nne l i nt e rna t i o n a l. com

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CLEAR CHANNEL INTERNATIONAL

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JANUARY 2021

“We’ve changed the culture.

So, we really only need to enhance our digital capabilities” — Ola Reppling, CTO, Clear Channel International

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www.c l e a rc ha nne l i nt e rna t i o n a l. com

CLEAR CHANNEL INTERNATIONAL

need them, so we still need to have data centres for those. That’s why we’re working with CWL and Cloud Temple, to actually have a hybrid cloud approach alongside control over the data centres. CWL and Cloud Temple are helping us to make sure we have the ability to retire applications, refactor the ones that we can, and move towards the cloud.”

The company partners with Broadsign for the majority of advertising broadcast on digital screens. “Broadsign 12

offers us a unified platform to deliver digital content. One of the biggest

Clear Channel International: Making Brands Famous CLICK TO WATCH

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2:57

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“It’s about making sure there’s rigidity at the core to allow flexibility at the edge” — Ola Reppling, CTO, Clear Channel International www.c l e a rc ha nne l i nt e rna t i o n a l. com

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Clear Channel International: Where Brands Meet People CLICK TO WATCH

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15 problems we have is organising the

such as ad-blockers and being able to

billions and billions of variations that

avoid potentially annoying customers

come from selling six or ten-second

by interrupting their content with ads.

slots for commercials across 15,000

That advantage has been compounded

digital screens, seven days a week.

by digital panels. “In classic out-of-

We generally steer away from promising

home, the refresh rate here is once a

individuals screens, in favour of focusing

week, or maybe once every two weeks,

on a specific target audiences. If our cus-

or even a month. But going digital means

tomer asks to be able to reach 10 million

one screen offers tens of thousands of

people with a certain demographic, we

opportunities in just one week.”

need to be able to fulfil that - which we can with partners like Broadsign.”

Reppling emphasises the benefits of out-of-home advertising over other forms, namely in avoiding problems www.c l e a rc ha nne l i nt e rna t i o n a l. com

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