Outdoor advertising, along with out-of-home advertising, is advertising delivered to audiences outside of their homes via billboards, signs, and other kinds of visual or experiential media.
“One of the fun things about outdoor and OOH advertising is the sheer variety that is found within the space".
Outdoor advertising, along with out-of-home advertising, is advertising delivered to audiences outside of their homes via billboards, signs, and other kinds of visual or experiential media. These various formats account for thousands of locations and millions of screens and faces around the world.
In a time when everyone is always online, outdoor advertising is sometimes treated as an afterthought by marketers looking for efficient ways to connect with their audiences. This is a mistake, especially considering big tech companies are some of the biggest buyers in the out-of-home space.
Don’t worry about missing out, though. With the help of this handy guide, you’ll be all set to start using outdoor advertising to its full potential.
Why outdoor and OOH advertising are effective
“Shot on iPhone” is a long-running billboard campaign showcasing the best photographs from amateur photographers using their iPhone as a camera. And there’s a reason why Apple, one of the biggest tech companies in the world, has famously made such consistent use of outdoor ads: they work really well.
The numbers speak for themselves. In a Harris poll of US adults conducted in 2021, 41 percent of respondents claimed that they were noticing OOH advertising more than they used to, with that number climbing to 55 percent in cities. Over 80 percent of respondents claimed that they noticed OOH advertising while driving.
Even better, many respondents reported that the ads had made an impact on them. Among city dwellers, about 34% said that “OOH influenced [their] purchase decision.” About 33% said they learned of a new brand thanks to OOH ads.
Why? Well, outdoor ads are not like digital ads, which we have trained ourselves to ignore because of how they negatively impact our online experience. Outdoor advertising is instead a feature of the world around us, something that jumps out at us when we go about our day. Because good outdoor ads have a visual appeal that helps them stand out from their surroundings, they invite curiosity in a way that online ads typically don’t.
Both Google and Facebook, which own the largest digital advertising platforms in the world, also make extensive use of outdoor advertising. That should tell you something.
Types of outdoor and out-of-home advertising
One of the fun things about outdoor and OOH advertising is the sheer variety that is found within the space. From small posters to digital screens triple the size of a regulation football field, there’s an incredible array of opportunities to connect with audiences in the OOH space.
Traditional formats
Most traditional OOH formats have been around for decades. They involve static imagery placed in a single location for long periods of time. They’re great tools for distributing messages intended for large audiences of people. Here are some of the main kinds of traditional formats.
Bulletins
Bulletins are probably the first thing you think of when you think of outdoor advertising. Large-format faces that are tough to miss, you’ll typically find bulletins at the side of the road outside of town, high in the air so that they’ll catch the eye of any drivers passing by each day.
Posters
These aren’t exactly like the posters you might have had in your room growing up. Relatively large, this format is typically placed along roads inside of cities, at a height where drivers and pedestrians alike are going to see them.
Jr. posters
Tiny for a billboard, a junior poster is relatively small and typically placed not too high above eye level. It’s really a play for local traffic, both automobile and pedestrian, and with a comparatively lower price than the larger formats.
Street furniture
The term “street furniture” is a bit of a catch-all for different kinds of installations made alongside streets. Benches, transit shelters, and streetside displays can all fall into this category, as well as bike stations, electric vehicle charging stations, and more.
Wallscapes
A wallscape is a bit different from regular outdoor advertising formats. These are often painted onto the side of a building or else made of a billboard produced in size, shape, or arrangement that is out of the ordinary. Wallscapes are a very distinct visual format that is typically used by big brands looking to make a lot of noise.
Digital outdoor advertising and out-of-home formats
Just about any format that exists as a traditional media offering will also exist as a digital format as well. Digital displays come in all sizes, from small jr. posters to enormous spectaculars that take up nearly the entire exterior wall of enormous buildings. This presents a new kind of opportunity for buyers beyond what is offered by traditional formats.
The digital advantage in OOH
Digital outdoor and out-of-home advertising holds a few advantages over traditional formats. The most obvious is that a digital display can show vibrant, moving imagery that can catch the eye in a way that a static image generally can’t. But there’s also the fact that digital displays are usually driven by some sort of computer operating behind the scenes, and that opens the door to some very cool kinds of campaigns.
At a fairly basic level, digital campaigns can be made to trigger in response to all kinds of conditions - time of day, weather, sports scores, etc. This makes it easier for brands to buy up space only when it is the perfect time to reach their audience; an ad for ice cream will have a lot more appeal on a hot summer day than in the middle of winter.
But digital can also go even further than that. Connect additional technology to the display and the computer driving it, and you can produce interactive campaigns where people passing by can influence the media that appears on screen. Or, you can produce some really interesting augmented reality experiences that are sure to leave viewers amazed.
One other major advantage worth mentioning is that it’s now easier than ever to buy digital outdoor and out-of-home ad campaigns.
Programmatic outdoor advertising is here and making waves
Just like online digital advertising, digital outdoor and out-of-home advertising is now available for purchase programmatically. This means that ad slots are made available for automated purchase based on the criteria selected by the buyer. This can be used to target a specific audience demographic, or it can be used to purchase ads based on ambient conditions - such as the aforementioned weather, sports scores, time of day, etc. There’s a lot to talk about with programmatic outdoor advertising.
Leverage data for accurate audience targeting
In today’s OOH world, media planners and buyers no longer want to buy media space - they want to buy audiences. As a result, accurate audience data and measurement are more important than ever when it comes to planning and evaluating the success of a campaign. And in an increasingly cluttered media landscape, activating OOH screens at the right place and time to reach your desired demographic is key. So what are the different types of data that allow marketers to run the most effective campaigns?
First, mobile data helps advertisers understand where audiences are most likely to be throughout the day, ensuring they’re optimizing ad spend by targeting venues with the highest concentration of desired segments. With geofencing, data like device IDs, languages, age, and gender is collected from smartphones once audiences enter a defined location boundary, like the radius surrounding a particular screen.
Marketers can also combine first-party data with their OOH strategy to reach audiences with contextually relevant ads. First-party data, or data owned by the advertiser, will be increasingly important as we move into a cookieless world. Retailers, for example, often heavily invest in loyalty programs that produce key insights into their customer base. This data can be used to target specific customer segments with OOH ads across the retail trade area.
Thanks to audience measurement platforms like Quividi, many OOH screens are now equipped with cameras that capture real-time information like impressions, dwell-time, gender, and age of people exposed to an ad. Independent research firms like Nielsen and GeoPath are also widely used in the OOH industry to help accurately estimate impressions, location data, and audience insights. With this information, advertisers can get better insight into ad engagement, enabling more accurate campaign analysis.
Get ahead of the death of the cookie with OOH advertising
The alarm bells have been ringing for a while now about the death of the cookie. Though Google and other digital advertising solutions providers have promised that online ads will offer new targeting capabilities, questions remain about how easy targeting and measurement will be in just a few years.
With DOOH, however, targeting and reporting have never relied on understanding the audience down to the level of the individual. Instead, the space has grown up around identifying trends in demographic groups, allowing advertisers to reach the people they want to without needing intrusive data about who they are.
By building up a strong outdoor advertising strategy now, you can not only access your desired audience with a powerful new channel, but you can also give yourself a head start in adopting a targeting strategy based on anonymized, group-level data that will serve you well in a cookieless world.
Via: Broadsign
For more information on OOH and DOOH advertising, and how we can help with your next campaign, contact us today at 210-610-5012 or email customerservice@bmoutdoor.com
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