WHAT'S THE POWER OF OOH ADVERTISING?

Often agencies who provide advertising media, like us, hear businesses say they’re just going to focus their spend on digital advertising and nothing else.

Whilst many of us accept that digital is the current trend and is proven to get people onto your sales channels there’s things you should know about the value of out of home advertising (apologies if you are already a fan!).

At the most basic level understanding that this form of advertising reaches people when they are in public spaces and captures their attention (it’s proven!) is what you need to know. And yes it did have a HUGE hit during the pandemic.

Perhaps you also need to know it’s one of the oldest forms of advertising and STILL sees a year-on-year revenue growth because well it works. And yet it still only accounts for a small amount of annual advertising spend from marketing budgets these days.

• Let’s look at Out of Home (OOH) in more detail

There are so many different format types of OOH media options available today from bus shelter posters to digital boards in city centres. Billboards at out-of-town shopping centres, flags on lampposts, roadside boards, on the back of taxis, print adverts inside tube or train stations, adverts on buses and TRUCK ADVERTISING! Many of these formats offer print and digital today and some advertisers are doing innovative stuff to capture the attention of consumers.

It’s proven to work for brand awareness. As Clear Channel highlight ‘the first stage of the marketing funnel is all about making sure people are familiar with your brand.’ There’s a proven 31% increase in spontaneous brand awareness by using OOH advertising (DRG, Classic & Digital delivering brand effectiveness, (seeing campaigns on Adshel & Adshel Live vs seeing no OOH), 2016).

57% of people who engage with OOH ads are either new to consume or ones who’ve bought before (Outsmart statistic). But more than that 38% of people who see an OOH advert are likely to do a brand action which is often heading to their smart phone to make a purchase or head to social channels. There’s more on this from Marketing Week.

Long-term campaigns reach thousands of people per day, and they can’t simply keep scrolling or worse block your advert. Every marketer knows brand awareness takes time to build, with long running OOH advertising campaigns you will be building frequency over the duration of your campaign.

It’s BIG; compared to digital you have a big space to play with your advert if you use things like billboards, bus or truck adverts. Take our truck adverts even the average rear is 5m2 whereas the average side of the truck is a whopping 35m2 and even a bus shelter poster is 1.2m x 1.8m in size which give you plenty of space to create the WOW factor.

Out of Home advertising reaches 98% of the UK population every week (source: Route) and this statistic has taken HUGE research because OOH advertising is by nature anywhere and at anytime with people moving between train stations and city centres or drivers moving past taxi’s and billboards. It’s a big statistic and should be the one that makes you believe that OOH has to be in your marketing mix.