Out-of-home (OOH) advertising has survived for decades as traditional roadside billboards, city bus wraps and indoor displays in places such as shopping centers. However, the media channel has evolved a lot since Coca-Cola advertised on the side of wagons heading west during the Gold Rush (at least, that’s how I remember it from history class). Today, outdoor media buying opportunities include a variety of formats and placements such as digital displays, street furniture and cinema.
Advanced technology has made it possible to utilize new spaces in a creative way that engages your audience without the need to bombard them with your message over and over again. Outdoor media buyers and sellers are coming to embrace these new digital inventory options, but this is not to say that traditional OOH has gone totally out of style. Technology just helps us adapt OOH to more places!
In this article, we take a look at several unique OOH opportunities and their potential benefits.
1. Sports Arenas & Stadiums
There are tens of thousands of arenas, stadiums and other sporting venues all over the country, from a small-town high school gymnasium to Wrigley Field. Within these locations, there is a lot of potential advertising real estate. There are the dasher boards that line the perimeter of the playing area, large and small screens displaying the game throughout, dioramas around the complex and sponsorship opportunities for features such as the instant replay or the scoreboard. You can even put your brand right on the ice at hockey rinks. What all of these ad formats have in common is that they’re in a sports venue full of excited, captive fans, giving your message great visibility.
Getting a Captive Audience
Gamenight is guaranteed to bring your ads an emotionally-engaged audience of sports fans. The vast majority of those attending the event already have an emotional connection to whatever is transpiring in front of them, and they are more open to the information your ad offers them. Moreover, each venue will attract a particular type of sports fan, and this is data you can use to better market your brand. You can learn if the audience is more local, regional or national and how the demographics of the audience break down in terms of race, gender, age or income.
Relation to Point of Purchase
Just by being out of their homes and at a sports venue, your audience is mobilized and potentially easier to lead to the point of purchase. While attending a game of any kind, they’re already indulging themselves by not merely watching the event on television at home. They have a higher likelihood of spending money on food, drinks, merchandise and other products or services. You can harness this enlivened environment and guide people already showing a willingness to spend their money. An example could be advertising your candy bar that is sold at the concession stand, advertising the sale of your products branded with team logos or advertising your local bar or restaurant for a meal or drinks after the game.
Cost & Effectiveness
OOH ads at arenas or stadiums offer a lot of advantages. For one, you have guaranteed circulation. Contracts for these locations are typically long-term, up to three years, and since the infrastructure is usually already installed it can be an affordable option, especially if you’re opting for a digital ad. Digital offerings also mean the amount of inventory available in the numerous sporting venues around the country is growing. As an added bonus, your ad could also end up on TV for the folks watching at home, expanding your reach that much further.
From football to dressage, you have a number of sporting options to advertise with, and since audience statistics are available by the venue, your ads can be well-targeted.
2. Interactive Digital Billboards
Outdoor media buying presents advertisers with many options, but billboards are one of the most popular choices. So many billboards, both big and small, enter our field of vision every day that we hardly even consciously register them anymore. The best way to ensure your message is delivered through traditional static OOH ads is by posting it in as many locations as possible, and that can be very costly, which isn’t ideal.
Interactive digital billboards provide an opportunity for consumers to actively engage with your brand rather than simply passing it by. With touchscreen technology, viewers can literally touch your creative. With QR codes, you can send viewers exactly where they need to go online. Your creative can be anything from an image to a video to a game or survey.
Getting a Captive Audience
Interacting with advertisements increases recall for viewers by putting a greater significance on their own actions to receive feedback from an ad. They’re encouraged to engage in the communications themselves, thus being more accepting and receptive of the ad’s information. Interactive ads work best in places such as malls, sidewalks, airports, train or subway stations, etc. - places where people are either spending leisure time or waiting for something. In these locations, these types of ads can serve to not just advertise but inform, educate and entertain.
Relation to Point of Purchase
While people are out and about, interactive billboard ads are a prime opportunity to drive them to your website or store location. Encourage your audience to visit your website or scan a QR code to send them to a landing page. An interactive ad could also help them decide what services or products they’re looking for and provide directions to the correct location. By encouraging viewer participation with your ad creative, you increase the likelihood of further action after they’ve interacted with it. Your ad should give them a direction to move in.
Cost & Effectiveness
Interactive billboard ads give you direct feedback on how engaged viewers are with your ad. You can easily discover how many people have seen your ad versus how many people have reacted to it, either by visiting a website, texting a number, using a coupon code or actually touching it. While outdoor media buying options have become more favorable due to improved targeting techniques, digital interactive billboards can employ sophisticated targeting approaches using first-, second- and third-party location data, traffic density and historical foot traffic patterns. Geotargeting tactics can even ensure your ad campaign continues via the user’s smartphone after they leave the ad’s location.
The interactive nature of these kinds of billboard ads means they take more time and investment to create than a regular digital billboard, though. A thorough analysis of your target audience is necessary to ensure that the costs you put into creating this kind of advertising do not go to waste.
3. Office Building Elevators
Outdoor media buying locations have usually stayed outside of office buildings and working spaces. After all, people are going to these buildings to work, not to shop. The workday is not devoid of purchasing decisions, though, and media buyers have found a unique piece of real estate in high-rise office buildings they can utilize to influence the business-oriented shopper: elevators. Businesses offering car rentals, travel booking, food delivery and b2b services can have a lot of success catching workers at these awkward moments in their day when they’re trapped on an elevator.
Getting a Captive Audience
Every day, employees are confined to elevators going up five, ten, twenty or more floors to their offices. These often uncomfortable moments find people looking for a distraction, and through dynamic digital advertising, you can give it to them. Captivate Network, a digital media company that brings digital content into elevators all over the country, reports that about 97 percent of elevator riders have watched the screens and 85 percent watch them during every trip. Their research showed that riders preferred compelling content, such as news, entertainment, weather forecasts and traffic reports, next to the ad creative, splitting screens 50/50. They also run ads shorter lengths of time, about 15 seconds, to match the average amount of time people are in elevators.
Relation to Point of Purchase
Elevator advertising is designed to engage business decision-makers right before they get off the elevator and sit down at their computers. Your ads are in the perfect location to catch them right before they start researching and booking business travel, renting a car, making hotel reservations, investing in business management tools or just ordering lunch. According to Captivate’s data, about one in five people actually visited a website to learn more after viewing an elevator ad.
Cost & Effectiveness
It can be difficult to know how much these kinds of ads are actually affecting sales, but Captivate claims their ads are 47% effective and that purchase intent after viewing an elevator ad is 42%. At the very least, elevator advertising is an excellent way to reach a college-educated, upwardly mobile audience that works in these high-rise office buildings. By evaluating the employers and workers who go in and out of the building every day, you can get a good picture of the kind of people exposed to your ads. And, if the technology is already installed in the office buildings you’re targeting, this can be a very affordable OOH option.
Outdoor Media Buying for the Win
Outdoor media acquisitions have come a long way, incorporating technology in new, creative ways to propel your brand into places where it can make an impact. To make the most of your OOH media strategy and incorporate it with your general media buying objectives, work with media buyers and planners equipped with the kind of experience you need.
The Ward Group, a Dallas-based buying agency, has been working with outdoor media of all shapes, sizes and functionalities for several decades. Whether you want to put up an old-fashioned billboard along a highway or an interactive ad in an airport concourse, our media stewards are dedicated to helping you achieve a smart, profitable campaign. Contact us today to get started!