AFFINITY - OOH! That’s Interesting

You’re on the bus. Or a train. Or behind the wheel. You’ve skipped breakfast because you slept in… again. On the way to work, your eyes and ears either stick like glue to your phone’s newsfeed or tune out to the sounds of drive radio. This is your everyday routine, so the 600 messages that you could be exposed to¹ that morning go begging. However, looking out the window, stuck in traffic or at a station, you see a digital billboard change in front of your eyes. Oh, I could really use a $1 hash brown right now. Or three.

Talk about right place at the right time.

This might be a bit Big Brother for some of us, but it really is just increasingly precise and data-driven digital out-of-home (DOOH) media. Out-of-home (OOH) media is easily recognisable and has slowly been growing with vast tools and capabilities that were once not possible. We are no longer counting cars that pass billboards to gather information on specific locations², rather, highly-finessed data is being accessed and overlayed with multiple sources to precisely target consumers.

This isn’t new news – with AFFINITY pioneering the world first hyper-targeted OOH initiative for ADMA³, and more recently, Adshel combining with Roy Morgan’s Helix Personas to profile and precisely target locations where people live, work and shop⁴. But is DOOH the holy grail for advertising? Does it hold the sole key to a guaranteed ROI on any campaign?

Not by itself, no. We need to think outside the box – literally.

OOH can be both a passive and engaging medium. Despite this, in both instances there is a high correlation between mobile use and exposure to outdoor advertising⁵ (discounting people behind the wheel because, you know, laws). Additionally, recent studies have shown that a multi-platform approach, combining OOH, TV and digital activity, can produce up to a 26% increase on returns⁶. That’s three mediums working alongside each other to deliver effective results. See a pattern here? OOH isn’t standing on its own two feet without a little help from its friends.

Just like other media channels, DOOH is steadily growing with the tools and capabilities to be a more tactical and engaging medium – for both consumers and advertisers alike. However, it is only as strong as the rest of the consumer journey around it. If a mobile website is lacking a long overdue CX overhaul, then the opportunity a passer-by has with a programmatically-bought DOOH billboard can be easily frittered away. If it doesn’t creatively engage or challenge the consumer, you can add that billboard to the list of 600+ messages¹ that’ll flood your target audience’s mind.

All user journeys on the path to purchase have multiple touch points. So, while targeting precision in DOOH is a significant advance for 2018 and beyond, advertisers need to keep in mind that along the way there remains multiple opportunities in existing media to complement the user journey and assist in facilitating a stronger ROI. Always hedge your bets.