Out-of-Home for Drummies: Buyer’s guide to a medium gearing up for growth

Around the same time, though, WPP’s landmark bi-annual media report found OOH revenues flat and last month (in the UK), the IPA’s Bellwether report recorded a balance of advertisers reducing spend in the medium.

Part of the story told by those stats is that, as Bager noted, most of the growth reported by the OAAA comes from digital; measures that bucket out digital iterations of the channel are more likely to find stagnancy or declines.

• The Drum’s official 50 best out-of-home ads ever

It’s also, perhaps, the story of a medium with plenty of cause for optimism, still striving for the undeniable results to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s cracked the code. OOH practitioners hope, in other words, that with continued innovation and creativity (and that uptick in digital spend), it will just be one of the few ‘traditional’ media channels that can still post growth figures against the inexorable rise of digital channels. And there’s plenty of evidence of such innovation, ripe for a new boom in the medium.

But for marketers looking to invest more heavily in the medium – or brush up on their bona fides – where to start? Right here.

1. The basics: how out-of-home is bought (and for how much)

OOH is still often bucketed as a ‘traditional’ media channel, but the buying environment is now well bedded in as a blend of traditional and digital options, ranging from direct buys to media owners, through hybrid options, to programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) for digital screens.

• OOH in numbers: costs, models and metrics

Pricing options and commercial models run a gamut too, from paying per thousand impressions (from $5 to $50 depending on the market and format), to paying per play on a digital billboard, to ‘fixed tenancy’ deals.

For those prices, Bradley Keefer wrote in The Drum earlier this month, OOH delivers on metrics across the funnel as “one of the few channels that can credibly claim to move the brand and the bottom line at the same time” but remains “underfunded but overperforming,” racking up marginal return on investment (mROI) numbers of $7.58 (against a media average of $5.502).

2. How OOH measures performance

As digital channels have grown, their integration into OOH has too – and so has the expectation of digital-style measurement across the medium.

Trying to reach those standards of measurement has been a goal for OOH for at least a decade now. “It’s always been a challenge,” says Adam Kahansky of OOH shop Broadsign. Lift data, Kahansky says, is now a standard, but it has its limits. On top of that, Kahansky says, there’s a shift towards a practical approach to retargeting based on OOH exposures by “bucketing device IDs of people exposed to OOH screens to then target those same audiences, to serve them secondary, tertiary messaging.”

It’s an approach that doesn’t aim for perfect attribution, but practical results, says Kahansky. “It’s never going to be 100% but take a handful, continue that conversation, and see what kind of attribution you can gather from that touchpoint. It brings OOH into the whole bucket, versus having it stand on its own, which it has for a long time.”

• Your cheat sheet on OOH attribution, programmatic integrations, and personalization

This pulls OOH further into the programmatic ecosystem – but as OOH has grappled with the attribution question for years, it now might be finally accepting its limits. Josh Kirby of programmatic shop Fynd Media says, with location and device data, privacy is a major constraint. With privacy controls usually stricter on Apple devices, “the coverage is all Android-based and even then you might only get 20-30% of users... From a tracking perspective, you’re using almost a survey amount of data. It’s not going to be holistic. But it’s better than nothing.”

For Kirby, those limits in data gathering are offset by recent strides in how agencies handle that data: better info on exact venue locations, greater visibility, better targetability of particular screens and venue types.

With this increased understanding of the limits and opportunities of OOH attribution, Kahansky hopes that the conversation can move on. “The industry has been in this mindframe that measurement is important, which it is, but we’ve become a little too used to measuring every dollar and every impression. I don’t think OOH will ever get there. As an industry, we need to get over that hump and trust the creative opportunity.”

3. The creative paradigm: ‘A push to more creative messaging’

In OOH as everywhere in marketing, Will Tunstall, co-founder of agency Tommy, says, “the biggest competition is always the phone”. While marketers could once have hoped for attentive (even bored) audiences on public transport or in places where queues form, for example, “a captive audience just doesn’t exist any more”.

The result? Increased pressure on creative to catch an eye, and convince it to linger for a second or two before returning to the phone. As Broadsign’s Kahansky puts it, that puts “a heap of responsibility and pressure on the creatives. There are certainly many distractions. But we do a ton of studies on the campaigns we run for clients and the data show that there are tons of opportunities, should the creatives capture that attention.”

• Creative lessons from the world’s best billboard ads

Twin creative trends capture two very different routes through this battle for attention: embracing the attention-capturing power of screens, and retreating to OOH’s bona fides by capturing eyes the old-fashioned way.

FCB Chicago’s EJ Lochen picks out a recent piece of work that embraces both: Polaroid’s campaign, across traditional and digital screens, that celebrates the analog in the age of AI.

Lochen expects creative strategy to split along this fault line. Polaroid’s work, she says, is a great example of younger audiences gravitating towards something that wasn’t intrusive, that wasn’t in their phones, or popping up when they didn’t want it to pop up. ”OOH can still be used like that, but there’s also a push to more curated messaging.

“It’s going to be interesting to see OOH pull apart into two different categories: there’s still a need and want from consumers of that more analog, traditional OOH that feels more like art, versus something that’s more of a call to action, that’s going to get you to visit a website with a big QR code on the side of it.”

• Creative inspiration from leading OOH creative Felipe Serradourada Guimaraes

4. Broadening opportunities: OOH’s growth areas

For FCB’s Lochen, the upshot of tech’s influx into the OOH space and those increased demands on creative are simple: a massive “evolution and broadening of” opportunities.

Much of this opportunity surrounds the growth in screens – their ubiquity, and what OOH practitioners can do with them. In short, Broadsign’s Kahansky says, “screens are popping up everywhere” – elevators, trains, transit hubs – and OOH teams are still hard at work to use those screens in ways that integrate with wider campaigns and to better capture attention with dynamic creative optimization, 3D builds, contextual placements, augmented reality integrations, anamorphics, direct connection with social campaigns, lenticular ads… the list is endless.

• The new rules of out of home: ‘Connected screens’, place and accountability

In advertising’s current mania for one-to-one personalization, the vision of Minority Report-style individually-personalized OOH may be closer than ever – but the creepiness of that vision is as much of a limiting factor as the technology, says FCB’s Lochen. “We’re still in this place where we can’t get too curated or too specific on messaging, or people feel a little creeped out. As people start even wearing wearable eyeglasses, where the ad might change [for them], people might find it a little less creepy.”

For now, the innovation’s happening around publicly available data like time, place and weather, Lochen says. Will AI change that? “As AI comes in and can start versioning off visuals and messages at a rapid speed based on data coming in, that’s where we’re going to start seeing more [personalization]. Maybe not one-to-one messaging, but something very highly specific to the person.”

Other opportunities for integration and expansion abound, says Tommy’s Tunstall, with people “massively looking for tangible real-world experiences,” as reflected in not only out-of-home but experiential budgets and sponsorships in areas like live sport. “It feels like there’s still a gap in really maximizing the connection between advertising screen, big screens, and activations – connecting all that in a meaningful way with devices and enhancing the overall out-of-home experience.”

“It feels like we’re not there yet,” says Tunstall – “there’s a limit to what OOH can do without the addition of something else… It’s almost at the brink of a giant leap forward”.