It’s no longer just the big, traditional brands or local businesses using out-of-home and digital out-of-home media: According to Outfront Media [1] (formerly called CBS Outdoor [2]), as new technology pervades today’s society, tech companies like Facebook, Foursquare and a crop of startups are getting into the mix with the aim of building brand recognition and driving app downloads.
OOH and DOOH has been a source of endless opportunity and innovation for these progressive digital brands.
This month, Facebook launched its first out-of-home campaign in Los Angeles and Chicago to promote Messenger, its mobile messaging app.
“By using a variety of out-of-home creative in our ‘Say Anything Better’ brand campaign, we could be part of the city landscapes…showcasing different messaging for Chicago and L.A.,” says Rebecca Van Dyck, head of Facebook’s brand marketing, in an Outfront Media article on NYC Sixty, looking at the Out-of-Home media sector in New York.
The situation speaks to the unique ability of OOH to provide the consumer with customized, highly visible messaging. In addition to tech giants like Facebook, smaller startups such as Boxed, GrubHub and Osdcar are able to meet and exceed their ROI goals with out-of-home.
Arbitron [3], now merged into Nielsen [4], notes that more than 75% of outdoor viewers shop on their way home from work.
“We’ve tried a lot of ROI-based ad networks, and out-of-home averages out if you do it right,” says Chieh Huang, CEO of Boxed, in the Outfront Media article.
Abby Hunt, a rep for GrubHub Seamless, said “We’re capturing people when they’re on the way home from work, when they’re hungry, so it’s natural to drive them to download the app.”
And East Coast healthcare startup Oscar started advertising on the New York subway in October, 2013, with small placements, and is now expanding its campaign to include more placements and to reach New Jersey.
OOH is increasingly becoming the smart choice for advertisers striving to capture their audience at the right moment. A USA Touchpoints Survey back in 2012 noted that, among OOH viewers, 58% search the web as a direct result of seeing an ad and 55% use social media to share information while viewing an ad.
A JiWire report, also in 2012, showed that 75% of smart phone users are more likely to take an action after seeing a location-specific message.
Interactive Europe, a quantitative and qualitative study of 5,283 European consumers across six markets – UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands – in Fall, 2012, by CBS Outdoor International, showed that in total, 77% of consumers reported doing something as a direct result of seeing an outdoor ad, including: 20% of consumers are reported to have made a purchase online after seeing an outdoor ad (up 43% year-over-year) and 13% of consumers have downloaded an app after seeing an outdoor ad.
With the longer dwell time in front of DOOH and their entertainment value and more up-to-date research in terms of both OOH and DOOH, we expect that newer research would show greatly increased numbers.
(If a research house has more up-to-date research on this topic, we’d love to hear from them. – Ed)