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#LondonIsThePlaceToBe/ #LebanonC’estCool ?

ex-UK Outdoor Media Centre CEO [1] Mike Baker has been getting out and about recently (see more on his actual startup here [2]). Last week he was invited to speak about the ‘Key Dynamics of the UK Market’ in Lebanon to media booking agencies, key people from Advertising agencies and a few marketing directors.

Pikasso - Breakfast with Mike Baker - Tuesday 21 April 2015 - Four Seasons Hotel Beirut [3]

Two presentations took place, a breakfast session on April 21 in Beirut itself and in Amman, the following day.

Mike was a guest of Antonio Vincenti, Chairman and CEO of PIKASSO s.a.l. [4] and (recently elected [5]) FEPE President, who will himself be over in London for London Digital Signage Week [6] May 18-22, 2015.

In his talk Mike put the success of the OOH sector in the UK down to heavy investment by the media owners and confidence in the medium across a wide variety of categories. He said that according to Nielsen, 49 of the top 50 UK’s biggest advertisers used Outdoor in 2014, and multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Samsung, Warner Bros, American Express, KFC and Diageo spent a quarter or more of their budgets on OOH!

Of course, in the UK digital screens now contribute 27% of total OOH revenue and the footprint of digital has expanded to cities such as Newcastle, Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, so that was also discussed.

Mike made mention that with the high penetration of smartphones, consumers can interact with sites in a rich variety of ways – texting, tweeting, uploading content, downloading vouchers, sharing location data, making contactless payments and so on and he showed examples such as Walkers (Twitter and vending) [7], Microsoft Windows phone (user generated content) and Despicable Me 2 (texting and social media).

Mike was also at pains to show a Harper Collins campaign example, demonstrating how even classic OOH can be digitalised using NFC together with a consumer’s smartphone.

Mike talked of the growing importance of mall advertising and the seamless integration of advertising sites into the fabric of the mall environment, leading to better visual displays and revenues that were (he says) significantly higher than for equivalent sites elsewhere – at the roadside or in transport locations.

The final theme of Mike’s talk was effectiveness. Mike referenced a large scale study by Les Binet of DDB, called The Long and Short of Advertising, which scrutinised the learnings of 700 brands and 1,000 UK case studies. Binet had concluded that the optimum marketing and media mix should include short term sales activation but be tipped more towards long term branding, and he noted that Outdoor’s branding power were similar to that of television – the results of the Cannes Effectiveness Lions 2014 awards seemed to confirm this, with 92% of shortlisted and winning entries having utilised OOH, second only to social media which was used in all 2014 winning entries, Ed.