OOH Advertising Needs Better Targeting

OOH Advertising: learn more.

The Impact of COVID-19 on the OOH industry

As the economic impact of COVID-19 continues to unfold, brands and agencies need to re-image their advertising methods. The out-of-home (OOH) advertising players will need to rethink their strategies before the damage deteriorates to them bleeding clients too. Traditional billboards will not be effective anymore as the consumers will be taking a more careful approach and spend more time in their homes. So fewer people will be outside and less impressions will be generated by outdoors advertising. Traditional OOH will be replaced by in-home advertising.

According to a survey conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) it is believed that traditional out-of-home advertising is expected to suffer (Forbes) an estimated ad spend decline of 51% for March and April and a decline of 41% for May and June.

Adzze has been re-thinking the advertising tactics adapting to a more sensitive message. The team has working on extending its capabilities to offer advertising concepts that can reach the consumers at their safest place: at home. One of these methods uses pizza boxes as advertising space. Think of this as small moving billboard that gets delivered at the consumer’s home. Studies demonstrated that this type of ads can evoke an 80% recall rate (8 out of 10 households individuals remember to see an ad on the pizza box) with an average ROI of 150%. This means, for every 1 dollar the advertiser invested in a pizza box advertising campaign, they received at least additional 2.5 dollars of sales. For more details, see the article Estimating the ROI of Pizza Box Marketing.

Few people spend a lot of time outdoors. According to a study, an average American spends 87% of their time indoors. Of the remaining time, 7% of it goes to time spent with nature and 6% spent in a car. These numbers are startling but advertisers still spend billions of dollars on out of home advertising. Notably, OOH advertising constitutes a significant share of traditional advertising media.

What is OOH Advertising?

Out of home advertising (OOH advertising) is a form of advertising that can be found outside of a consumer’s home.  OOH advertising is a form of marketing that allows companies to create marketing campaigns in places where their target audience already spends time. OOH advertising is an important way to reach customers, but it’s also a lot more complicated than people think. Read on to learn more!

Is OOH advertising worth the money?

There is a general trend in the US where the amount of money spent on traditional advertising media is declining. According to figures by eMarketer, all but one traditional media ad spend declined in 2019. Notably, the only traditional medium that experienced growth in 2019 was OOH advertising. Particularly, this advertising medium includes things like billboards. In the second quarter of 2019, out of home advertising edged up by 7.7%, the highest margin since 2007. Interestingly, most if not all, of the growth came from the increasing adoption of digital out of home advertising media.

Digital billboards might be pushing up the amount of ad spend in OOH advertising but challenges still exist. For example, this analysis shows that billboard advertisement “does not measure up to the costs incurred.” Some of the reasons behind this issue include the increasing unpopularity of digital billboards.

Resistance against billboards is rising

For starters, digital billboards leverage technology to display attractive ads that the target audience cannot ignore. In particular, the digital displays have transformed the way people interact with billboards. Initially, the static images on billboards were uninspiring. As such, the impressions the ads generated were quite few. However, the proliferation of digital billboards is causing visual pollution and people are rising against them. Some cities like New York, Sao Paulo, and Chennai are putting measures in place to curtail billboard advertising.

In addition to rising resistance against billboards in general, the ROI of billboard advertising is disappointing. Particularly, you are likely to spend over $15,000 on one billboard per month but the conversion rates are low. This is because billboards do not target the exact audience that you desire. Further, few people pay attention billboards. As a result, there is no engagement and even brand visibility may stay low.

Alternatively, you can use in-the-hand marketing to grow the visibility of your brand. In-the-hand marketing, for starters, is a simple technique that literally puts ads in the hands of the target audience. For example, you can produce custom printed valet tickets that carry your business’ logo and a short message. With the ticket in hand, your brand will gain a long exposure to the customer. Ultimately, this will lead to high engagement and conversion rates.

The Billboard Industry will change after the pandemic

The after-effect of this development will be an unavoidable reduction in patronage for the billboard advertising companies. Billboard companies will eventually have to sit it out with the hope that they can still reclaim their market share in the end. However, smaller businesses and other brands that depended on their strategic displays to market their brands may not be so patient. Just as major clients like hoteliers, airlines, and cinemas are on pause mode, smaller brands are quickly pulling away and leveraging alternative media and in-home advertising to preach their brands.

Billboard companies may not only be counting their losses in billions of dollars, many of their customers might have moved on to embrace other more pocket-friendly advertising alternatives. These alternatives are indoor-directed, and have proven to be equally effective, perhaps even more effective than the conventional outdoor methods. Aside from the fact that they are more expensive, it is difficult to track engagement for out-of-home ads (OOH Advertising). In fact, small businesses face more challenges trying to get a marketing space in the highly competitive ad industry.

Billboard prices

Billboard prices depend on format, circulation, demographics, and impressions. Traditional billboards price is $14,000-20,000/month in larger markets. With the cost of billboard/month, the advertiser can place its message on 40,000 coffee sleeves to 40 different coffee shops during the same period of time.

There is an unproven assumption that billboards are effective. In fact, several publications demonstrated the lack of targeting and tracking, low engagement with the target audience, high costs, low ROI and in many cases the issue of visual pollution and low brand recall. The targeting issues very often are addressed with alternative approaches as mobile billboards, digital OOH, ads on trucks and ads in places people don’t expect as flags, backpacks, inflatable objects, gas pump and balloons.

Door Hanger Marketing will replace traditional outdoor ads

The business of marketing is changing in the age of COVID-19. Whether its effects are brief or prolonged, marketers need to be nimble in these challenging times, and pivot when needed while optimizing performance throughout the crisis.

Advertiser will have to find alternative channels to reach consumers and many already pivoted to In-Home Advertising using food deliveries. This model represents the new market trend in advertising as an alternative to traditional OOH advertising channels. As delivery orders are being fulfilled, active advertising is on-going simultaneously. Ads are placed on pizza boxes and shopping bags and delivered into the hands of customers. The amazing part is that the ads enter people`s homes and stays in their faces.

New age advertising methods as seen at Adzze, will not only attract more clients but will effectively engineer the on-boarding of major businesses as many begin to see the tremendous benefit of in-home advertising. With innovative methods such as ads placement on door hangers. This concept guarantees definite impressions of your brands on prospective customers because our approach delivers the brand directly into the hands of your target audience at their homes.

Your advertisement is printed on door hangers and distributed to the households in the zip code or areas that were selected according to the marketing campaign. Adzze technology solutions are used to target demographic profiles such as income, age, ethnicity, marital status, so that we hit your exact target-market ensuring the door hanger delivery. In addition, the segmentation method enables to evaluate annual spend criteria so that you have a better insight into the spend behavior of the target audience.  The consumers will be positively surprised if the door hanger brings them value as coupons or discounts. The advertiser must partner with the capable door hanger distributors to ensure to track the door hanger delivery to the targeted addresses. Typically, the return of the  Door Hanger Advertising investment is 3x, this means for every $1 invested, the advertiser receives $3 back.