Out-of-home advertising: The New Trends

Out-of-home advertising

The Impact of COVID-19 on the billboard industry

As the drastic economic impact of coronavirus continues to spill, brands and agencies are forced to re-evaluate the current advertising methods they are using. Recently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) surveyed nearly 400 media buyers and brands. The results were surprising: 74% think the coronavirus pandemic will have a larger impact on their advertising spend than the 2008 financial crisis. According to the President of Interactive Advertising Bureau, David Cohen, “Typically marketers will press pause for a moment, take a breath, assess the situation, replay and reevaluate.”

The traditional out-of-home advertising is expected to be largely impacted. The estimated ad spend declined 51% in March and April and another decline of 41% is expected in June 2020. Fewer people are outside reducing the appeal and effectiveness of billboards and DOOH. Advertising in malls, at bus stops, and bus shelter advertising are fast becoming replaced by in-home advertising. The impact of COVID-19 has kept the consumers inside their homes. Hence, the best ways to reach the audience will be to take your advertising message to them indoors.

Adzze has been re-evaluating the current tactics and adapting to a more sensitive message. The operations team has working on extending its reach to offer advertising methods that can reach the consumers at their safest place: at home. One of these tactics uses pizza boxes as advertising space. Think of this as small moving billboard that consumers receive in their homes and place on their dinner tables. Ad data demonstrated that this type of ads can lead to an 80% recall rate (8 out of 10 individuals recall seeing 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.

Out of home (OOH), advertising is one of the oldest medium through which businesses keep consumers updated about their products and services. However, the rise of alternative mediums like social media is shaking OOH advertising. As such, new trends are emerging, which will define the sector going forward.

What are the new trends in Out-of-home advertising?

Digital outdoor advertising is the most significant trend in OOH advertising. Interestingly, digital out of home (DOOH) is coming up as a lifesaver for the OOH industry. According to a study done in the UK, the likelihood of the target audience seeing DOOH ads is twice that of static Out-of-home advertising ads. Further, the study noted that the impact of DOOH ads is two-and-a-half times more than static OOH ads.

For this reason, many businesses are adopting DOOH at a very high rate. According to figures made public by Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA),Out-of-home advertising advertising revenue expanded by 7.7% y-o-y in Q2 2019. As a result, the industry gained 7% of the advertising industry for half-year 2019. Interestingly, OAAA noted that DOOH contributed about 37% of the total revenue for the quarter.

Further, OAAA explained that the growing interest in digital OOH ads helped outdoor advertising to be the only traditional advertising medium to experience growth. Notably, eMarketer data confirms this assertion. According to eMarketer, out of home advertising grew by 1.2% in 2018, compared to 1.0% for TV advertising. The only traditional ad medium that grew faster than OOH was radio. Advertising mediums like newspapers and magazine contracted by 6.7% and 6.0% respectively.  

Advertisers will have to focus on Stay-at-Home Ad options

The use of OOH and billboards will most likely experience more decline in the coming weeks, given the growing number of cases of infection in the United States. Businesses that dearly need to get the word out about their enterprise will have to embrace new-age advertising to stay in business. This means more customers will abandon billboard advertising to adopt indoor ads; a strategy which brands trying to avoid the cut-throat cost of sign advertising have happily been using to market themselves in recent times.

The New York Times aptly described the effect of the pandemic on outdoor advertising as a ‘seismic shock’. Even Coca-Cola is among the companies that have limited their ad campaigns during the coronavirus crisis, the New York Times report says. Long story cut short; a lot of companies are hitting the brakes on billboard ads and other forms of OOH advertising and are also pulling back until the coast clears.

OOH Ads

Another growing trend in OOH advertising is the rise of automation. Traditionally, procuring the services of Out-of-home advertising providers was a cumbersome process. Notably, most of the negotiations and processes around the medium were manually done, making it hard for everyone. Nonetheless, most of the processes have been automated. Notably, there integrated strategies based on the location where stakeholders use automated platforms to interact. With electronic platforms, advertising agencies can deliver their services in real-time.

To make Out-of-home advertising ad campaigns more effective, advertisers are integrating mobile phones. Notably, there are case studies that confirm the effectiveness of pairing mobile advertising with OOH media. It enables advertisers to achieve highly targeted results. The technique utilizes geofencing to target consumers and to allow precise targeting of OOH ads. As such, an increasing number of providers are adding mobile geofencing as an extra package to make OOH ad campaigns more attractive.

Several reports already identified the flaws of Out-of-home advertising as 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 and In-Home Advertising

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.