Monday, May 16, 2011

Why Outdoor in Today's Social World?

Why OOH is more relevant and vital now than ever

It seems you can’t go a single day without reading or hearing about something relating to digital media. Whether it be the latest athlete to create a controversy with a tweet, or how Facebook is evolving it’s sales and marketing strategies, new uses for QR codes or new efforts by companies and/or brands to make their websites more relevant and engaging, digital/social media is hot.

This fact has not been missed by marketers, many of whom have been in an all-out sprint to capitalize on the new and evolving opportunities now in existence to allow consumers interact with their brands. This sprint has often appeared as directionally challenged as a cat that just had water thrown on it: claws out, crazy look in the eye and going a million different directions in a single second. They know they need to go “there”, and fast, but they don’t really know where “there” is for them. The myriad options present for brand interaction has created a lot of what my Dad likes to call “Ready. Fire! Aim.” efforts. These efforts have often led to more questions than answers, including whether or not they resulted in sales.

Many in the OOH industry see this interest and investment in digital campaigns as a threat. They see the dollars that have been reduced in other media, which have been negatively effected by technological advances, such as newspapers (to digital platforms) and television (to the explosion in offerings and the effect of DVR), and hoped that they would automatically be redirected to outdoor. While this has happened to some extent, as evidenced by the recent growth of ad spending in OOH, we had actually expected more. Instead of being redirected to OOH, many ad/marketing dollars have gone to digital.

We don’t look at this as a missed opportunity, but rather an opportunity in the making. Outdoor is very well-positioned to help digital/social media campaigns. We are the first step in the engagement process, or what we like to call the “top of the funnel.” Allow us to explain…

The actual buy-sell interaction, which is often preceded by a consumer-brand interaction on some digital format, is the very bottom of the funnel. It is the end of that “journey to purchase” that every brand hopes their target market will take. But that journey needs to start somewhere and the targets need to know where and how to begin. They need to get into the funnel in the first place. Brands cannot afford to wait on “virtual” word-of-mouth, in the form of “Likes” and retweets, as it takes far too long to reach critical mass. OOH, with it’s excellent reach and frequency, which is now demographically defined thanks to a new audience measurement system (Eyes On Ratings), can provide that first step of engagement with a brand, where they will hopefully funnel all the way to the buy.

This is not to say that outdoor should only be utilized as the beginning step in a digital campaign. Much to the contrary. Most outdoor campaigns are still more direct than that, with displays geographically and/or demographically targeted, with messaging that informs consumers why, how and where to buy their goods and services. All of this for far less per eyes on impression than other media.

Although our medium is more cost-efficient than ever, OOH is about more than reaching more people, more often for less money. We are more relevant than ever because we are about engagement. This can be an initial engagement with a social media campaign, or much closer to the bottom of the funnel, with targeted displays designed to lead more directly to a buy.

Mike Norton
EVP
Norton Outdoor Advertising