Targeting is one of the most effective ways to understand who an audience is and how they can be reached more effectively.
The second part is thoughtful measurement. With OOH, marketers are always faced with understanding whether their investment into a channel paid off, they hit the key performance indicators (KPIs) they were going for, or they achieved the goals they were looking for. With measurement, we can now help marketers understand if their investment was actually meaningful.
As an asterisk, OOH is just one piece of the pie for a marketer’s entire approach to reaching audiences or their consumers. It isn’t the be-all and end-all, but the tools that are now available allow marketers to understand the impact OOH brings as it ladders up to the other parts of their media buys. Thoughtful measurement is always there, and it includes elements such as brand lift studies, foot traffic studies, and understanding purchase intent and purchaser consideration, and starting to incorporate them as an almost necessary add-on to any type of OOH campaign.
OOH is probably one of the oldest mediums, but something that’s been emerging in the last couple of years—which we saw begin around 2020 or so—is retail media. When people think of OOH, they usually think of billboards. However, it’s so much more. OOH has the ability to reach audiences in the gym, in residential buildings, in office buildings, and, of course, now this emergence in retail media.
Retail is changing the perspective. OOH advertising is now giving marketers the opportunity to reach consumers at key point-of-sale (POS) locations. Whether you’re a busy mom and you’re shopping for your family, or you’re on a lunch break, or you’re running through the grocery store or a convenience store, retail media is growing, and it’s providing opportunities to reach people in key moments that may not usually be associated with OOH. It’s exciting to see this new network crop up, and for it to be a part of the channel.
SMC: How do you see the role of data evolving in advertising, and what challenges and opportunities does this present for brands and campaigns?
Retail media gives brands the opportunity to reach their desired consumers at key point-of-sale (POS) locations.
SM: From an OOH lens, being able to better understand how to reach your audiences is probably the key thing, along with what data provides for marketers. For example, in the online space, if you use a cookie, it provides advertisers with the opportunity to serve an ad to someone who is a sports enthusiast. In OOH, you don’t have that one-to-one relationship. It’s a one-to-many relationship, with the opportunity to effectively reach audiences at the right time, and in the right space. Data provides marketers with a more effective approach to delivering those messages at those key moments.
Now, if we take it a step further and think of how data is generally used by marketers to power their entire marketing plans, OOH used to be a channel that was quite siloed. It had to be booked or planned with multiple phone calls, using individual publishers’ or media owners’ data sources. There wasn’t one unified way of planning an entire campaign with one set of data and one definition. If we think of how the online space has adopted data, in terms of it being the thread that’s pulling together the rest of their marketing plans, OOH was left out of it.
