How The New OOH Value Equation Helps Brands Reach Audiences More Effectively

So much of what we’re all talking about this week at Advertising Week 2018 is how the industry is rethinking how we create effective advertising programs and platforms. After years of treating each media channel as a separate “silo,” agencies are breaking down the internal barriers and embracing more of a collaborative approach across media types and teams. The siloed approach was understandable. After all, for much of the past two decades, specialized knowledge and expertise was required as the industry worked to integrate new digital and mobile technologies and importantly, the rich data that these capabilities provide.

But we’re now at an exciting inflection point where we are (re)discovering that at the very heart of all of these channels, technologies and data is a consumer and, more to the point, a human interaction that determines the success of our advertising and marketing initiatives. As we work together to break down the silos, our shared focus is on “human marketing” that cuts across media types & channels and instead focuses on measurable brand experiences.

Nowhere is this transformation more relevant than in out of home (OOH). We’ve all known intuitively the value that highly-visible giant roadside billboards, conveniently-located transit shelters and targeted airport displays offer to brands. But until recently, we couldn’t prove it, and importantly, we couldn’t understand the impact of OOH in the context of other complementary media channels. That’s all changed.

At Clear Channel Outdoor, we firmly believe that the value we provide to marketers is our ability to help them tell impactful, creative brand stories at scale, with insights and data solutions to more strategically plan and measure campaigns’ impact and results against specific audience groups.

A couple of years ago, Clear Channel introduced its RADAR suite of solutions to help brands better understand consumers’ real-world travel patterns and behaviors as they go about living their lives in the physical world. As a result of RADAR and other OOH industry initiatives, we evolved the OOH value equation to be much more than just real estate, i.e., the location where an OOH ad is displayed. It’s about audiences in locations. It’s about consumer behavior. And it’s about harnessing the power of mobile location data to give our customers a better understanding of the behaviors of the consumers they want to reach, using new tools like RADAR to effectively and efficiently target and retarget brand messages.

Clear Channel’s focus is squarely on offering marketers a unique and measurable value proposition. In a media landscape filled with rich mobile location data, one thing that drives the effectiveness of the OOH medium is our ability to use sequential messaging: telling and retelling the brand story via OOH inventory and mobile ads that reach audience segments at scale and continue to guide the consumer further down the brand funnel.

As a result, we are helping brands better understand how to interact with the audiences they’re trying to reach, in ways that are optimally relevant to those audiences.

We can now deliver a message on a 48-foot OOH canvas and follow-up with a similar message on a mobile device, delivering engagement, response and conversion rates that go way beyond industry benchmarks. It’s an innovative approach that, for the first time, is completely measurable, using the same data and approach used across the digital and mobile media ecosystem. OOH has always delivered for ad partners; now we’re helping our customers with the data and insights needed to really prove it and understand the incremental value that OOH brings to a digital and mobile-led campaign.

This Wednesday in my AW session, I’ll be talking about how Clear Channel and our peers in OOH are working with our counterparts across the media spectrum to help brands tell their stories in measurable, impactful ways that keep the human interaction front and center. These are exciting times, and I hope you’ll be able to join the conversation.