An advertising medium that is as non-invasive as possible, utilizes real-time data and can be creatively leveraged to the wildest dreams of any Art Director? All of it sounds too good to be true, but those are precisely the benefits of the ingenuity with digital Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising.
In a panel hosted by Barry Frey, CEO at DPAA, Greg Glenday, CEO at Adspace, Ron Camhi, Managing Partner Los Angeles Office and Chair, Advertising & Digital Media Industry Group at the law firm Michelman & Robinson, Molly Schultz, VP, Group Partner of Digital Investment & Innovation at UM, and Sean McCaffrey, President and CEO at GSTV all discussed the up-and-coming trends and opportunities in the digital OOH trends.
Before the panelists began, Christine Beury, Director of Global Campaign Marketing, Advertising Cloud at Adobe introduced the Adtech track of the day by acknowledging the changing advertising landscape. She kick-started the day with the idea that it has always been important to reach the target consumers where and how they spend their time, but today’s “big F-word” – that is, fragmentation – disrupts traditional models. She emphasizes that it is important to understand the consumer, and to truly think about a day in the life of the average consumer and being able to map that journey.
With the consumer journey in mind, modernizations in the out-of-home area is a possible solution. Because today’s society is focused on being on the go, people today are spending more and more time on the go – thus, out of their homes.
In the tremendously digitally-focused advertising industry, anything that is not a digital ad may be seen as old-fashioned – but the panelists disagreed. There is an unpredictable amount of opportunity available for advertisers to reach audiences in new and inventive ways through digital OOH.
Glenday, who works with digital OOH placements in shopping malls across the country, believes that digital OOH provides a special canvas with unlimited possibilities to display creative storytelling, an affordance of virtually no other medium. Adding to that, Schultz considers that digital OOH is more dynamic, and can be utilized for interesting opportunities with interactive displays integrating the time of day or corresponding with the current weather where the OOH ad is placed. This integration and creativity opens up possibilities for brands to resonate with massive audiences while supporting brands’ marketing objectives.
As McCaffery pointed out, there is certainly still a role for place-based OOH advertising, and digital OOH can be placed beyond physical limitations.
Comparing the intrusiveness of mobile advertising to digital OOH, all the panelists agree that it has absolutely no issues with adblocking, data, or privacy.
With privacy and data concerns ever-imminent, as the presence of Camhi at the panel and his privacy law expertise reflects, digital OOH offers a solution to both advertisers and consumers. Consumers do not typically think of OOH media as intrusive to their lives, which conveniently for advertisers makes them more receptive to messages.
As the #GetOutofHome campaign surrounding the Advertising Week venue points out, there is no way to X out, close, scroll past, skip, or adblock an OOH ad. And audiences don’t mind that.
For those pointing out that mobile advertisements allow for immense amount of data and can track attribution while OOH simply cannot, think again. With facial recognition technology, Glenday states that there is the capability to track people observing screens on locations and making a quick conversion by entering a store. McCaffrey denotes that through his perspective at GSTV, conversion attribution can be made through credit card purchases at gas stations and beyond.
For the challenges currently facing every advertiser today, the innovations in digital out-of-home could be the solution.