Call me an optimist, but after many false dawns it finally feels like the world might be returning to a sense of normality.  To steal a headline from Friday’s AFR: ‘After a 23-month hiatus, Australia’s $45.4 billion international tourism industry is about to reboot from Monday’.  We’re back! Australia is open for business and God forbid, there’s even a rumour that we might be able to fly to Perth from early March. We’ll see.

Let’s not beat around the bush, the past two years have not been kind to the Out-of-Home sector. While some media channels benefitted from increased audiences as Australian households struggled through periods of domestic incarceration, Out-of-Home audiences were displaced, reduced and at times, decimated. Not surprisingly revenues followed. In 2020, Out-of-Home revenues contracted precisely one-third from almost $1bn in 2019. While the inevitable rebound commenced in 2021, industry revenues remained some 17 per cent below 2019’s high-water mark at the year-end.

I believe further rebound is inevitable, because if we look closely at Out-of-Home revenue data for the decade prior to Covid-19, it’s clear to see ten years of quarter-on-quarter revenue growth, and the fundamentals that drove that trajectory are still strong. In fact, they are far stronger.

So what’s changed?

Out-of-Home has long-since been the beneficiary of digitisation with media owners investing billions of dollars in converting analogue (paper) sites to digital screens. In 2021, digital revenues accounted for 58.8 per cent of total Out-of-Home revenues in Australia. But here’s the thing. While advertising sites have become digitised, as a collective we have continued to act in an analogue manner, treating digital panels like ‘digital scrollers’. That’s where we need to evolve to fully power away from Covid.

As audiences return to the airports, rail networks and city streets of Australia, advertisers and agencies alike will seek the best ways to reconnect brands and consumers within these valuable ‘real world’ environments. What they will find is a media channel still capable of building rapid reach across mass audiences (of course), but also now with fresh capabilities to go a little deeper, for true data-led planning, for audience segmentation and targeting, programmatic trading, dynamic creative optimisation, mobile retargeting, automated verification, campaign attribution and measurement – the list goes on. In the new world, Out-of-Home can still play to its old strengths but can now also play a critical role in a genuine ‘omnichannel’ strategy.  Education, however, will be key. 

Better knowledge, more power

As the global leader in Out-of-Home, we believe we are uniquely placed to understand how the foundations of the medium are shifting and have created JCDecaux ACADEMY, a ten-module eLearning course designed to educate participants on every step of the digital Out-of-Home journey, from planning and trading to measurement and attribution.

As the industry's favourite brand-building media becomes more digital, targeted and addressable, we will aim to share everything media agencies and marketers need to know now, in order to stay ahead of the curve and leverage the power of the digital Out-of-Home channel in 2022. 

There’s no doubt the last two years have been tough. But with audiences rapidly returning there’s a sense of positivity in the air. The impact of newfound freedoms can already be seen with Adsquare mobility data confirming audiences across our five capital cities up 400 per cent from the dark days of lockdown, and almost 70 per cent higher than the average benchmarks for the past 12 months. 

Marry that with a media channel full of ambition, increased sophistication and capability and perhaps I’m not an optimist after all, but more a realist. The future really does look bright – especially for those that grasp the opportunity now coming firmly into view.

JCDecaux will be rolling out its 10-module digital Out-of-Home course in the coming weeks. It is open to agencies and brands that want to better understand how to maximise growth and ROI from DOOH. Register your interest here to secure a place.