Out Of Home has good reason to make some noise right now. With our current portion of ad spend hovering around 12 per cent, there is much upside to be earned and plenty going on for the industry within the measurement space, which will propel us all forward. We’ve been a sector that has had to reinvent our relevance, building upon largely analogue foundations to set on a course toward greater efficiency of trade and to a future where we can participate in the expanding digital ecosystem. It’s energising, challenging, and exciting. And as we head towards 2023, the shift in gear now feels more fly-by-wire than clunky mechanical.

With media industry body chanting about their collective scale, there is a strong sense across all media sectors that more is more. More customers to talk to, more touch points to engage with them, more attention, more data, and ultimately a want for more share of wallet. For an individual advertiser though, this concept of enormous scale really only matters if your brand can use the platform to efficiently reach the right many, and more importantly, do it within the context of a campaign. In the era of performance-based marketing, and the bottom of funnel sugar hit, scale which demonstrates real returns at the cash register is the new par for the course.

The OOH sector has ambitions to significantly increase its share over the next few years, and the pathway to greater investment from brands will only come from two things – being easy to buy and demonstrating attributable results. It doesn’t matter that we have 35,000 physical pieces of public infrastructure or have the most eye-catching billboards or even the most environments, what matters is how we enable our clients to use them better, and how we can measure that success. Challenge accepted.

The truth in numbers

We’ve been heavily focused on understanding and productising the performance of our network. This means looking at the right mix of digital and classic, the right weights to deliver marked results, the blend of environments which work best and more efficiently to drive an outcome with specific audience segments. It’s been quite the journey and one that is finally paying off. Having mapped over 400 buyer segments using retail and banking transactional data to every one of our physical panels and fast-tracking optimised campaign planning through our SmartReach tool, we are both well positioned and well down the track in the attribution stakes.

There is nothing more transparent than playing with a score card that ultimately looks and sounds like the cash register. Time and time again we’re seeing campaigns, both using OOH in isolation and in combination with other media channels, outperform their peers during their campaign period.

Data from some of the recent campaigns that ran on our network:

Using a combination of Street and Retail, Capilano Honey saw an uplift in buyers by 10 per cent, the spreads and honey category it competes in grew by just 3 per cent. Capilano Honey attracted 69 per cent new buyers, 19 per cent more than its competition¹.

Also, through our Retail and Street network, Rapid Loss was able to optimise placement to reach a massive 91 per cent of all ‘Diet Product buyers’² and, during their campaign, achieved a 22 per cent increase in buyers and an incredible 94 per cent share of wallet.³

Libra underwear also took a Retail and Street Furniture approach in combination with TV and digital and saw an 11 per cent increase in the number of buyers, outperforming its competition by 3.5x and, in a highly competitive category, increasing its market share by 8 per cent from pre to post campaign³.

It’s not just clients who use our SmartReach optimisation planning tool who can access attribution reporting. We understand that in many cases agencies have their own media placement tools and IP, so we’ve adapted our offer. When the OOH component of a broader campaign runs on the oOh! network, we still provide attribution reporting on a range of metrics – buyer uplift, brand penetration, market share, sales promotions during the campaign, audience profile, new customers to the brand (outside of the interpurchase cycle) and online and offline buying behaviours. It’s this category view that is valuable to clients and generally sits outside the typical reporting they can easily access, notwithstanding the substantial investment required to access this rich data set independently.

Truth in the art of Out of Home

At oOh!’s Outfront’23 in October, we announced the extension of our attribution offering into the creative space for a very clear reason: Analytic Partners reports that 41 per cent of the effectiveness of an Out of Home ad comes down to the creative execution. That’s a big number and it certainly has our attention. Too many times we see campaigns miss, having lifted a still from a TVC with a tiny logo, or having too much/too small copy that is whizzed past at 60km/hr and is illegible. These are simply missed opportunities to connect with buyers, and we’re on a mission to make sure that brands and creative agencies know what works – within their category, and by each format and environment by intersecting the art and science of OOH creative by underpinning it with real sales outcomes.

In practical terms, this tool, which we’ve named POLYGRAPH, will unlock the truth about what creative attributes drove results within their respective category and even dissecting past campaigns to look at factors which drove the best shifts in campaign performance. To date we’ve analysed over 130 campaigns and this database will continue to be enriched as we measure hundreds of campaigns over the next 12 months, linking the success metrics within OOH and in combination with other media channels.

So, the ingredients of success are well and truly before us. We have a sector working and growing together and collectively investing in world-leading audience measurement, measuring site by site impression delivery by the hour. This will make buying OOH easier, particularly as we advance towards connected platforms. At oOh! we will continue on our journey measuring campaign performance, for many brands down to a product level, reporting on meaningful metrics for our advertising partners. Finally, we are clearer than ever on the drivers of creative success and in combination, these data-driven pieces of the puzzle will unlock the pathway to exciting and sustainable growth into the future.

Sources:

1. oOh! Brand Buyer Tracking, Quantium data, campaign period vs.  pre-campaign benchmark
2. oOh! Smart Reach, Quantium data, campaign reach of ‘Diet Product Buyers’
3. oOh! Brand Buyer Tracking, Quantium data, campaign period vs. 52-week benchmark