What is Outdoor Advertising?

The stand out billboards and posters that you stumble across frequently in your day-to-day life can be called a few things. Outdoor Advertising or Out of Home (OOH) Advertising is simply a way of describing a medium that is outside of your home.

The various types of OOH can be broken down into three different categories:

1. Billboard Advertising

This is the most commonly known form of Outdoor Advertising. Whether the billboard is on a sky-high building or along a busy motorway – you can even find billboards in rural areas – the idea is to capture attention from a  wider audience. It’s a great way to place advertising in the eye-line of customers you may not be able to effectively target via other mediums.

Image: https://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/55/2017/04/haim_billboard_1-768×512.jpeg

2. Street Furniture

Street Furniture is just one name for this category as it basically covers all permanent fixtures in typically urban or high traffic areas, this can include

• Bus shelters
• Telephone boxes
• Kiosks

3. Transport

Pretty self-explanatory this one. Buses, taxis, train stations, the London Underground. It even extends to the spaces within taxis and train carriages.

Image: https://ubiqtaxis.com/blog-entry/taxi-advertising-reaches-the-areas-that-other-media-cannot-reach.

These are the three, core, traditional forms of Outdoor Advertising, but really there’s no end to the number of opportunities for this style of marketing. That’s where the effectiveness of the placement of OOH has become so important – to narrow the focus or content of your marketing to suit the audience.

This article breaks down the pros and cons of the categories above to help you decide which one best suits your business and campaign goals.

Traditional or Digital Outdoor Advertising

Some people think OOH or Digital Out of Home (DOOH) is more confusing than it is. But it’s simple – choose your size, choose a location, choose your artwork, and choose traditional or digital.

There’s the classic paper poster style that is physically pasted onto paid spaces, then there’s the digital side that is effectively anything on a screen.

DOOH is becoming increasing popular due largely to the fact that DOOH can capture attention in a way that drives interaction from your target audience.

The other big win that comes with DOOH, is the way you can target your audience in a way that traditional OOH can’t. With DOOH you can choose not just a location, but a targeted time and day – say Friday evenings for a dating site on a bus shelter that’s gone by Monday morning.

The beauty of DOOH is the way you can react to fresh insights to update your content based on results about a live campaign. What better way to launch, test and improve to produce the best campaign that delivers personalised, relevant messaging to the consumers you’re chasing.

From the way you choose your location to the shape and size of your screen- it can all help you secure the results you’re looking for.

Utilising the space at a bus stop is a great example of a position with high traffic that could suit your marketing goals, utilising an interactive call to action to get results and change your content where necessary.

Businesses around the world are starting to use DOOH in interactive ways to drive audience participation, like:

• Augmented Reality
• Bluetooth
• QR Codes
• Interactive Gaming
• Hashtags
• Video and Moving copy

The advantage of DOOH is that it creates so many possibilities, your imagination is the only limitation!

The Benefits of OOH

Consumers typically need at least 10 interactions with a brand before using a call to action. When you think about the habits of people and the way we frequent locations and favourite commuting routes, OOH is a fantastic way to get your brand count up quickly!

OOH can help you reach your marketing objectives with its uniques features and benefits, including:

• Integrative campaigns to underpin an overarching multimedia strategy
• A blank canvas to use as creatively as you want
• Target your audience by narrowing down your location with Bubble
• Effective branding
• High impact with fantastic customer recall
• Market to many with effective ROI

The latest ‘Oops’ campaign from O2 is a great example of how much impact an OOH campaign can have. Utilising both static, or traditional, OOH as well as DOOH to promote their latest offer to replace customers screens for free, really created a conversation with the public.

Image: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/o2-runs-broken-billboards-show-off-screen-replacement-offer/1443552.

A Captive Audience

There’s no other medium that can capture your customer’s attention like OOH – you can turn off TV and radio, scroll past Social Media and AdWords, but if you’re sitting at a red light looking out the window you’re more motivated to read and interact with OOH in an exclusive, uncluttered environment.

This is why OOH gets such fantastic recall – it’s on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in locations where your audience is. What other medium can say that?

Now that you know what outdoor advertising is, it’s time to start using it to your advantage. Start searching over 80,000 national ad spaces that you can easily book online. Need some help understanding your target customer? Click here to read more about where you’ll find your persona.