Out of home (OOH) has been around since the dawn of advertising and for good reason. It can quickly make an impact on passers-by and be used in a variety of innovative ways.
While you might think of OOH as just a big billboard on the side of a building, it encompasses a much broader definition. Any advertising out of the home will fall into this media channel, including street furniture, transport, leisure and retail hubs. It’s everything from special builds to beer mats!
Strengths
OOH has remained a key advertising channel to this day. Some reasons why include:
- Reach – 97% of the population interact with OOH each week (quick note – unless you manage to book every site in the UK, your campaign won’t reach this many people)
- Trust – OOH can fit naturally into an environment, there’s no cookies or tracking involved, meaning people are more likely to trust what they see.
- Creativity – There are endless opportunities with OOH. An idea can be elevated through wrapping a bus, projecting onto buildings and even holograms. If you can think it, you can do it (within reason, please).
- Flexibility – With the rise of digital panels, OOH advertising has never been more flexible. Rather than being locked into a two week in-charge, ads can run where and when we want, allowing budgets to work smarter.
Weaknesses
That being said, OOH still comes with its challenges.
- Lead times – These still remain long for traditional print OOH. Some media owners need booking confirmation up to 16 weeks in advance.
- Combating the big brands – Big brands will often book up space such as buses and roadside packages at the start of each year, limiting inventory.
- Tracking and attribution – It can be difficult to directly attribute business results to an OOH campaign.
How does MB do OOH?
At Media Bounty, sustainability, transparency and efficiency are at the core of how we approach our briefs. Within the outdoor space we are constantly assessing what is the right approach for our client’s needs:
- Market Neutrality – While 87% of the outdoor market is taken up by the likes of Global, JCDecaux and Clear Channel, it’s important to make sure that we’re reaching out to a wide variety of suppliers. The market is made up of smaller suppliers who can reach specific audiences or locations that the bigger guys might not. A more bespoke approach with a smaller supplier could be the way forward.
- Effectiveness and Efficiency – While having the right format is important, it’s also just as important to understand where this format is placed. We interrogate every panel we book to make sure it will be seen by the right people at the right times, in the right place. While having a wide reaching national campaign is great to build mass awareness, sometimes limited budgets mean we need every impact to count.
- Sustainability – As an ethical agency, we assess all of our suppliers against sustainability focussed criteria.
- Integration – As an integrated Media and Creative agency, the teams work closely with each other to ensure the creative idea and media direction is a natural fit for every brief.
The good news is that as media planners, we’re also OOH nerds, making sure we’re up to date on the latest awards contenders or big activations. We’ll always share internally or with clients when we see Specsavers mess up an outdoor ad, a jar of Chili Marmite exploding out of a 48 sheet, or Tom Cruise standing on top of his own face at the Waterloo IMAX. It’s important to be inspired by what we see in the OOH space and make sure we can add to the conversation.
Here’s a few examples of our own campaigns that we’re particularly proud of:
Sipsmith
Last Christmas we bought Sipsmith to the streets of London. We ran D6 Panels, Ribbons and 48 sheet OOH in high footfall locations across central London, to keep Sipsmith top of mind while the streets were packed with christmas shoppers. Digital panels were dayparted to run during the evening to ensure we were showing up at the most relevant times.
A pre and post campaign survey told us that we successfully reached 40% of Londoners, with 60% of those being gin drinkers, driving…
- A 12% boost in prompted awareness
- A 75% rise in favourability
- The opinion that the product was perfect for gifting increasing from 23% up to 93%.
Men’s Minds Matter
We placed messaging all about men’s mental health in Reading FC’s football stadium urinals. While not the most glamorous of locations, it meant we could reach a relevant audience at the right time in a particularly high dwell environment.
If you’d like to learn more about our approach to efficient, sustainable and exciting OOH buying, why not get in touch with our team at hello@mediabounty.com
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