Innovations in traditional outdoor advertising media

In recent  years, we have appropriately seen a great deal of attention paid to advertising in new media. Without a doubt,  we see a dramatically  different media landscape  than  was the case ten years ago. As a result,  we have recently  seen  a substantial volume  of articles  published focusing  on  topics such  as advertising over the internet, mobile  television, SMS and  social media. Additionally, considerable attention  has been  paid to other  promotional  techniques, such  as product  placement and sponsorship, which have taken on increased  importance due to changes in the media landscape.

While  attention to these  areas  is necessary  and,  indeed, essential,   it is also important for us to not lose sight of the fact that traditional  media are attempting to find  mechanisms, often  related  to technological  innovation,  to cope with and thrive in the new media environment. Thus, I would like to encourage research­ ers to consider  topics that address  new developments in traditional  media  such as television,  radio, magazines,  newspapers and outdoor  advertising. While there have  been  some  notable  exceptions the  proportion  of academic arti­ cles on traditional  media in major advertising journas over the last several  years has become  quite  small.

 

Outdoor advertising,  which is now more properly  referred  to as ‘out  of home advertising’  because   of  the   range  of  formats   that  have  evolved,   provides  a good example of how recent  innovation  has changed  a medium  dramatically. Moreover,  in the  case  of out  of home,  it can  be argued  that  new  media  have created  more opportunities than  threats  for the out of home industry  due  to the frequent use of out of home to communicate a website address and, increasingly, for other IMC-related applications involving technologies such as QR codes and Bluetooth. I’ve recently had the chance to meet with Stephen  Freitas, Chief Marketing Officer of the Outdoor  Advertising Association of America, and am very impressed  by the industry’s ability to adjust to the new environment  and new technologies. I’d like to note a few of these specifically to demonstrate  how adaptation of ‘traditional media’ to key trends is critically important. While I real­ ise that some of this discussion will be from a US perspective, I s spect similar trends are highly in evidence in other parts of the world.

 

One major development  in out of home advertising recently is the growth of formats other than billboards (see Outdoor  Advertising Association of America 2010). While. billboards still accounted  for 65% of out of home expenditures, other  categories, including  transit (e.g. airports, buses,  truckside,  rail, taxi) at 17%, cinema  at 10%, street  furniture  (e.g.  bus  benches  and  shelters,  kiosks, bicycles and bicycle racks, shopping malls and pedestrian panes) at 6%, and alter­ native out of home (everything else from airborne to dry cleaning bags to stadium advertising) at 2% have grown considerably. Some of these relatively new formats provide opportunities  for advertisers that did not exist previously and open the door for very creative approaches, such as Apple’s out of home campaigns for the iPod and iPhone that depict both the product (e.g. a stunning visual of an iPhone and it application on bus shelters) and its users (e.g. the silhouette of an iPod user enjoying music painted across an entire bus) in spectacular fashion.

 

The  outdoor industry has also adapted quite effectively to digital technology, both with integrating digital displays into some out of home formats (e.g. in store street furniture, digital displays in transit locations and places of business) and by converting more traditional billboards to digital formats. The  ability of digital billboards to carry multiple  messages both opens  up access to many locations for advertisers who had not previously been able to buy, as it allows for multiple messages to be rotated in the same location. This technology also addresses a tra­ditional limitation of the medium in that real-time changes of copy can be made. Hence, television stations can promote different programmes at different  times of the day, restaurants can offer specials at various times, and other appropriate time-based  adjustments  to the  message can be made. Clearly, this innovation changes the way out of home is used and opens up new opportunities  for adver­tisers who use digital billboards.

 

Another key innovation is the creation of the innovative ‘EYES ON’TM meas­urement system that was created by the Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB). Historically in the  US, standard  billboard rates had been  set  by TAB using traffic counts and factoring the size of the billboard. A significant issue with this method  was that ‘viewership’  was being measured in terms of people passing a billboard as opposed to measuring people who actually noticed the ad. The  new EYES ON system,  which is now available in more than 200 markets for most billboard types, transit shelters,  other  street  furniture and some wall murals, addresses this issue by developing a measure  of ‘eyes  on’  impr<;ssions that  provides  a sophisticated estimate of people  who actually notice the ad.

 

TAB  uses a very sophisticated technique to arrive at  the  EYES  ON  rating, adjusting traffic counts  (or daily effective  circulation)  based on visibility research designed to convert  people who have an opportunity to see the ad into audiences who actually notice an ad.on a unit (for additional  information  on the specifics of the approach,  see www.eyesonratings.com). This  research  includes  15,000 high­ definition video simulations of vehicular and pedestrian exposure to out of home units, and factors in the size of the display, its format, the side of the road the dis­ play is on, the angle of the road, street  type and distance  from the road. Visibility research· is also supplemented with travel surveys  that provide demographic pro­ files for people  viewing  units and record their driving  patterns.  As a final step  in arriving at EYES ON  ratings and developing the associated  database,  data from Peoplecount (traffic engineering and  pedestrian modelling),  Mediamark (MRI), Micromeasurement (video simulation), PRS (eye tracking), MAP, lnterpublics (visibility  model  development) and  Telmar  (database architecture and  model­ ling) are integrated.

 

While I have actually  been  critical elsewhere of the wisdom or need  to make visibility  adjustments in rural areas, as the  system  has been  implemented, the advantages in  urban  and  suburban environments are  very  clear.  Moreover,  it strikes  me as entirely  possible that the visibility research can factor in the lack of other stimuli  competing for attention in rural areas, and TAB may well do this as the system  expands.

 

In any event,  the advantages of the new system  are readily apparent and open some new opportunities for the industry. First, having accurate  pedestrian counts around  structures such  as kiosks  and  bus  shelters in  major  metropolitan areas allows advertisers to get data on exposures (and its contribution reach, frequency and  CPM)  where  data  had  simply  not  been  available  previously. Second,   the ratings  provided  by EYES ON  are simply  more accurate  and can  be viewed  as an accurate  ratings measure  that can be more readily compared  to that of other media. Generally,  rating points can be measured  as the total number of ‘eyes  on impressions’ (EOIs) delivered by an out of home display expressed as a percent­ age  of that  market’s poplllations  (OAAA 2010). And,  of course,  as with  other OOH  formats,  more  accurate  measures  of reach, frequency and  CPMs  can  be computed.

 

A final major advantage of EYES ON- and perhaps its most major innovation – is the ability  to engage  in selective demographic (rather  than  just geographic) targeting  by OOH advertising. The  EYES  ON  database contains  information on the demographic viewership of each individual billboard site and provides a much better  measure of actual exposure  to a specific demographic  group (e.g. consumers with incomes over US$100,000) than zip code-based data would. Moreover, maps of billboard locations are available that reveal optimal locations based on consumer driving patterns in a way that is sometimes counterintuitive.

 

While it is not my purpose  here to review all the  implications of the  new measurement  system for out of home media in the US, I do want to point out how much it, and other innovations, have been changing the outdoor advertising industry from what is was even ten years ago. Clearly, there are new opportunities for advertisers as a result of these changes. It is also clear that other ‘traditional’ media are changing. My goal here is to encourage more research on how advertis­ers can effectively respond to and take advantage of changes in traditional media and  what changes are necessary to use these  media effectively. Clearly, there may be cases where one or more of a medium’s traditional advantages have been compromised. Articles on such issues are also of interest.

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