OOH Ads In Digital Era
What is OOH
OOH is the breviation of out-of-home advertising, also called outdoor advertising, outdoor media, and out-of-home media, is advertising experienced outside of the home. This includes billboards, wallscapes, and ,screens, posters seen while “on the go”. It also includes place-based media seen in places such as convenience stores, medical centers, salons, and other brick-and-mortar venues.
OOH advertising in the marketing industry
The marketing campaigns are following marketing funnel. For OOH , it’s sitting at the top funnel mostly to drive awareness. Originally, the marketers will research the demographic of selected regions and choose the most fitable region to buy OOH media. It’s widely used by brand awareness marketing, new product release, etc. .
How can it help in the marketing funnel
Since marketers select the media based on the regional demographic, they expect the Ad can impact the targeted used group. Marketers want to convince those audiences to try to learn more details of the brand or the product. They don’t expect conversions coming from such format of Ads.
Why can’t OOH fit into cocurrent digital marketing era
Within current digital marketing era, the traditional OOH is obviously obsolete. The key reason is that it’s not measurable and it’s disconnected from other digital marketing layers because of the lack of data.
How is modern digital marketing working
There many characateristic to differentiate modern digital marketing to the traditional version. But the most remarkable two are capability to measure and capability to link funnel layers by data. For measurement, any actions taken by audiences can be attributed to the impressions or clicks. At the same time, by leverage data in different marketing media, marketers can link campaigns in different layers of the funnel and reach out to the same users on different commercial medias. The modern marketing can deliver consolidated advertising experience to same group of audiences. Apparently, such solutions raise the peformance of marketing to a new level comparing to the traditional advertising.
What is missing of traditional OOH
Let’s turn back to check the OOH. It’s typicall the traditional Ad format. It’s far from the requirement of moder marketing campaigns. If you are going to buy OOH advertising, you can’t expect any intuitive charts or analysis telling you how the Ad impact the audiences and how to move for the next step. So this is the predicament the traditional OOH is sufferring for now.
Digital evolution of OOH
The traditional OOH is obsolete. Are there any ways to refurbish this old-fasion media?
How to digitalize OOH
Like all the other media, OOH is also digitalizable.But it’s a little bit different from online advertising. The OOH digitalization is based on GEO targeting but not based on single devices. If it’s based on GEO, is it same as traditianal TV Ads ? The answere is absolutely no. The OOH digitalization is leveraging geo fencing. Meanwhile, the data is from audience devices segmented according to users’ preferences.
After the OOH campaign, audience data can be transported into other marketing channels like all the other digital marketing solutions providing consolidated marketing experience for both marketers and targeted audiences. Let’s take a look at the digital OOH marketing campaign execution steps.
- Define the targeted audince segmentations This step is same as regular digital campaigns. It’s firstly to define what kind of user the campaign needs to influence. The tips are similar to other digital marketing solution as well. Don’t choose the segmentation that is too small, cuz you are execute OOH for upper funnel.
- Project the audience segmentation to the map and find out best OOH placement to reach out to the audiences.
This is the most critical step of digital OOH. Unlike other digital marketing to use data to target audience in real time, digitall OOH is to use audience data to analyze the media inventory that it will help marketers to select the most fitable inventory for the campaign. The way OOH reaching out to user is one to more not one to one like mobile or website. Hence, OOH is targeting group of users but not based on single user preferences.With the selection with consideration of cost,marketers can decide the inventory to buy. Some Ad platform is providing geo heat map with the audience projection. This is quite intuitive for the marketers to make final decision.
- Execute the campaign and use other touchpoints to measure the performance With all the inventory and segments prepared, the campaign will be kicked off. During the period what marketers can do ? Measurement and monitoring is quite important. To do measurement, marketers need to define the metrics. It’s not recommended to add final conversion as the key metrics because it’s too low in the funnel which is far from the funnel layer of OOH. Here are some metrics suggested,
- Search rate Marketers can use search engine to monitor the keywords searching rate after the campaign kick-off. Besides the general searching engine, you can focus on some specific platforms as well , like Amazon, Facebook, AliExpress, etc..
- Brand awareness from 3rd party researching companies. This is most popular method to evaluate the brand influence. Research companies can follow up right after the campaign kick-off and draw the audience awareness data in multiple charts to reflect the performance of the OOH advertising.
- Landing rate on the landing page and some other engagement metrics The other engagement metrics are similar. But don’t put the conversion on the top. Click, browse, playing games, etc. , are more proper in such scenario. But please remember, when monitoring, it’s better to scope the metrics within the inventory locations. You can set Geo fence which is same as targeting to monitor the influence of the users. At the same time, you can set the radius to specific distance , like 1km , 2km or 3km. According to some experiment, for workspace, it’s better to define 500m or 1km. For shopping mall, it’s better to use distance up to 3km.
- Transport the audience segments to other channels for further marketing campaigns. This is the advantage of digitalized OOH. After the campaign ,marketers can take advantage of the digital data to deliver consolidated marketing experience in different media channels. Marketers can segment audiences based on the performance of the OOH advertising and use them in search ads, product ads, feed ads, etc. to drive further conversion in different funnel layers.
How to mosaic OOH in the onmichannel marketing
Apparently, with digitalization, OOH recovered from obsolete marketing channel to a promising media. But how to maximize its superiority to boost the campaign performance ? Marketers need to find the most fitable scenarios
What industries are thirsty of D-OOH
Since digitall OOH is relying most on GEO targeting, LBS is undoubtedly the most fitable industry of such format.
- Clinic
- Barber’s
- restaurants They can attract users by posting ad in specific community OOH media. Besides LBS, there’s another strategy of such format which is called “saturation attack”. For some brand , marketers can launch ad to cover all the audiences in all the regions. It’ll deliver great awareness effect and social media sharing as well. Hence, above two are the most typical scenario of digital OOH. But both are for your reference. You don’t have to limit your inspiration by them.
What is the future
Despite the digitalized OOH industry looks promising and attemptive for marketers, there are still multiple points to pay attention to.
Where are the inventories
Inventory build-up is always the top priority. If you want to organize a group of media , you need to work with local property management or community management team. You need to set up competible revenue share with them so that they are willing to let you manage their community resources. Moreover, we need to pay attention the quality. Sometimes, you can find there are more than 1 placement in one elevator carrier which will distract the audiences.
How to gather the convincible data
Data is another challenge of the digitalized OOH. Data refers to both data for targeting and the data for measurement. It’s better to find the region with contains enough audience data density.Meanwhile, marketers need to form a reasonable combination of metrics to measure the performance. Conversion is always avoid in such scenario. Considering what’s next after OOH campaign can help you set up meaningful meansurement framework.
Conclusion
In summary, digital OOH is quite new for the marketing industry but quite promising as well. To use it , marketers need to define the scenario ,find the best region and set up a meaningful evaluation framework.