Feeling the pinch: Out-of-home’s next opportunity to evolve
Broadsign’s Ben Allman reflects on recent plateaus in out-of-home growth and why advertising’s oldest and most resilient medium needs to evolve to remain competitive.
When the Outdoor Media Association (OMA) announced that out-of-home (OOH) growth had plateaued in the last quarter, the industry took a collective gasp. Reading up on double-digit growth is something we’d become accustomed to over many previous quarters.
Broadsign’s Ben Allman
Since 2012, Australia’s OOH industry has roughly doubled its revenue, solidifying its place as the only medium besides online to have enjoyed consistent revenue growth over the past decade. As a medium, we have been somewhat blessed by population growth and urbanisation at a time when most other mediums are battling audience declines and fragmentation. But it hasn’t all landed in OOH’s lap; the industry has worked hard to reinvent itself in the digital age, with digital out-of-home (DOOH) now accounting for over 50% of total OOH revenue, well above the global average of roughly 40%.
Broadsign is a cloud-based digital signage software and hardware company that provide solutions to some of the largest and most successful outdoor networks worldwide.
I think one of the main issue with the OOH industry is the lack of accountability and accurate statistics of who has actually seen the OOH ads. Relying on sample or geolocation data to provide a generic overview of who may have seen an ad is not very comforting when spending big dollars on advertising. Perhaps that’s why OOH is plateauing?
This issue can be easily solved though as the technology (camera analytics) is already here to provide real time insights into how many males/females of an approximate age bracket have seen an OOH ad. In fact, with programmatic OOH you can now proactively change the digital OOH ad to suit the audience coming towards the OOH sign.
That will get OOH clients excited again!
Great piece Benno!
“This issue can be easily solved though” – yeah, because installing and maintaining that sort of technology is cheap and doesn’t cause all sorts of privacy issues…
“Relying on sample or geolocation data” – what makes TV or Radio ratings any more reliable than OOH then? Both are taken from research conducted with relatively small samples of people but then used to represent the total population.
Not sure if Programmatic is the answer when lots of the mediums are one to many.
Programmatic in the context of ‘Outdoor’ is a buzz word itself.
Don’t over complicate a “one to many” medium I say. It’s how you underpin your strategy with data led placements that make your dollar work harder. Naturally people will see it.
Val Morgan Outdoor already do this, it’s called DART.
“This issue can be easily solved though as the technology (camera analytics) is already here to provide real time insights into how many males/females of an approximate age bracket have seen an OOH ad.”
You’re not going to know who is likely to see an ad without eye tracking data. A camera seeing a face doesn’t mean the face is looking at the camera or area near it (ie the sign).
A camera could give you opportunity to see data for most but not all internal locations (at a significant data collection cost). But it will not give you age/gender in a roadside location to the same extent.
Camera’s don’t easily solve measurement, they are just another possible set of data points in the many that are needed.
Dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer.