The advertising industry is undergoing exponential change. The out of home (OOH) advertising industry has consisted of stationary billboards, transportation vehicles such as bikes, scooters, cars & busses, and other permanent assets in shopping malls and streets. You can even go as far to say that out-of-home advertising started in Stone age with cave drawings, providing information on where to go for food and telling stories. Advertisers and marketing agencies place advertisements on these assets by running ad campaigns targeting specific markets, demographics, and affinity groups. Out-of-home advertising spending in the United States in 2019 was assessed at $10.4 billion in U.S dollars. It is estimated that OOH advertising will further grow to $11.7 billion by the end of 2023 (Statista). The MOOH industry specifically focuses on moving assets instead of stationary ones. Effectively tracking these types of ad campaigns is difficult.
The issue with OOH/MOOH is obtaining useful metrics to understand if the OOH/MOOH campaign is working. Think about digital advertising online. Google and Facebook both offer ad placement services on their products such as search (Google.com), video (think YouTube ads), and other forms of content. The reason that these ad services have been so successful can be attributed to rich analytics and actionable performance data such as impressions (how many people saw the ad), clicks, the average cost per 1000 impressions, conversions, and so on. The analytics allow for accurate measurement of the campaign’s performance, allotting small tweaks to be made to optimize your conversion rates for website traffic, app downloads, or phone calls.
Furthermore, the metrics also help power crucial “re-targeting” campaigns. In digital advertising, retargeting is the process of aggregating users that have seen the ad or have interacted with it, but have not fully completed the CTA (call to action) for further marketing. A CTA can be calling a phone number or making a purchase on the advertiser’s website. Someone who has clicked an ad and browsed the product catalog but failed to make the purchase is an example of a retargeting opportunity. After a user has shown interest in an ad campaign but hasn’t completed the CTA, they can be served a different set of ads on Facebook, Google, or other websites to try and close the gap to convert to the CTA based on metrics collected before.
Back in the MOOH advertising world, the industry has always been missing the analytical perspective, losing out on marketing dollars to tried & true online advertising on search engines and websites. However, recently, that mindset has begun to shift and evolve. StreetMetrics is a company that has been bridging the gap between MOOH ad campaign assets and its analytical performance measurement. The company uses a privacy-compliant dataset of mobile devices and then aggregates real-time GPS data from MOOH ads to accurately measure the reach and impact of ad campaigns. Retargeting efforts are made possible through further tools that attribute MOOH ads to website conversions, in-store traffic, and app downloads just to mention a few.
This is an exciting time for OOH and MOOH industries as they apply decades of what was only possible in a digital world to real, tangible assets we see when we are out and about. In the near future, we will likely see a shift in marketing spend in favor of these kinds of marketing mediums.
Author: Dan Stanisevschi
