Businesses use Out of Home (OOH) advertising because it offers coverage and scale to target people on the move in innovative ways, with impactful creative. We spend over three hours a day in public spaces, and over the course of a week 98% of the UK population will see some OOH advertising, (Route 2016).

Today’s OOH is much more than posters. In recent years, new formats and increasingly connected technology have enhanced and complemented the already existing high-impact classic inventory. OOH has transformed into an increasingly dynamic, adaptive, innovative and interactive medium. Consequently, it is enjoying unprecedented growth, with revenue over £1bn, up 3.5% YOY 2015 vs 2014 (WARC/AA).

It is a public, broadcast medium that can’t be avoided, skipped or blocked – conveying stature, authority, fame and making brands iconic. OOH is perhaps best known as an effective brand building medium, and many studies have demonstrated that brand building delivers long term success for businesses large and small.

I work at Outsmart, the marketing body for OOH, and we wanted to measure if OOH is also a catalyst for short-term effectiveness – specifically – can it trigger consumer behaviour and drive customers to engage with brands on their smartphone?

Working with research group Ipsos Mori, we recruited a sample of 479 people aged 16 to 44 for a study that ran throughout the course of November last year. Each participant downloaded an app so that we could track where they’d been, what OOH campaigns they’d been exposed to, and what on-device actions they subsequently took (search terms, website visits, app usage). They didn’t know they were part of an OOH study, and all measurement was passive.

That meant we captured real people, going about their everyday lives, doing ‘real’ stuff. We captured them, if you like, being natural and normal.

Here’s the bigger picture:

• They recorded a collective 1,300 + hours of OOH exposure across 35 national campaigns which used a mix of OOH formats and environments

• They took 7,000 + brand actions. We split these into ‘direct’ and ‘secondary’. ‘Direct’ brand actions are defined as a search for or visit to a specific brand name or advertiser website. ‘Secondary’ actions were by category – such as ‘best new hatchback’ or ‘winter sunshine’.

• Via their devices, they collectively spent more than 150 hours with brands

That was pretty good. But we collected much more data, which enabled us to take a closer look at things like: exposed vs unexposed behaviour; device usage; previous relationships with brands; and the link between exposure frequency and response.

The key findings

Across all 35 campaigns, 9% took an on-device brand action, rising to 13% among the best-performing 20 campaigns. As a response rate to advertising, that’s a strong result!

Comparing exposed vs unexposed on smartphone response, there was a +17% uplift across all 35 campaigns, rising to +38% among the best-performing 20 campaigns. This is the contribution that OOH activity makes - bringing customers to a brand’s online assets - by search, web visit and app. Of those taking the actions, 57% were new or lapsed customers – fantastic for brands seeking growth.

66% of smartphone actions were direct to the brand (ie ‘direct’ as opposed to ‘secondary’).

Response is generally pretty quick: 10% were within a day of the first exposure, 50% within four days, and 91% within 14 days of the first sighting.

When we dig deeper into the data we find that young people (16-24s) exposed to OOH are almost one-and-a-half times more likely to take brand action than unexposed. Probably because they are often out socialising with their friends, plus they are heavy phone users. The popular perception about this groups negative attitudes to advertising and their complex media consumption behaviours has made them a challenging audience for businesses to talk to. It is great to see that OOH is a medium that they respond to.

In the wider context, the evaluation of marketing communications has shifted away from long-term impacts (over 18 months - 2years) and towards shorter-term performance metrics. Our study shows that OOH is equally effective in the short-term, providing excellent return on investment and a gateway for consumers to spend time with brands.

The methodology

We partnered with Ipsos and Route, and selected a nationally representative panel of 479 people aged between 16 and 44. Their behaviour was passively recorded via an app that included geo-location facilities. The 35 national campaigns we studied were mapped to an individual site level, geofenced to industry standard visibility distances for each format and placement, and had an average weight of 476 GRPs. We defined lapsed customers as those who had not used fast-food or entertainment brands for one month; other retailers for three months; and financial service providers for six months. The study ran from 2-26th November 2015.

 

Tim Lumb, Insight and Effectiveness Director, Outsmart

 

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