Technology, and social media in particular, played a central part in this year’s election. Twitter revealed that David Cameron had been the most mentioned party leader this year, Conservative MPs tweeted more than their Labour counterparts and party hashtags were used millions of times, with the hashtag #GE2015 being used 500,000 in the week before the result.
Dubbed the social media election, the 2010 campaign changed the way parties promoted their views and this year continued in the same vein as both Labour and the Conservatives invested heavily in social media marketing. Yet what made this election stand out was how much of an impact traditional media still has. Granted, Twitter users sent 1.5 million messages during the televised debates this year but that was still less than a fifth of the total number of people who actually watched it unfold on the TV. In addition, newspapers also proved their worth with social media following the campaign rather than leading it.
So just as technology has helped to revive people’s engagement with politics online, connected car technology is now supporting the resurrection of more traditional advertising outlets – namely billboard advertising.
Modernising the Traditional
In the 1978 election, the Conservatives commissioned a billboard poster depicting a long line of unemployed people accompanied by the words “Labour isn’t working”. It was a game-changing advert.
In fact, it was so impactful that nearly 40 years later, Labour launched its pastiche of this famous Saatchi advert depicting the queue of people as a waiting room of patients and changed the words to “The doctor can’t see you now”. This was just a digital representation of the image but it just shows how much of a lasting impact a strong billboard campaign can have.
So digital outdoor posters do make perfect sense to get the message across. But parties aren’t spending money on traditional billboard advertising. Instead they are placing onus on social media in campaigning efforts and the reasons for doing so are firstly because billboard advertising is expensive and secondly because traditional advertising such as this is notoriously difficult to measure.
Essentially today, billboard “proof of performance” is really “proof of posting” as advertisers lack recent, accurate data due to the fact that billboard operators rely on various incomplete and inconsistent data sets. Campaigns, then, are rarely strategically planned or accurately measured. We have seen in the political realm that digital ads and posters have been quickly pulled together in reaction to certain events. But this doesn’t mean that outdoor advertising is a dying trend, quite the opposite is happening in fact. Spending on outdoor advertising exceeded £1 billion for the first time and digital poster and billboard screens account for about a quarter of this total.
Commenting on this rise in spending in the UK advertising market, Tim Lefroy, chief executive at the Advertising Association said, “In cinemas, outdoor, news and television, advertising is seizing the opportunity of new technology.” And just as social media proved to be a game changing technology in the way brands broadcast their messages, big data derived from connected car technology could be the next big technology to make an impact on the advertising industry.
Connected Car Technology Provides “Proof of Performance”
By using data from connected cars, advertisers are able to understand how many people were exposed to an ad and for how long in traffic based on the time of day, day of week, equipping them with that essential “proof of performance” which is increasingly becoming a necessity. With insights into how many vehicles typically pass a location by time of day and day of week at a location - as well as actual vehicle counts on a specific day, time and side of the road - advertisers are able to plan strategic campaigns, armed with accurate and reliable feedback on the impact of their work.
Harnessing connected car technology to understand the journeys customers and target audiences make empowers smarter and more engaging promotional campaigns. Big data insights equip firms with targeted information to understand how to pinpoint advertising and other marketing efforts to their customers on billboards.
Traditional media still engages significant volumes of potential customers in the digital era. With iconic images posted on billboards persuading customers in the long-term - just like the 70s “Labour isn’t working” campaign still affects us today - connected car technology could be the answer to provide tangible proof of this impact. With so much investment in advertising, safeguarding budgets with measurable insights as to how it is working has never been more important.
By Matt Simmons, EMEA Marketing Director at INRIX
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