With the exception of cinema, the out-of-home sector (OOH) most affected by the pandemic crisis. In the last quarter, the Advertising Association and Warc’s expense report showed that spending had fallen by 70% and Nielsen had indexed it to 85%. Here, The Drum interviews OOH bosses on their long road to recovery.

Billboards, or what specialists call the OOH and DOOH (digital) advertising inventory, are based on one-to-many impressions in high-traffic areas. And in the blockade, it proved problematic. The sites of the lucrative cities were ghost towns and marketing was more targeted at non-public devices and to the house where the public moved the longest.

Shelleen Shum, the forecasting director at eMarketer, says “OOH ad spend for most markets was negatively affected”. DOOH was hurt slightly less. But in Q3 and Q4, footfall is expected to increase and delayed campaigns to resume, while a pandemic election in the US will drive spend there.

So how did the bosses of Clear Channel, Global, Posterscope and Talon adapt to the lock?

Justin Cochrane is the European CEO of Clear Channel International, which operates part of one million billboards in 31 markets. For him, it’s about the flexibility of media owners.

“The worst thing you can do is check to retain customers. We accepted that the hearing was gone and that we would lose reservations. We were as smart as we imagined for customers.

However, backing campaigns are receding and he says “the third quarter is recovering well.” In this context, its profit losses in the third quarter have lately fallen by 30%.

This week, Clear Channel is rolling out its Radar visitor portal in Europe for its consumers to virtually map campaigns, whether it’s for “18- to 34-year-olds who buy groceries at major fashion brands or parents who have recently visited a supermarket.”

Managed in partnership with AdSquare, it is fed through 5% and 10% of the population’s anonymised cellular data, which are used to track traffic near Clear Channel billboards, bus stops and street furniture.

Previously, it relied on the slow demographics of about 10,000 travelers using multisensory trackers. Thanks to these two measures (and more), it largely monitors site-by-site recovery. “Previously, cellular knowledge would not have been accurate enough to know if someone close to the sign.”

For Cochrane, the most impressive crusade since closing came from Emily Crisps, DOOH’s first semi-repentant client (pictured above). He also praised the position of Paddy Power, Leaving the Couch, Remember the Crouch.

DOOH has allowed for more risky jobs like this, he explains. They can be changed at the touch of a button, much more than demolishing 4000 posters.

Global, the audio and outdoor giant, previously this year changed the name of its virtual audio exchange advertising (Dax) market to Digital Advertising Exchange (also Dax). The platform now hosts around 1000 DOOH sites, which can be purchased 4 DSPs. It promises to broadcast the creation on DOOH screens in “less than an hour”.

Dax now has to convince buyers that audio and OOH can work together, and that’s the job of Oliver Deane, Global’s director of foreign trade.

He recounts BMW’s recent plug-in hybrid crusade that synced DOOH schedules with his radio ads knowing that a lot of you’ll get advantages from the audio and visual experience, which he says leads to efficiency.

Despite the recession, it continues its strategy of modernizing “screens on the ground”. It will have about a quarter of the additional screens in a position to be sold until March 2021. More of these audiovisual opportunities are expected in the future.

As for the OOH strategy, Deane believes McDonald’s is doing it. The driving service remained open for most of the crisis and road and shipping spaces were important for this awareness campaign.

“Advertisers use DOOH well as an artistic canvas to convey very concise and transparent messages to people. They went from the same Covid-19 ads.”

The organization is recently leading the “Think Big” campaign in the face of the recently announced and expected recession. Using the knowledge of the last recession, it seeks to show the merit of using this marketing budget.

A positive aspect, Deane concludes, is that the slowdown has forced the industry, on the part of the customer and the distributor, to make the media “much more and much more immediate”.

On the other hand, the vendors away from home and on the site, Posterscope boasted of charging more than $3 billion, before the pandemic.

General manager Glen Wilson said: “We had a global pandemic with general instructions not to leave home, which had a significant seismic effect. The 70% reduction in AA/Warc spending will be fair.”

“Despite the invisible circumstances, such as going back to the lockdown, which we have noticed appearing in cities, this is very positive,” he says.

The merit of OOH is that it can succeed in a large number of people at once, which is useful in a fragmented media landscape. The crisis will “accelerate” existing trends.

“The rise of the virtual away from home driven by the media owners who built it, such as progressions like Ultravision and front-scrolling panels. These allow you to sell your most productive sites more times. Digital has this, but with a higher quality of presentation. »

Posterscope tries to sell to its consumers in the prospective REtransmission of DOOH, with purchases and creations that cause “when safe situations occur”. This can be weather, time of day, traffic, pollen counts (here the GSK crusade), temperature, government-imposed locks or even football results.

Wilson’s task is to check the effectiveness of such purchases. With its new Ecos Now trading platform, it focuses on the media consumers need to buy, not just what’s on sale.

It provides an example: “Cider sales are strongly correlated with warm weather. If I could buy the medium on certain options when certain temperature triggers were triggered, then obviously it would be a much more effective use of expenses.”

There are no more bets. Express situations for this to be acquired exist or not.

Barry Cupples, managing director of plan development firm OOH Talon Group, says DOOH “unlocks predictive analytics that allows marketers to make more important decisions on the go.” Which is the ultimate right now.

Having all the variables on a single board and being able to act on them almost in real time is a new charm for the OOH space, many associate it with the faithful plastered billboards.

“Advances explain the artistic procedure and optimize the media and message with a greater and more embedded audience orientation.”

Talon’s OOH knowledge control platform, Ada, has been especially helpful in “providing consumers with the maximum trace applicable to audiences on a weekly conversion base,” however, this week is launching Atlas, an automated DOOH purchasing platform. The purpose here is for marketers to expand their online methods for DOOH. If it’s for shopping and planning, who can let it go?

In the future, those who can perceive fluctuations in public movements will benefit. And Cupples believes that, to gain a competitive advantage, creation must be highlighted by fast delivery, with messages that fit the time of day, position and consumer objective. He highlights his paintings with clients such as McDonald’s and O2.

Its most recent point is that OnDevice Research shows that OOH recorded the largest build-up of customer confidence in the pandemic, while channels such as social media suffered in comparison. The huge amount of PSA hardware that fills OOH sites has probably led to this and will have long-term benefits.

This article refers to: Monde, Ooh, Future Of Media, Media, Brand

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