Crafting creative brand strategies with OOH

Understanding the power of Out of Home advertising

OOH advertising comes with lots of unique advantages that can’t be recreated through other channels. Here are just a few of the features that make it such a valuable medium for brand promotion.

• Visibility: When placed in locations with high traffic, on foot or otherwise, OOH advertisements can bring maximum visibility to your brand, 24/7. The potential for constant eyes to be on your brand and product increase its familiarity to consumers, even when viewed by people who wouldn’t necessarily be your target audience. This rise in familiarity can increase trust in your brand.

• Frequency: A follow-on from visibility - OOH advertisements are not only seen by many, but they’re seen often. As well as increasing familiarity, this repeated viewing increases the likelihood of consumers responding to your messaging.

• Geographic segmentation: In some ways it is easier to advertise to specific geographic segments through OOH ads than it is via digital channels. This is particularly useful for smaller local businesses, and brands looking to target specific demographics.

• Unobtrusiveness: While this might sound counterintuitive, OOH advertising often benefits from not seeming like it’s being “forced” in front of people, the way online ads occasionally can. When encountered as a part of their daily routine, people are far more likely to feel as though they have discovered the ad themselves, as opposed to being targeted by advertisers. 

• Cost effectiveness: OOH ads are often incredibly cost effective considering the amount of attention they can attract.

• Measurability: While it may not be measured in clicks or open rates, depending on the type of OOH advertising you’re using it’s still possible to track impressions - and therefore the impact - of your campaigns.

Integrating OOH into brand strategies

Incorporating OOH into wider brand strategies is a great way to raise awareness of your brand and reinforce the messages you’re sharing on other platforms. Staying consistent with your branding and tone of voice across multiple channels is key to establishing and maintaining your brand’s identity - the thing that sets you apart from your competitors. By using OOH to complement your digital strategies you’re going to make it easier for potential customers to recognise and remember you, your product, and your values.

For example, by complimenting a video campaign with a billboard referencing the same characters used in your ad, you’re fleshing out the world of your campaign and creating a cohesive sense of storytelling across multiple mediums. Similarly, they’re a great place to highlight and repeat any slogans you’re using to stick in your audience’s mind.

Lastly, even after implementation, no campaign is complete without being tracked and measured for its effectiveness - these insights can then be taken with you into your next campaign. For a more indepth look into creating an OOH campaign, take a look at our full breakdown on the topic.

Leveraging data for Out of Home creativity

As mentioned above, you can’t create a campaign without data and research to use as your building blocks. There are lots of ways to leverage data to enhance the creativity of your OOH brand advertising, much of which focuses on the aspects of OOH that are unique - those centring around the geographical locations of your ads and who will be seeing them. 

For example, by taking weather data into consideration you can not only find out when people are most likely to see your ad (e.g. a sunny weekend day), you can also decide whether or not you want your advertisement to change depending on these environmental factors. Advertising cool drinks on hot and sunny days is likely to be more effective than showing the same drinks to people fighting their way through snow and ice. Pair this with an understanding of the local footfall patterns, and you have a lot of information that can influence how and where you’ll spread your message.

Perhaps the most important data you’ll need to understand and use is the data surrounding your target audience. One of the traps of OOH campaigns is the fact that they can be seen by anyone - but that doesn’t mean they should be designed with just anyone in mind. You need a fleshed-out and logical profile of your intended audience - because, if your ad isn’t made for anyone in particular, then who is supposed to want to look at it?

Measuring Out of Home campaign impact

As previously mentioned, it’s a misconception that the impact of OOH advertising isn’t as measurable as online counterparts. There are plenty of OOH Media analytics you can use to track how many people are seeing your campaign and how that affects your business. This can be as broad as measuring footfall past your ad, to specific measurements such as Eye Tracking. Eye Tracking makes it possible to tell not just how many people pass your ad, but how many people actually look at it, and what shapes and sizes of ad are more likely to enter their field of vision. 

It’s important to establish ways of tracking and measuring your campaign’s impact during its conception. Without these figures, it will be impossible to prove that the time and money you have spent on your campaign has been worth it. It also gives you valuable information to take forward into creating your next campaign. Seeking support from the experts at Clear Channel would give you access to PCAs (post-campaign analytics) with a detailed overview of your campaign’s impact - because we understand how important it is to know you’ve made a good investment.