The latest Global Ad Trends report from the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) states, “successful brands allocate an average 13% of their media budget to out of home.” Since reading the report, I have been interested in understanding more about these successful brands. Who are they and why do they buck the 6% average adspend in Out of Home?  How do they use OOH to strategically position their products and services? Most importantly, why should we pay attention to the trend?

It goes by a lot of names…. “experiential marketing”, “event marketing”, “on-ground marketing”, “live marketing”, “participation marketing”, or “special events”. But no matter what name people use, it’s clear that there is one thing experiential marketing is, and that’s confusing. Experiential is still a (relatively) new channel, and it’s continuing to develop before our eyes. The addition of smart phones into the mix is adding a dimension to an already rapidly changing media.  So, it’s no surprise that people can be confused when it comes to what’s involved in experiential.

The inventor of the Segway, Dean Kamen once said, “Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation” Out of Home media is currently on the cusp of just such a “once in a while” moment, a foundational change that will completely reshape the future of the industry.

In this increasingly digital age, why should you be including Out of Home media? Why consider OOH when digital online and mobile are king? In this second installment of our 3-part series, “An Introduction to Out of Home”, we are going to touch upon not just why Out of Home should be considered, but why it should be a core media buy for any plan.

What is Out of Home Media?

Well…..Billboards right? There… that was easy. Hold up, not so fast …

When we talk to advertisers that are new to the Out of Home advertising category, that is frequently the answer we get – and with good reason. Billboards are the largest, most prominent, most widely recognized part of the Out of Home media landscape, and it’s natural for people to focus on them.

On July 1, 1941 before the broadcast of a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies (Go Phils!) Bulova watches ran the first official, paid television advertisement in the U.S. (they paid between $4.00 and $9.00, reports vary), and advertising experienced a paradigm shift as screens became the most important media format. In 1994 the new web magazine Hotwired ran what is generally regarded as the first “banner” ad for AT&T, and the screen landscape shifted.

What would you do if we were to tell you that in order to make your advertising campaign work to its fullest extent, you should not only triple your Out of Home budget, but take dollars away from television and radio to do so? Now before you close this article out and laugh about it with your colleagues, results from recent studies from Nielsen and Omnicom’s Benchmarketing show that billboards and bus shelters and the rest of the OOH media world should be playing a much larger role in your brand’s media spends.