Out-of-Home Advertising

Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is becoming more effective in early 2021 as consumers increase time spent commuting, use more contactless technologies and seek outdoor dining and activities, while simultaneously tuning out digital device ads due to burnout, according to findings from the "Consumer Insights & Intent: Q1 2021 report by the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) and The Harris Poll. As the one-year anniversary of COVID-related lockdowns approaches, the research indicates that OOH advertising could return to greater prominence in the marketing mix after seeing its role diminished at the outset of the health crisis.

More than half (55%) of consumers in big cities — defined as those with populations greater than 1 million — are noticing more OOH messaging and signage compared to 41% of the general population. OOH is also influencing purchasing decisions for 34% of consumers in big cities. Consumers are noticing OOH while driving, both on highways (83%) or locally (82%), with 72% of workers expect to commute at least part time in the next few months.

The increase in attention paid to OOH advertising comes after the channel suffered setbacks during the early stages of the pandemic, losses that could be reversed by the consumer behavior trends surfaced in the OAAA report. For example, 75% of consumers are tuning out digital device ads due to excessive time spent in front of screens, meaning they could be more receptive to messages served elsewhere. The survey polled a representative sample of 1,000 U.S. adults and was conducted from Jan. 15-20.

"People are eager to make up for lost time," John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll said in a press statement. "They're looking to get back out into the world with a vengeance. Brands should meet consumers where they are, which will be anywhere but at home on Zoom."

The report also suggests that OOH could be effective with consumers who have increased their usage of tap-to-pay, QR codes and augmented reality, especially among millennials and Gen Zers. Specifically, more than 40% of respondents are interested in learning about special sales or deals available through tap-to-pay apps and QR codes. Similarly, 78% of millennials are seeking safe outdoor activities, while 82% of Gen Zers are looking for outdoor dining options, providing more areas where OOH ads could be effective.

Several recent campaigns have marked this shift toward OOH and away from at-home activations on platforms like Zoom. As part of its "Invest Your Heartbeats in the Life Artois" multichannel campaign, Stella Artois offered "low-risk, high-return investment advice" in artistic OOH ads that show a "juxtaposition of typical business counsel reimagined as tips for savoring life together."

"We have a powerful opportunity in the coming months to capture the heart and imagination of people who are looking at their surroundings and out of home marketing with more awareness and appreciation," Anna Bager, president and CEO of the OAAA, said in the release.

Dole Packaged Foods ran a multichannel campaign to raise awareness about food insecurity and the effects of improper nutrition on personal health, per an announcement. The company cited data that show an estimated 54 million people in the U.S. face food insecurity, an issue that has become more prevalent as the economic impact of the pandemic leads more consumers to seek assistance from food banks during lockdowns.

The "Malnutrition Labels" campaign included outdoor projections in several cities that resembled the "nutrition facts" labels on packaged foods, except they show data about the consequences of bad eating habits and lack of exercise. The concept put a twist on the information that the federal government requires on packaged foods to inform consumers about calories, cholesterol, saturated fat and other contents. 

Projections were visible on buildings in parts of New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore, as shown in an online video that accompanied the campaign. Each label addressed food insecurity, obesity and the importance of good nutrition to raise awareness about systemic food inequity, according to Dole. Dole aimed for broad reach with the multichannel campaign, extending beyond the areas where its projected billboards were visible at night. 

The campaign also included paid digital, social media and content marketing as part of Dole's broader "Sunshine for All" platform to address social issues and sustainability. Dole worked with creative agencies David Madrid and Miami on the campaign, with support from Spark Foundry, High Wide & Handsome, National Experiential and Peppercomm.

The out-of-home (OOH) part of the campaign indicates that marketers are stepping up those efforts after pulling back from billboards and other signage as people spent more time at home. 

Dole is among the companies emphasizing social causes in their campaigns, with consumers tending to favor brands that show how they're helping their communities. Among the more recent examples, Ben & Jerry's in December honored Colin Kaepernick, the activist and former NFL quarterback, with a new ice cream flavor to celebrate his work to confront police violence. Campbell's Chunky, the official soup brand of the NFL, partnered with Target to sponsor a virtual esports tournament aimed at alleviating food insecurity among children.

WPP's GroupM agency forecast that digital ads made up more than half of total advertising expenditures in the U.S. for the first time last year. Digital growth contrasted with the contraction of traditional media like newspapers, direct mail and magazines. However, some traditional categories — including out-of-home (OOH) — are poised for a significant rebound if the pandemic dissapates in 2021.

Among nondigital media categories, OOH advertising spending was projected by GroupM to drop 31% to $5.9 billion in 2020, per the December estimates. However, the channel is expected to grow 23% to $7.2 billion in 2021, GroupM said. The recovery will likely occur in the year's second half as signs of a return to normalcy manifest. The agency's bullish prediction around OOH reflects broader optimism that the distribution of vaccines will help to bring an end to the pandemic, letting people return to their former routines of commuting to work and seeing outdoor ads.

The agency offered an overall better outlook than it did earlier in 2020, when marketers canceled or delayed campaigns at a larger scale. Digital ad spending was expected to climb 5.4% to $110.1 billion in 2020, or 51% of the total $214.6 billion, excluding political ads. The $214.6 billion figure for U.S. spending represents an 8.8% decline, a revision from GroupM's June forecast of a 13% drop.

Google, Facebook and Amazon will be the biggest beneficiaries of digital ad growth, having a combined market share of about two-thirds of the U.S. digital ad market, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing data from eMarketer. The companies have "done a good job of showing ad performance," Christian Juhl, GroupM's global chief executive, told the newspaper.

The predicted growth in digital advertising indicates that marketers see the value of online media in reaching target audiences and supporting their e-commerce efforts, according to GroupM. Digital advertising is accessible to a broad range of marketers, including small businesses that have been forced to grow their online presence as many consumers avoid shopping in stores during the pandemic.

"While liquidity risks, reduced spending and physical store closures were widespread, these headwinds were sufficiently offset by an accelerated focus on e-commerce initiatives," GroupM said. "This likely led to a rapid expansion in support for digital advertising."

Hulu leveraged out-of-home (OOH) technology to project the characters of "Animaniacs" atop taxis and ride-share vehicles for the rebooted series' debut weekend on the streaming platform, per a press release emailed to Marketing Dive. The three-dimensional characters appeared on vehicles parked at iconic locations such as Madison Square Garden, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Santa Monica Pier, Sunset Strip and TCL Chinese Theater as holograms created via Holoprojectors that spin at 30 frames per second.

The ads are activated through location-based, WiFi-enabled triggers. Developed with OOH media network Firefly, the holograms promoted the return of "Animaniacs," which originally aired in 1993 and became a quirky favorite of millennials — many of whom are now parents of young children.

By teaming with Firefly on car-mounted hologram activations, Hulu tapped into nostalgia for "Animaniacs" with audiences in New York and Los Angeles. The ads are a novel use of technology that elevates traditional OOH and is well-suited for the animated show, which has endured as a cult classic for many millennials who grew up in the '90s.

The campaign shows how marketers, including streaming content platforms seeing a boom in viewership, are continuing to invest in digital OOH experiments to engage consumers who are outside but continuing to be wary of the coronavirus.

"Brands deserve more from out-of-home advertising — static, traditional creative simply isn't enough to resonate with a modern audience," said Kaan Gunay, co-founder and CEO of Firefly, in a statement.

The stunt for the reboot of the kids' series is similar to one Firefly staged for Puma during the 2020 NBA All-Star weekend in Chicago. With dynamic hologram ads promoting the company's Sky Dreamer sneaker, Puma also looked to engage younger consumers.

OOH had been experiencing a bit of a resurgence after consumers hunkered down during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As they started to reemerge during the summer, OOH was viewed as a way to reach consumers after they had spent many months in front of screens at home.

Though consumers are still encouraged to stay home, there is some indication that OOH remains an effective marketing tool. According to a survey from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, 38% of consumers that planned in-person shopping for Black Friday 2020 said they'd be on the lookout for ad signage offering discounts or specials via QR codes, near-field communication sensors or text messages. Among those who planned to spend at least half their holiday budgets over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, that interest increased to 58%.

Direct-to-consumer bedding company Brooklinen approached the 2020 holidays with a marketing campaign designed to position it as providing comfort amid an uncertain season. Four dollhouse-sized rooms were hand crafted to replicate the brand's "relatable, yet dreamlike aesthetic," while the campaign's broader goal was to deliver memories of seasonal joy and wonder from holidays past, according to Senior Manager of Creative Production Liane Pavilonis.

The "Dream World" campaign centered on four mini room vignettes, including tiny toilet paper rolls, teeny scissors and wrapping paper, and 12:1-scale replicas of home furniture crafted from real Brooklinen products. The model rooms — set in morning, afternoon, evening and night — were assembled remotely as in-person studio productions were mostly paused, and were supported by placements on Brooklinen's website, email and social campaigns, as well as out-of-home (OOH) panels on the New York subway and digital boards around the city.

"When we were concepting this campaign back in May, there were a lot of unknowns in the country," Pavilonis said. "We went with an idea to focus on and spread the word of hopefulness, the idea of waking up to a new day with new challenges and hopefully provide comfort to our customers along the way."

'Steppingstone of optimism'

Despite the overall dip in OOH spending during the pandemic, Brooklinen's holiday campaign in New York included digital and static displays that exuded more of a "motion feel" than the model rooms, per Pavilonis, while other elements online gave "Dream World" a national reach.

"By nature of being a Brooklyn-based brand, a lot of our out-of-home is just naturally within the New York market that we are most familiar with. However, we do take the opportunity to tease out these elements on a national level, which we see largely in phase two," said Katherine O'Keefe, Brooklinen's director of PR and partnerships.

In-store elements at Brooklinen's Williamsburg, Brooklyn, shop included a collage window that harkens to the tradition of Fifth Avenue stores exhibiting elaborate window displays, along with a portal shape on the main entrance that acted as a graphic device used throughout the campaign, tying together the model rooms and holiday theme and encouraging passersby to browse the store.

The effort built on 2019's "Comfort Beyond Words," which used paper recreations of New York cityscapes to illustrate the city's magic during the holidays. Paper settings were constructed to depict bustling streets, people traveling into town to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and the iconic store window displays along Fifth Avenue. But 2020 brought about a new conversation when it came to the holidays, according to the company's leadership.

"Instead of focusing on the external magic of New York, we decided to focus on what it means to celebrate and create magic at home this year," Pavilonis said. "It felt like an opportunity for more self-reflection and allowing your home to become the most magical place to celebrate the holidays, no matter where you are."

Brooklinen was not alone in approaching its holiday marketing with inspiration for at-home consumers. Gap, for instance, took an upbeat tone for its campaign last year, centering on themes of togetherness and hope expressed through dance. Meanwhile, Ikea kicked off its "Four Weeks of Wonder" initiative that acknowledged the difficult year while promising to ease some of the pressure from the unusual holiday with depictions of scaled-back celebrations and relatable human moments. Brooklinen took a similar approach to relatability, aligning its messaging to appeal to consumers as many were still spending most of their time at home.

However, the goal of the dollhouse models and accompanying "Dream World" campaign was not to provide a form of escapism into a wondrous world, according to Brooklinen's Associate Art Director Chrissy Ziegler.

"It's a steppingstone of optimism toward a better future and a better world," she said. "Creatively, we wanted to depict a world that is a little out of this world."

Redefining home

At the pandemic's onset last spring, Brooklinen implored its customers to share feedback about their concerns and feelings, with key themes cropping up around uncertainty and the concept of redefining "home."

"When the pandemic first started to impact daily life in March, we as a brand that retails home products didn't really know what would be expected of us," Pavilonis said. "Whenever we have a question about how to carry on, we just talk to our customers, and they informed us early on that they just wanted more photos of dogs in beds, like lighthearted content."

Going that route may have been an astute move for a brand like Brooklinen, as consumers overwhelmingly reported being fatigued by COVID-centric advertising back in the summer of 2020. A later study by Ace Metrix found that pandemic themes appeared in 32% of holiday ads, with many centering on the "new normal" versus traditional seasonal concepts. Given the unusual state of events of last holiday season, brands felt pressure to walk a fine line in their messaging, balancing themes of connection and warmth while avoiding depictions of in-person gatherings.

"We are not the CDC and we are not giving out directions on how to handle COVID during the holiday season. Our goal here is to simply provide comfort, but this is a fun way of doing that," Pavilonis said. "Some of the immediate feedback we've gotten has helped to reinforce that this is the right direction."

Marketers have new opportunities to reach consumers as restrictions on travel and commerce ease in states throughout the U.S.

In recent months, many major cities have seen double-digit lifts in movement outside the home compared to early in the pandemic, according to data from location tracking company Ubimo. In some locales, traffic has returned to levels at or near what it was before the COVID crisis, the data shows. And as consumers emerge for more activities — including drinking, dining, grooming and some gym-going — it's an opportune moment to reach them.

"Today, as people take their purposeful trips there is less distraction and noise," Gilad Amitai, Ubimo's COO and co-founder, wrote on the blog of parent company Quotient. "Brands can reach consumers with little distraction in the critical moments before they make their purchasing decisions."

He noted that out-of-home advertising (OOH) gives marketers the chance to reach customers just before they go into a venue where they'll make a purchase.

As marketers reinvigorate OOH messaging, though, they also need to prepare for fast-changing circumstances. More than ever in recent memory, marketers need to target and message according to what's happening on the ground in near real time. Even in geographies where car and foot traffic is up, overall, trends fluctuate week-to-week as consumers watch the news and officials tighten or loosen the rules. Protests and curfews in dozens of cities have added new considerations to the mix.

Realistically, digital is one of the few ways to manage the complexity for OOH messaging. There are about 220,000 digital out-of-home advertising (DOOH) screens in America today, and the numbers may grow. DOOH can be activated in 72 hours or less, compared with weeks for traditional OOH, and in as little as 24 hours for the more than 10% of screens currently transacted via programmatic — another percentage that's growing.

Marketers using DOOH can move spend among geographies and also mix and match across mobile and other channels, using omnichannel data from them all to optimize as circumstances shift. They can deploy dynamic creative optimization (DCO) to hone in on the types of creative executions showing the most positive effects, changing based on traffic and weather patterns, for example. They can also underweight messaging where their products have become less available due to distribution glitches or spikes in demand.

DOOH just works

Even as consumer activity increases overall, people are staying relatively local, choosing to move about via cars, meaning highway signage may be especially effective in the coming months.

"A lot of budgets are going to shift to the roadside as a lot of Americans are going to choose to travel by car this summer," Anna Bager, president and CEO of the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, told Adweek.

Insights gathered by Sightline (Xaxis and Kinetic's joint DOOH product hub) shows activity near DOOH screens is picking up at locations such as gas stations, grocery stores, pharmacies, highways and, in some markets, gyms, malls and bars. DSPs that handle programmatic insertions for DOOH are showing more inventory available on the screens as well. Categories such as air travel, hotels and restaurants may also see more marketing spend as their sales start to grow.

Even during the shutdowns, six in 10 people were seeing OOH advertising on their way to buy groceries, according to Sightline. OOH has been proven effective at helping to drive intent to purchase and cement brand affinity, especially when combined with other channels that leverage the flexibility and data that DOOH can afford.

CPG especially capitalizes

Adding to the enticement of DOOH right now, brands can capitalize on both reduced prices and lessened competition from brands that aren't increasing their advertising. One category that's been especially well-served is consumer product goods.

Proctor & Gamble, which spends more on marketing than any other company, saw its sales rise 10% in Q1 2020 from the previous quarter amid the COVID crisis, according to CFO Jon Moeller on an earnings call in April 2020. P&G increased marketing spend $100 million even while cutting other overhead.

"There's big upside here in terms of reminding consumers of the benefits that they've experienced on our brands and how they've served their and their families' needs, which is why this is not a time to go off air," Moeller said on the call.

Analysts say that digital accounts for all the recent growth in OOH and will continue to increase its share of the market. By jumping in smartly now — targeting the right geographies in the right conditions and adjusting fast by leveraging data gathered across channels — brands can increase their effectiveness on screens, both large and small. They can gather data, gain important insights and use it to optimize now and into the future as more DOOH screens come online.

Uber plans to expand its cartop advertising network, Uber OOH powered by Adomni, to Boston and Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2021 and Chicago in the second quarter.

Video and art platform Niio partnered with Uber OOH in 2020 to place artwork between ads, letting artists exhibit and get paid for their work, Adomni said. Uber also will look to roll out the program, which places screens atop ride-hailing vehicles, to up to 20 additional cities, with demand for international locations such as London and Sydney. The revenue-sharing deal, which makes Uber a digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad publisher, started in February 2020 to connect brands and passersby through video on vehicle displays.

The expansion follows months of low ridership for hailing companies like Uber and Lyft. Ride-share drive time appears to be rebounding since the pandemic's onset, as consumers begin to return to the office or other activities that may require hailing a cab or taking public transportation, per data Octopus Interactive emailed to Marketing Dive. This uptick poses an opportunity for a company like Uber to capitalize on people returning to regular activities with potentially fresh eyes.

Placing artwork between advertisements on the vehicle displays could cut through ad blindness and snag people's attention with branded content that's tailored to daypart and location, Niio CEO Rob Anders said in a virtual panel during the Digital Place-based Advertising Association's video summit. Those customizable elements represent the type of programmatically enabled DOOH that bolstered a boom in the outdoor category in the year before the pandemic.

While programmatic OOH is relatively new, it's forecast to one day be a key part of the U.S. digital ad makeup, per VIOOH's State of the Nation report. Nearly all (99%) respondents plan to increase their spending on programmatic OOH in 2021, with 32% set to at least double spending, the report notes.

Through its OOH network with Adomni, Uber can tap into this growing revenue source as ridership still lags behind pre-pandemic levels, potentially offsetting losses and appealing to drivers frustrated by the difficulties of making a living in the gig economy.