Tactical OOH Powers Brand Communication
Asia Outdoor Magazine: As market research in UK indicates, the optimum duration of an OOH campaign is two weeks. According to your experience, how is the OOH campaign duration impacting ad effects? Does this kind of relationship apply to the OOH ad market in China?
Mike Underhill: I don’t think we could say there’s an optimum duration. Getting reach is quite straightforward and can be fast. For instance, most of the audience for a campaign in a CBD site will have an opportunity to see the ad in two to three weeks, but because a lot of OOH traffic is lost due to leakage it would take longer than that to build sufficient frequency of contact with the campaign. If the campaign is in an airport, however, accumulation will take longer – two months or more would be realistic. From this perspective, optimum duration depends mostly on the characteristics of the campaign target audience and their travel habits.
AOM: What are the requirements from different clients with regard to OOH campaign duration ? Based on AMC’s research results, how do OOH ad campaigns with different purposes, like brand building or product promotion , differ in campaign duration and media combination? Please share with us some of AMC’s classic cases.
MU: Yes, this is much more to the point. How long the campaign should run depends also on the purchase and innovation cycle for the category and what the advertiser is trying to accomplish, such as triggering purchase decision or building longer term brand equity. Two weeks would probably not be long enough for any automotive campaign because whatever impact it makes on the feelings of potential car buyers is likely to evaporate before most of those people eventually shop for a car. But two weeks is probably OK for the launch of a new flavor of ice cream, at the start of summer, by a brand that people are familiar with.
A pretty common problem is that outdoor is too tactical; it’s not well integrated with other media. Also most clients think it should just support the TV leg of a campaign, which is fine, but outdoor can also build on the campaign’s reach and impact. One of our clients recently launched a high-penetration IT product in China’s top cities. In one city, their media agency used just three billboards located within 500 meters of each other in an IT shopping district, because they wanted to influence purchase among shoppers. But it’s a well known fact that buyers in this category short-list their brands and models of interest before they go shopping. So while the boards would have been seen by almost every shopper in the area, they provided no additional impact because they simply contained the graphics from the TVC. If they were meant to support the TV part of the campaign those boards should have been spread out across the city. If just 5% more of the overall campaign budget had been allocated to larger and correctly spread combination of outdoor, they could have gotten 50% better outdoor reach, reinforced the TV message more effectively and gotten much better overall campaign reach. Having said that, it’s also the reality that agencies are very constrained by outdoor inventory availability and price. But in this city with thousands of billboards, where we ourselves saw dozens of prime sites vacant, there were many other placement options available that the agency could have used.
AOM: As Dr. Samuel Johnson said , "Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” But the effect of ‘promise’ has gradually diminished due to the flooding ad messages and changeable consumers, how has consumers’ media contact habits changed? How should OOH media develop to become more flexible and interactive to engage consumers? As consumers’ media contact behavior changes, what research adjustment will AMC make correspondingly?
MU: The number and repetition of brand messages that people encounter in a day has outstripped people’s ability to process them, so most of this gets unconsciously filtered out by audiences. Two dynamics then work in parallel which together are – initially – bad news for advertisers.
Firstly, most people seek “less noisy” places to live their lives, or if they have to tolerate some noise, they look for places where the kind of noise is agreeable to them. This impels them toward opt-in media and customizable content, most of which is online and now increasingly mobile. So the first dynamic is fragmentation. Secondly there is the lack of mechanisms for placing ads in fragmented media. These two factors mean that it’s harder for advertisers to maintain contact with their audiences.
To an extent it is unavoidable because the medium has to exist for a while before its audience can be measured and a value placed on advertising there. Once that happens, there’s a clearer incentive for someone to build a way for large volumes of advertising to be put there and then there’s an incentive for advertisers to go along with it. What’s surprised most people in the industry – online especially – is that the “fragmentation-to-building” lag has been much longer than expected.
You ask about OOH being interactive to engage consumers. OOH can never be as interactive as online or mobile. But I do not believe that OOH needs to be interactive in order to create engagement and be effective. OOH’s greatest assets are 1) that it can forcefully insert a message into a person’s physical space and 2) that it can reach people of all socio-economic levels. Granted, those people are often looking at their mobile phones while going past billboards and LEDs, but outstanding creative always gets noticed. And that is the other half of the contract with the audience: static OOH like billboards and bus body really have to be very creative in order to cut through. If they are not, people easily ignore them.
For digital OOH, I think it’s a different opportunity and challenge. Digital OOH is flexible enough to let advertisers get to where the audiences are very quickly and to deliver more and more messages. But that’s a dead end because it just leads to more audience filtering. An example is supermarket LCD’s which are placed directly above the checkout counter. Shoppers pass underneath them, they are at close range and every shopper has an opportunity to see the ads played on the LCDs. AMC measures whether shoppers look at these screens. 7 out of 10 shoppers do not look at these screens at all. They completely ignore them. The other 3 in 10 shoppers look at the screen for an average of 1-2 seconds. Why so little? Because the screens are just repeating the same ads that shoppers are exposed to for six hours every night on TV. It’s boring.
To the extent that digital OOH is used only as a replacement medium for TV format ads, it faces competitive pressure from online and will struggle under the burden of expensive infrastructure and deep discounts. Making digital OOH more locally and contextually relevant (ie. content for the brand that is specific to the store or location) would help lift engagement, but a lot of investment is needed to make that happen. For AMC this fragmentation is also a challenge, it means we have to capture new media behaviors and integrate that data with what we’ve already built for other media types. It’s not easy!
AOM: AMC counts all media because all media count , why ? What kind of media mix does clients prefer? What role does OOH media play therein? What is the optimum media mix for short-term promotion in terms of its maximization of impact on consumers? OOH is becoming increasingly important in terminal promotion ,what kind of OOH media format attracts consumers most?
MU: There are developments in media all the time which we try to keep up with, so we try to count all the important media at least. In this, our perspective is basically aligned with the client. Clients care about driving sales and media is one of the tools they use. Whether they use TV or OOH or online or print is a creative and logistical issue, but basically they want to get their message effectively delivered as deeply into their target audience as possible. To the extent that any medium can help do that cost-effectively, clients may use it. But there are many barriers to use, the main one being lack of data, which is why TV is still over-spent. It’s not that clients prefer TV, it’s that they and their agencies feel they know what they’re getting with TV. The consequence is that they spend too much on TV, half to two-thirds of which is wasted. Fortunately that’s changing, but the shift is more toward online than OOH – again because there are better numbers to support the decision. But the shift is slow because both online and OOH numbers are not very compatible with TV. We’re trying to change that by providing a common currency that lets advertisers compare all media with the same reach metrics.
There’s no single optimum mix because each campaign has different targets, but the characteristics of very efficiently reaching campaigns are that they use several media types, at least four or five, and they are not very heavily weighted on any single medium. TV is an essential component for reach, but if a mid-size to large-size campaign is using more than 50% of the budget on TV, it will build unnecessary frequency and the client will bleed money.
What attracts consumers is uniqueness. If a format is unique and new, people will be naturally attracted to the novelty of it. But most new formats are soon copied and become common and instead of being attractive they have to rely on being intrusive and their value declines. That’s why message content and creative matter more than format for getting impact.
AOM: Compared with other ad monitoring systems, what makes AMC's single-source data set stand out ? How to obtain scientific, neutral and effective data? What does it mean for the advertisers, media owners and consumers?
MU: We do not do ad monitoring. We capture daily media usage of more than 10,000 media vehicles from a panel of many thousands of people. We match their daily media behaviors against a client’s media plan and find every intersect point between the plan and the audience, across many media types including OOH. So we know who sees the campaign, where and how many times.
Most media research is not media-neutral because it is paid for by media owners who only want their own media sector studied. That results in data silos and it also results in some data bias which makes clients somewhat suspicious. AMC is very media neutral because we get all our Traffic data from a single source, we apply the same data philosophy consistently across all the media and integrate the media data at a very fundamental level. Our data is incredibly detailed and personal; it reflects the same degree of fragmentation that exists in people’s daily lives.
For the advertiser this is great - we know exactly where the waste is, and we show clients how to re-allocate their media spend to greatly reduce waste and reach more people. If advertisers use that insight it’s good for consumers too, because they are more likely to see ads that are relevant to them, less repetitively and in places that it matters. For most non-TV media owners this is also good news because the general direction of pull is away from TV, but it can be misleading to talk about the value or impact of our data on whole media types because there are over-priced and wasteful media vehicles as well as very efficient ones mixed throughout the media landscape.
