Bus shelters that measure and respond to your heart-rate, and giant billboards that insert you into the ad. What once would be the fodder for a sci-fi plot is becoming a reality and it’s being fuelled by the decline of traditional media channels.
A perfect storm of declining profits, adblockers and banner blindness, has seeded digital out-of-home (OOH) as one of the sole marketing channels that is experiencing across-the-board growth.
Digital OOH is booming, signalling a broader shift away from traditional advertising formats into newer, more innovative channels that inspire creativity. The sector has enjoyed seven years of consecutive revenue growth, with recent Outdoor Media Association data showing it saw a 15.8% growth in net media revenue over the past year.
We have the growth, the vision and we’re increasingly granted access to the technology, which has now gotten to a highly advanced point. It’s up to advertisers to leverage this progress - like sophisticated beacon technology that links to consumers’ smart devices - to realise the potential that it holds for consumer engagement.
Take interactive billboards for example, as I mentioned, they can now measure a collective crowds’ heart rate as it passes said billboard at certain times of the day.
If the average heart right is stronger at, for example, three in the afternoon, it means joggers are running by on the street at that point in time. So, advertising can then be targeted to suit this demographic, with sneakers, sports gear or health food.
On top of this, as we see an increase in consumer use of wearable tech devices, there will also be an increase in data collection for advertising purposes using beacon technology. As a result, we’ll be seeing more interactive outdoor advertising that’s produced for a certain audience, based on the information that’s provided by consumers’ smart watches or phones.
Advertising is increasingly becoming about the consumer journey and brands are pivoting to give consumers a more personal experience.
We’ve seen some truly inspiring campaigns that have taken advantage of everything that digital OOH media offers. Like the ‘Giant Balls’ hanging above Bourke St in Melbourne that moved and changed depending on the weather.
Similarly, AAMI delivered an outdoor billboard campaign which saw the text and image change depending on the weather conditions.
Although brands and their advertisers are dipping their toes in the water, metaphorically speaking and getting their thinking caps on, these campaigns are still the exception in digital OOH.
This is when they should be the norm.
In an economy that demands immediate return on investment (ROI), the wild growth statistics of digital OOH often aren’t enough to convince wary brands that innovative and often untested out-of-home campaigns are worth the investment.
That’s why Bonds was rolled out at a small number of locations, not on a national stage.
The creativity and ideas are present, but the scope is not. Brands are simply not taking advantage of the resources available to them in digital OOH.
But there is a happy middle ground. For example, my company shows the advertorial content in doctors’ waiting rooms. There are others that allow you to show bespoke content in other targeted areas like shopping centres and elevators in corporate buildings.
They can all match publicly available data against broad demographic data that’s meaning they can return to a client and offer valuable eyeballs that will genuinely connect to the content. You can’t go past a level of intrusion here, but it’s not personalised or individualised. Rather, it’s about getting collective data to ensure content is more suited to the audience.
Facebook and Google are already creating targeted ads based on internet users’ search history in a far more intrusive manner. For us, it’s about gathering data about the group, not the individual, and targeting an audience through this.
We live in an environment where cautious brands are demanding that the dollars they spend on advertising have a strong return in terms of sales. Meanwhile, consumers are demanding more personalised content.
We can make that happen. We just need to start taking advantage of the technology at our disposal and the booming digital OOH sector, then we can start to deliver some truly inspiring and fruitful results.
By Nazar Musa, CEO of digital out-of-home media company that provides content to digital display screens in health practices across Australia, Medical Channel.