Out-of-Home Advertising
What is out-of-home (OOH) advertising?
While we are all overly familiar with advertising, such as TV ads, internet banners and popups, and mailers, there is an entirely different side to the same marketing coin. Out-of-home (OOH) advertising encompasses everything we encounter in our travels beyond our own four walls, including:
- Outdoor banners
- In-store signage
- Window graphics
- Vehicle wraps
- Backlit displays
- Digital signage
- Standoff displays
- Flags
- Smart signage
- Environmental graphics
Any marketing we encounter as we interact with the outside world can fall under the category of OOH advertising. Traditional billboards are perhaps the most readily pictured example. Everyone can remember a lot of billboards they’ve seen over their years of driving through urban and rural settings. Billboards are everywhere, and the best are ones that are easy to see and understand while moving at highway speeds, while offering an eye-catching graphic and a simple call to action. While billboards are excellent OOH advertising, there are a hundred other types of OOH ads, and you’ve likely seen millions of examples in your lifetime. SpeedPro printers are experts at helping you take your designs to the next level and apply them as large format projects that will get you results.
Benefits of Out Of Home Advertising
Out of home advertising is a great effective alternative to traditional advertising. Professional OOH ads are hard to miss and often are more consumable than online digital advertising. Because of their size and location, they can significantly impact consumers in real time.
How Effective is OOH Advertising
OOH advertising has been proven to work extremely well over the years. Much of this effectiveness is driven by behavioral and psychological factors. People are generally out and about for specific reasons, whether that is to shop for groceries, see a movie, eat at a restaurant or buy a new television. Someone goes to a destination with the full expectation that they will return home having satisfied their goals. However, once at a given destination, a consumer is mentally open to learning about similar choices related to those goals. Thus, Joe Shopper may be browsing the latest iPhone models but is readily available to read a poster ad for a new gaming console or watch a video advertisement on a digital sign for office furniture. OOH advertising takes full advantage of marketers having captive, receptive and highly targeted audiences for their products.
OOH advertising’s value is backed up by research from many sides. A recent study by Neilsen showed that OOH advertising is actually the most effective advertising mode at driving online search. Westmount has shown that OOH ads on a business’ site are overall the biggest ROI of any advertising form, averaging less than one and a half cents per impression. The Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America’s data shows that, among other impressive stats, nearly 60 percent of people who see an outdoor ad perform a web search (usually mobile) after seeing it, and a whopping 70 percent of people confirm that OOH ads actually influence them to purchase. In addition, in the United States alone, OOH advertising results in an astonishing 101 billion impressions every week!
How is OOH advertising best applied?
The concept of environmental, or experiential, graphic design is not extremely new. Still, it is now more important than ever as a way to differentiate how a consumer encounters your advertising. Gensler Research Institute released a study that shows that consumers share experiences that involve memorable environmental graphic design up to ten times more often. Those same people also tended to rate their experiences in well-designed venues two times higher than experiences in places considered poorly designed.
The Gensler Institute goes on to define various “experience modes” that set the stage for a consumer’s interaction:
- Task — guest is focused on a singular goal (conference center, workplace).
- Social — guests are out enjoying a good time with friends or family (restaurant, club).
- Discovery — guests are exploring and actively seeking new things (mall, museum).
- Entertainment — guests are engaging in a fun audience-based activity (concert, movies, sporting event).
- Aspiration — guests are trying to better themselves in some way (fitness center, classroom).
The effectiveness of a given experience mode is then determined by how well a marketer applies the following six factors:
- Beauty — how pleasant on the eyes is your environment?
- Clarity — how easy is it for your guests to grasp what you want to communicate?
- Novelty — how unique is the experience you are giving the guest?
- Welcoming — how comforting (and comfortable) is your space for guests of all types?
- Authenticity — how honestly does your space speak to your brand’s mission?
- Inspiration — how well does your space motivate guests to take “the next step,” whatever that may be?
With the right mix of large format graphics to complement your space and your goals as a marketer, you can focus your efforts on any given experience modes and then use the many various products SpeedPro offers to address each of the Gensler Research Institute’s factors. SpeedPro’s huge catalog of signage options (banners, posters, digital and smart), as well as environmental graphic selections (decals, wall and floor graphics, standees and 3D displays) unlock endless combinations for you to test.