Life comes at you fast

Advertisers today are not just looking at traditional media but an all-encompassing, well-rounded media plan and better user experience to reach and engage their target audience. Outdoor as a business has piqued interest in a campaign and facilitated response that is effectively transposed to a wider audience. The added benefits are measurement and accountability, hitherto out-of-home's (OOH) key challenge – communicating a large amount of information – by providing an extended platform with outdoor media to conduct ad distribution.

As we examine the massive potential of outdoor signage, let's start with some basics. Two forces are propelling the growth of signage. First, marketers want to access consumers closer to the point of purchase. Although e-commerce is growing, enabling people to buy as easily from bedrooms as from store aisles, there are many marketers who are not – and possibly won't ever be – e-commerce enabled. The next best thing for them is to prompt consumers using technology at locations where consumers can already buy.

Second, technological advances, coupled with rapidly declining costs of that technology, are making digital signage more practical and affordable. The economics of outdoor business make more sense everyday. Consequently, more digital signage is getting into stores, malls and other venues.

The coupling of demand (to get close to consumers) and capability (the availability of cost-effective outdoor solutions) is spurring its growth particularly in the face of declining consumer attention to traditional media. To date, research results seem to indicate that advertising at points of sale is having an important impact on product selection. As products (like media) continue to proliferate, the “war for attention” will intensify, encouraging outdoor signage to help spur consumer action.

There is another big plus on the side of outdoor: it can't be turned off like television, turned out like radio, or discarded like newspapers and magazines. It's there all day, every day, and the person traveling to and from work or shopping will see it every day. The job of a billboard is to create a quick impression and to remind the viewer that a product, a service, or a business exists. That is all that can be managed in a 7-second reading time by passing motorists, under the best of traffic and weather conditions.

Most shoppers will not stand in an aisle to watch a 15 to 30-second TV commercial. Marketers need to use shorter, punchier, action-oriented messaging. This means a
combination of direct marketing, activation and sale enablement techniques to craft appropriate outdoor content. Good outdoor content will direct the consumer – for example, prompting shoppers to inquire about a new product – will be more akin to a point-of-sale than brand advertising, and should be treated as part of the sales-closing process.

Depending upon the location and capability of the signage (namely, whether it's two-way or not), marketers can develop local area marketing strategies. For example, you can tailor directive messages to build traffic to individual store outlets. Effective outdoor advertisers do this already, to a degree, but experts say they lack the ability to dynamically serve new content to traditional outdoor signage. Crystal ball gazing about the new applications of new technologies can be fascinating. However, the technology is likely to unfold in ways that will create digital signage in more formats than just flat screens. This will lead to more interesting and engaging uses of digital.

The scene of Tom Cruise in Minority Report arranging information on an electronic board with hand gestures isn’t science fiction. It's already there at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, terminal 3, courtesy of Accenture. This is the potential future of digital signage as consumers choose to rearrange displayed material to incorporate their own information in a digital signage mash-up. Another Minority Report you might recall is the talking billboard, which uses iris recognition to identify customers. While we don't know of a billboard doing this (yet), iris recognition is in routine use at airports and border crossings.

Outdoor media can (and should) fit into the plans of most marketers – especially those that have a large retail presence. Outdoor signage can be used effectively to cater to the different traffic patterns and different neighborhood locations of a marketer's various stores or outlets. Marketers will increasingly be able to use response and loyalty technology in order to maximize the potential of outdoor signage to act as more than one-way screens.

Source:
Manila Bulletin
October 26, 2009