Mobile Plus OOH: Strong Alone, Powerful Together
Hand in hand, OOH and mobile are evolving together, providing marketers with an opportunity to reach consumers on location.
While attending last year’s Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas, I met David Greschler, COO of a company named NOMAD, which owns a network of “people-powered digital billboards.”
The business model itself is intriguing. College students are an appealing target for many advertisers, and they can be challenging to reach. I certainly would have been happy to wear an iPad on my back when I was in college—if such a thing as an “iPad” even existed. But what truly stuck with me since that meeting is that, in the NOMAD model, a personal mobile device became an out-of-home (OOH) advertisement simply by turning the screen around. Same device—different advertising channel.
Indeed, marketers are now combining the power of mobile devices with the grand scale of OOH in a variety of innovative ways. Two powerful channels on their own, they are converging into an even more impactful location-based strategy, reaching consumers in the ideal location and mindset. Let’s call it “where advertising.”
I expect the relationship between the two formats to continue to evolve, but let’s take a look at how they are currently working hand in hand to help attain marketing goals.
• Interactivity: Utilizing innovations including SMS, NFC, and QR codes, marketers can encourage interactivity between consumers, their mobile devices, and OOH advertising. The interactions provide value to the consumer by delivering content, discounts, music downloads, and social media integrations, and can even allow consumers to make instant purchases via their mobile devices.
Some campaigns are beginning to test the waters of gaming integrations, allowing consumers to interact with mobile, OOH, and each other. These interactions provide a higher level of engagement than either platform could attain on its own, not to mention fantastic engagement metrics to gauge campaign impact.
• Mobile amplification: An increasing number of OOH media companies are offering mobile ads in conjunction with OOH media. In many cases, the OOH inventory is geofenced to identify devices that passed the advertising. Those devices are then tagged as exposed and retargeted with advertising, coupons, or related content. This provides a one-stop shop to buy where advertising, while providing robust campaign effectiveness metrics on the back end via mobile conversions.
• Creative optimization: Due to the increasing number of digital displays across the marketplace, creative optimization can happen in seconds via passively captured triggers, such as weather, traffic speed, and search queries. One way that advertisers are beginning to optimize their messaging is by utilizing nearby mobile device detection. Users of mobile devices have a specific profile—for example, someone who may be interested in a high-end car versus someone more interested in an economy vehicle. The concentration of nearby mobile devices in either category can trigger the optimal messaging for an automobile manufacturer.
Creative changes to digital displays can be personalized in real time as a direct result of actions taken on a consumer’s mobile device. This works well with social networks where consumers can utilize a hashtag and have their photos or tweets appear on a nearby display. As many of us in the industry know, even A-list celebrities love to see their faces on a billboard.
• Campaign optimization: Mobile advertising can be used in advance of an OOH campaign to help optimize target audience segments, find ideal locations for placement, and test creative. By monitoring the types of audiences who engage with the mobile ads, which creative has the greatest success, and even the location of conversions, advertisers can then invest in an OOH campaign already informed by rich, campaign-specific mobile metrics.
• Augmented and virtual reality: Through augmented and virtual reality, marketers can enhance a consumer’s surroundings or launch that consumer into a completely different, immersive experience. Both present exciting opportunities to enhance mobile and OOH advertising together and separately. To date, we’ve seen several integrated augmented reality campaigns where a consumer can view an OOH advertising through the lens of his mobile device to enjoy an enhanced experience and/or additional content. As this is still a relatively novel innovation in the advertising landscape, we expect to see significant testing and learning in the near future.
And last, but not least …
• Data: While the use of mobile data to measure OOH campaigns does not necessarily represent a convergence of the two platforms as advertising canvases, it is certainly the topic du jour in the OOH industry. The prevalence of large-scale, persistent, and accurate geolocation data harnessed from mobile devices is empowering the industry to leapfrog other channels in terms of optimization, accountability, and attribution.
Hand in hand, OOH and mobile are evolving together, providing marketers with an opportunity to reach consumers on location. Where advertising?Everywhere.