Why Facebook is channelling Friends Reunited

Facebook endorsement for Talon’s 4th Space industry initiative. 

Facebook has had its fair share of bad press, audience challenges and brand safety issues amidst its meteoric growth.

It released a report last week on the benefits of combining Facebook and Outdoor advertising that is a welcome realisation that media channels work better together. Mirroring our own research into how full motion digital OOH can brilliantly extend a brand’s social media assets, the latest work shows how the reinvented oldest broadcast medium can still play nicely with young protagonists.

Commissioning Kantar and Accenture to research the behaviour towards brands amongst 5,539 individuals in UK, France and Germany, the report has leant in to the key benefits of OOH.

The report finds that “when comparing different approaches, using both Facebook and OOH ads worked best – with the combined impact proving to be 13% more efficient than expected.”

“With both Facebook and OOH channels included in the media mix, all intended audiences-including new and existing customers-were reached, driving 6% of incremental sales, far beyond the benchmark.”

The study also reveals that OOH ads are key for product discovery in certain verticals among younger European users. Facebook and OOH have a strong impact on consideration and buying, whilst “Gen Z and Millennials in Europe are significantly more likely to say Facebook and OOH help them make food and beverage purchasing decisions and they are also more likely to be influenced by these channels compared with print and television.”

The research endorses Facebook’s US standpoint that “with the widespread use of smartphones, the high visibility of Out of Home goes hand in hand with actions on digital channels such as social media.”

Unlocking the Power of Multi-Channel Marketing with OOH

Such positive findings for multi-channel marketing and the role of OOH in reaching younger audiences closely replicates Talon’s own 4th Space research from 2018 (over a similar period to this work). Full motion content across OOH and Social Media performs best for brands working together with similar creative, and particularly in driving action (not just awareness metrics). Brand uplifts around +23% were seen across all campaign-specific KPIs, with consumer action metrics performing twice as effectively as this.

We have since been working closely with our clients, agencies and creative partners to stress this opportunity and have seen brands including Sainsbury’s, Estee Lauder, John Lewis, Starbucks and others maximise the potential for their social campaigns by adding digital OOH to the campaign.

Furthermore, Ocean’s recent neuroscience 4 extension to its long-running study measures the impact of using support technologies and mechanisms to drive emotional intensity and memory encoding for brands. It found that social media integration alongside large format digital OOH campaigns can drive our responses 5 times greater than even the effective use of full motion OOH content alone, thereby helping redefine media engagement.

Facebook has encouragingly opened up its ad sales approach to encompass smarter ways of reaching audiences. The benefits of working with a similarly fast-changing channel like digital OOH include improving your reach, purchase proximity, audience targeting and full motion creativity. Even those individual media channels that seemingly dominate the media landscape like Facebook are smartly realising the advantages of working together to better target complex Gen Z and millennial audiences.