The Role for Premium Digital Out of Home

In recent years, out of home media owners have invested in high quality, high impact locations across the UK, taking advantage of renewed demand for premium out of home opportunities.

The reasons why advertisers are increasingly using premium out of home are varied, but they often have less to do with maximising audience reach and much more to do with creating attention and impact.

The need to create impact and attention is clear when we consider the changing OOH landscape and its impact on how on-the-go audiences consume advertising messages.

The good news is that the OOH opportunity has never been greater, with more people spending longer out of home than ever before. At its peak on a typical weekday, two thirds of UK adults are simultaneously exposed to OOH advertising. Over a two week period, OOH reaches virtually all UK adults. It performs especially well for the most valuable audiences – ABC1s, males and the young. This is why the medium can be so effective as a reach-driving channel.

We’ve also never been better placed to understand how to reach and engage those audiences. The launch of Route and the availability of big data about locations, journeys and real behaviours, means our understanding of Out of Home audiences is richer than ever.

The Role of Premium DOOH in Enhancing Advertising Impact

But, at the same time, it has never been harder to get the attention of on-the-go audiences. The impact of technology means that we are always connected. And with so much content and so many platforms, it is easy to reject or ignore the messages we encounter. In the city, there is an even greater challenge as Londoners encounter more than 50 out of home ads each day. For media planners, this presents a real challenge: how to make sure our campaigns cut-through and get noticed.

The Strategies to Overcome the ‘Cut-through Challenge’

When we think about how to cut-through in OOH, there are four strategies in every planner’s arsenal that we tend to use one or more of: creating awareness, creating attention, creating disruption, and creating resonance.

In other words, maximising reach and frequency, adding impact, challenging our preconceptions to create more memorable communications, and making the media work harder by communicating the right message, in the right place, at the right time. In the OOH arena we call this contextual relevance; reflecting locations, environments, time-of-day, and real-world events to drive greater relevance and advertising impact.

The Role for Premium DOOH

Adding premium placements to a classic reach-driving OOH campaign, however, can help more advertisers overcome the ‘cut-through’ challenge.

Today, premium OOH most often means larger, digital and dynamic locations, which deliver visibility, size and scale.

We know that these types of locations typically reach larger and more engaged audiences than smaller, traditional equivalents. People are more likely to look at them, and they’re likely to look for longer. When they carry animated creative, there is even greater engagement, with up to 60% longer viewing times.

We also know that premium DOOH sites add substantial value to the advertising messages that they carry. They generate stronger and more positive emotional responses than standard formats. And they deliver a strong priming effect (the impact that attention-grabbing placements have beyond the initial viewing) with recall rates of campaigns that include premium DOOH being up to 50% higher (source: Ocean’s highly insightful neuroscience analysis). The positivity generated from featuring on iconic and premium sites can have an impact on campaign effectiveness, with stronger shifts in brand perceptions.

Premium DOOH gives advertisers creative licence. From the sheer scale of the platform, to the quality of the screen resolution and the capacity for animated content; premium digital OOH is a platform for richer and higher impacting advertising. The technology behind digital screens allows for advertisers to be more relevant to on-the-go audiences: by reflecting locations, time-of-day, and audience mindsets, with contextually relevant creatives. This means they help brands reach key audiences on the move whilst delivering the crucial element of fame, much sought after in today’s brand communications.