Adweek Panel Recap: Talon, Buntin & Havas on Winning Go-to-Market Agency Strategies in OOH Advertising

Insights on Evolving OOH Advertising Strategies

With the promise of fresh perspectives, deep relationships, and fast-paced agility, independent and boutique agencies have become increasingly attractive to brands. But how these ambitious agencies deliver on their missions and highlight tangible results will be crucial to retaining clients and growing their businesses. That’s where out-of-home (OOH) comes in.

At this week’s Adweek Elevate: Independent Agencies event, Talon America COO, Jonathan Conway, was joined by Jeffrey Buntin, Jr., President and CEO, Buntin Media Group, and Timothy Simko, Executive Vice President, Client Lead, Arena Media – a Havas Media Group company, for a discussion on meeting marketers’ growing demand for and expectations of OOH advertising by tapping into its unprecedented tech, targeting, measurement, and creative capabilities to unlock its full potential. 

In setting the stage, Jonathan Conway stated:

  • During the past 19 months, OOH has demonstrated tremendous versatility and utility for brands to reach audiences at scale with genuinely impactful and culturally relevant messages.
  • Brands recognize more than ever the importance of real-world and communal experiences, and how powerful they can be to create meaningful connections with people.
  • Moreover, there’s the digitization of OOH inventory and the access to AdTech platforms, which aggregate fragmented inventory and make it possible to apply modern, data-driven advertising techniques to the channel, target audiences, and measure outcomes more precisely than ever before.


Among the panelist key takeaways:

On the importance of OOH as part of an agency’s growth strategy

“As an idea-driven agency, our aim is to guide clients to have the qualities of a high conviction brand and making sure everything we do has a high degree of measurability. OOH has passed that test in unique ways through the years for Buntin. OOH’s ability to flex strategically into the needs of what clients are looking for has been evolutionary and, in more recent years, revolutionary in terms of its fit strategically in our integrated channel plans,” said Jeffrey Buntin, Jr.

On OOH data investments

“The prevalence and role of data, as well as other tech innovations, has allowed us to be very targeted with OOH. We’re able to almost personalize the way we approach campaign messages and how best to integrate them with social and digital. Those opportunities have inspired our brand, channel, and creative teams to look at the medium through unbiased eyes and to collaborate to get more value out of OOH than we had thought possible 10 years ago or even three years ago,” said Jeffrey Buntin, Jr.

On the benefits of moving OOH upstream

“We saw the opportunity to take the medium from being the last thing that was thought of to one of the first by working with the media supplier community to create a robust inventory system that could bring the right data picture to the fingertips of planners. If you give OOH the credence of thinking about it as part of the early planning process in a cross-platform media strategy, it could really pay back in ways that some channels simply can’t and at a value that will really surprise people,” said Jeffrey Buntin, Jr.

On building an executable OOH campaign

“It starts with an understanding of the audience, their passion points, where they live and work, where our client’s product is available, and the various channel-specific tactics that we can use to engage with them along the way. No media and person exist in a silo, so why would we plan that way? There has to be multiple touchpoints. That’s why OOH is so interesting. And it works so well with mobile, which is inclusive of video, social, and other digital ways that a consumer can interact with a brand. Understanding how each of the channels work with and impact each other to amplify the message that we’re trying to deliver to the consumer is key,” said Timothy Simko.

On OOH’s customer journey advantage

“Oftentimes the consumer journey is purely conception, but OOH literally lives along that journey. Not only can a piece of OOH be along that journey, but it can also become an integrated experiential destination for the audience to interact with the brand. That has been exciting to think about how data, the channel, and the message can coexist to really to become both experiential and OOH – and blur the lines between the two,” said Jeffrey Buntin, Jr.

On working with an OOH specialist

“When we get to the regional and local levels, it requires expertise to understand the inventory that’s available and the best types of units to leverage to reach consumers. We lean heavily on our Talon partnership for that because you have the strategic capabilities and the expertise to build out the right type of media plan for those markets. You also understand who the right suppliers and media owners are, and you have relationships in place with them,” said Timothy Simko.