It’s hard to cast your mind back to a time before the industry was spruiking the benefits of taking a data led approach to everything from audience profiling, planning, buying, and metrics to demonstrate success. The explosion of data across the media landscape has impacted all media categories, including the previously data poor Out of Home industry. We are now faced with almost too much data, every media operator has a data offering, and the question lies, is all data created equal?
When I first joined oOh!media 12 years ago, the industry’s use of data was in its infancy. Industry audience measurement was in development with survey data available, however providing only a macro view of consumer behaviour.
Beyond that, while it was understood people spent a significant amount of time out and about every week, and that outdoor media reached broadcast audiences as a ‘one to many’ medium, the industry was data poor when it came to understanding audience movement and profiles at location.
Fast forward to today, and the situation has changed dramatically. The Out of Home industry has accelerated and developed significantly in exploring and applying the power of data in greater depth to better understand audience profiles at location – a key development as advertisers seek greater confidence in delivering their message to more of the right people to influence business outcomes.
Here at oOh! we have been on this journey too, and over the past five years in particular have ramped up our efforts to bring unique, robust, trusted data into our business. The aim has been to deliver deeper insight, built from real data and based on actual behaviour, into audiences at location, and deliver that at scale across our national network.
This ability to capture data has evolved significantly over the last decade so much so that we likely couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago where we would be today. This is thanks to numerous developments in hardware and software, from increased digitization in many walks of life to larger and faster platforms on which to store and process information to the development of sophisticated algorithms that now only take seconds to search and analyse billions of data points, saving hours of research and boosting insight capability exponentially.
Data evolution
Our journey at oOh! from basic data collection to today’s sophisticated methodologies has been fuelled by years of investment in people and expertise. Beginning with just a couple of individuals, we now have a team of data scientists, engineers, developers and analysts who specialise in how data can be used to drive ROI for clients, capturing ever-increasing slices of aggregated audience groups as they go about their daily lives.
As a location-based business, understanding the audience who lives around our advertising locations is not enough. In recent years we have stepped up our commitment to understanding the profile and movement of audience groups at out of home location, activating that through the build of easy-to-use applications and tools to demonstrate superior targeting to inform planning.
A wide breadth of data sources allows us to bring to life this global-first data offering and give our clients uniquely valuable audience insights to plan and execute their Out of Home campaigns. For instance, through our work with data partner Quantium, Smart Reach draws upon an unrivalled picture of the travel and shopping behaviours of 80% of Australian households based on de-identified and aggregated data. This enables Smart Reach to map the behaviours of audience segments, based on actual consumer behaviour, for an unparalleled understanding of the oOh! locations they are exposed to.
Driving Volvo sales
A recent example demonstrates this approach in practice. To introduce the Volvo Omtanke – To Think Again campaign to the Australian market in 2018, the Swedish company chose to launch with a large format oOh! Road campaign prior to running a national TV campaign.
The oOh! Road campaign was planned using Smart Reach. The strategy was to optimise campaign placement across digital Roadside locations to deliver on the ‘big family’, ‘singles’ and ’young couples’ car buyer categories. The solution also utilised audience data to tailor creative to each location, ensuring the most relevant message was delivered to either young singles and couples or big family audiences.
The solution delivered 1.6 million (53%) singles and young couples car buyers, and 1.2million (58%) big family car buyers, engaging audiences on average 4.4 times over the campaign period.
The results of this campaign were validated by independent research agency Dynata, who found high levels of recall for the oOh! Road campaign among key targets (42% among those in the market for a new car, and 46% among the affluent younger audience). Dynata also found 43% of those who recalled the campaign took some kind of action as a result of seeing it, as well as a significant uplift in recommendation (+104%) and consideration (+136%) among those who recalled the oOh! Road campaign compared to pre-campaign benchmarks.
Return on investment
Advertisers are increasingly taking a multimedia approach to engage with consumers at various points along the customer journey. Out of Home is fast becoming a priority media partner that can be used very effectively in combination with other media.
The latest research study accessing the ROI norms across 140+ brands and derived from over $9bn in advertising spend in Australia by Analytic Partners for their audience, shows that the combination of TV, digital and Out of Home drove the strongest ROI. This combination drives a 27% incremental increase on top of the ROI delivered by each of the mediums separately. Additionally, the optimum results for campaigns with a media spend of under $1 million were achieved with a media mix of Digital and Out of Home. And campaigns that had more than six per cent of their media spend in Out of Home achieved a 57% ROI, while those which spent under that amount only achieved a 41% ROI.
Source : https://www.adnews.com.au
