Outdoor posters and billboards have been a mass advertising medium for a good number of years, whether as a political, artistic or commercial form of communication. The out-of-home (OOH) media business is no stranger to change since its ubiquity in public spaces mean it has weathered changing consumer trends.
In Asia, the OOH business has traditionally operated on the basis of quantity rather than quality. Its growth has been unplanned and haphazard in some markets, manifested through cluttered spaces with little or no consolidation by media owners.
However, the industry is set to change its course. Trends that will define its transformation for the next 10 years, according to O'Donnell, are technology, content, empirical data, destination planning, mobility and social media.
Small media owners have already started to streamline in terms of ownership and have become highly refined in quality of delivery. Even non-OOH media owners are entering the business to generate content via multiple platforms.
"You will see convergence of the oldest and newest media, and there will be a natural relationship between the two," O'Donnell said. A case study that blurred the lines between outdoor, digital and social media was Lynx's 'Angel Ambush' campaign in 2011, which blended real life footage with live-action vision mixing of 'angels'.
The digital angels seemingly interacted with real people for two days at two high footfall locations in London - Victoria Station and Ocean Outdoor’s Birmingham Bullring. That was the first time an augmented reality campaign has run on large format digital billboards in the UK, which went viral and achieved over 1.1 million views on Youtube.
"Technology will forge a far closer relationship between OOH ads and other media, particularly in enabling more accurate measurements of individual mobility and therefore making it possible for more integrated campaigns," O'Donnell said.
An integration of an offline outdoor platform with an virtual shopping experience was when grocery chain Tesco's South Korean subsidiary Home Plus put up billboards in subway stations with a range of products accompanied by Quick Response (QR) codes. All consumers had to do was is scan the QR codes with their cell phones and their groceries would be delivered to their homes.
To meet the effectiveness challenge, there will also be a need to move from intuition-based OOH planning towards one based on empirical data for more reliable estimates than before.
In addition, specialist agencies and media owners will come together to create a single 'currency' for OOH measurement which has been a missing link so far in proving campaign effectiveness, O'Donnell pointed out.
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