We got the opportunity to sit down with Jeremy Flynn, Vice President of Data Products & Strategy at Clear Channel Outdoor — a partner of Cuebiq that specializes in out-of-home media advertising, providing billboards and much more. Keep reading for Jeremy’s view on why OOH is so effective, how the emergence of “smart cities” has helped spur DOOH growth, and what his favorite billboard creative was this year.
Based on Cuebiq’s latest Footfall Attribution Benchmarks Report, OOH saw the highest Brand Uplift by platform with a range from 80 to 120%. Why do you think OOH advertising is so effective for advertisers?
Brands have always turned to OOH because of the size and power of our medium to reach consumers outside the home. That’s as true today as it was a century ago. What’s changed is that we now have highly sophisticated ways to prove the effectiveness of a campaign that are making OOH more relevant to brands. Making OOH more addressable and measurable helps surface its longstanding effectiveness in a way that brands and advertisers can understand ROI relative to other media channels.
The productization of attribution and audience insights through mobile location data is a game-changer for the industry, giving advertisers valuable insights that enable them to understand their customers now more than ever. This has helped them to be even more efficient and effective with how OOH is deployed within their media mix. Giving this enhanced level of measurability and addressability, brands are recognizing that OOH is very capable of better targeting and driving brand outcomes. Said differently, OOH is finally speaking the same language as the rest of adtech, and buyers are catching on!
That’s a good lead-in to our next question: How has the emergence of “smart cities” helped spur the huge growth in DOOH advertising?
Smart cities are a super interesting concept and something that will take a few decades to play out completely, with respect to AI and other technological advancements. For now, consumers are spending more time than ever outside the home, and there will be an opportunity for advertising to be even more present in the critical moments of the customer journey. Urban and suburban sprawl has established a culture where people will continue to be mobile, where autonomous vehicles will enable people to travel greater distances from home to work, as well as other desired points of interest — creating more opportunity to address them with OOH advertising. These new types of travel experiences will shape more active engagement with OOH creative, resulting in stronger media impact and lift on OOH campaigns.
With so many technological advancements in the past few years such as programmatic advertising and offline intelligence, in your opinion — which innovation has helped the most when it comes to OOH & DOOH advertising?
Digital technology is the enabler that’s driving positive change in the OOH sector. As I mentioned earlier, Clear Channel Outdoor’s use of location intelligence is creating a planning, buying, and measurement approach that is familiar to those who primarily buy digital and mobile media. Second, converting traditional printed OOH displays to dynamic digital displays allows brands to post campaigns faster, change creative quickly, impact OOH messaging using a range of dynamic data triggers, and incorporate digital OOH into established programmatic buying platforms.
Additionally, workflow automation is allowing CCO to post traditional printed billboard campaigns in 48 hours, a huge improvement and vastly more valuable approach than the old-school expectation that OOH takes weeks to get a campaign in market.
What was your favorite billboard creative you’ve seen this year and why?
While we are constantly seeing amazing innovations in creative and out of home like the recent “Love My City” Times Square digital campaign activated by the National League of Cities to showcase the powerful connection people have to their communities, what’s most compelling is that even the most straightforward campaigns using digital and traditional OOH billboards are still wildly effective at raising awareness on a local or national level. Just last month, we activated a CSR campaign around Missing Children’s Day throughout the state of Texas; the missing child case we featured in our campaign in Houston was found and reunited with their mother shortly after the campaign debuted. The mother told us directly that she’s convinced the billboards brought her child home. To me, this is just one example of the unique power of OOH to spur action in the offline world.
As innovation continues to advance OOH advertising, what new trend will dominate the space in 2020 and beyond?
OOH will continue to have a reliable viewability and fraud-free story that more buyers will become attuned to in 2020 and beyond — especially as our inventory becomes more addressable and measurable. As we get more and more sophisticated with our ability to integrate data into our solutions, the best practices that have existed in digital will help brands and advertisers move past measurable outcomes and take their campaign learnings and insights to optimize their OOH campaigns.
So when a brand asks, “Can we bring our data to you for planning and measurement?,” OOH companies will need to be able to answer with a resounding “YES!” so we can continue to deliver innovations that help us become more integral to the brand conversation by enabling brands to bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds. As a result, our industry will become more nimble with data and more responsive to our customers’ needs.
We’ve just begun that with our latest solution: RADARSync™, where we’re developing an even more intimate understanding of ad exposure in the physical world and how it drives online activity through social and other connected platforms.
What has made your partnership with Cuebiq so effective? And how has offline intelligence helped not only OOH marketers but marketers in general?
Integrating Cuebiq’s location intelligence and measurement into our CCO RADAR suite of solutions allows us to measure a range of KPIs and understand OOH’s ability to impact not just brand metrics like awareness, but also consumer behaviors like store visits, TV viewing, app downloads, web activity, product purchases and more. And across all these disparate KPIs, we’re proving that OOH drives a significant, measurable, and positive impact on changing consumer behavior. And this is a substantial advancement for marketers as they must deliver an ROI back to the brand. CCO RADAR, powered by Cuebiq, allows us to do just that.
