OOH Ads: Does it Generate an ROI?
OOH advertising has been deemed by many businesses as an outdated form of advertising. In favor of online marketing strategies, many businesses have stopped investing in popular forms of OOH (or out-of-house) advertising methods. Studies have shown that this is a mistake.
Not only do OOH ads still generate profits in 2020, but they are also increasing in profitability as the years go by. This is because of their availability, ease of access, and lack of modern inconveniences, which are detracting from the viability of online advertising more and more as time goes on.
This is a short guide to OOH advertising, including strategies that contribute to its success and how to generate a stable ROI (or return on investment) when using OOH ads to market your company.
Types of OOH advertising
OOH ads consist of any advertising in a visual form that you distribute outside of people’s homes. The most conventional OOH ads are in the form of billboards and signage that advertise your business on roads and in cities. However, all forms of physical advertising contribute to your OOH campaign.
This includes advertisements at bus stops and train terminals, in airports and restaurants, and even in taxicabs and movie theaters. There are also location-specific OOH advertising strategies such as placing marketing materials at arenas and stadiums.
All of these diverse OOH ads contribute to a multimodal approach to advertising your business. This type of advertising has only increased in profitability in the digital age. Why is that?
Advantages of OOH advertising
As opposed to digital marketing, OOH advertising can be seen when people are on the go, at the supermarket, the football game, in the park, or at the movies. This creates a subtle psychology advantage for OOH ads where people don’t feel like their privacy is being invaded by your company’s marketing, which is a reaction that is increasing in frequency as time goes on and hurting online ad campaigns.
Consider the explosion in popularity of ad-blocking applications. These automatically reduce the ROI of digital ad space by making it less likely that anyone will see their ad or be receptive to it when they do.
By contrast, the ROI of OOH advertising is now $6 to the dollar on average. Compared to other conventional ad methods in print, television, and radio, OOH advertising is the only form that has increased in profitability over the last decade.
It does this by working in tandem with digital search tools. Studies have shown that people are much more likely to look up something on their phone after seeing it on a billboard than they would after getting a popup in their browser about it.
The high ROI of OOH advertising essentially comes down to accessibility and trust. People choose to absorb the campaign and act on it when they see it in the world more than when it pops up on their computer.
The Takeaway
With the rise of digital OOH ads in the form of flashy electronic billboards, OOH advertising has become more profitable and accessible than ever. Its high return on investment is due to its synergy with search engines – people see things out in the world and then they search for them.
In an age when people are getting more suspicious of online ads and as more of your company’s email marketing campaigns get lost in spam folders, OOH advertising remains a tried and true method of getting in customers’ heads when they’re out in the world.
So long as there’s no adblocker available for their eyes, OOH ads will remain as effective as ever.
