A recent publication in the Journal of Advertising reviewed 454 articles spanning 104 years of academic research in OOH advertising and generated 20 research questions for academics and practitioners to move OOH advertising research forward and increase its visibility.

At a high level, the review finds 54% of academic research focus on ad management topics like creativity, message processing, and media planning while the remaining 46% discuss public policy issues like regulations and ethical concerns (e.g., driver safety and the advertising of harmful products and objectionable content near vulnerable populations). Scholarly interest in OOH advertising research is appreciably multidisciplinary extending beyond marketing and communications to include law, health sciences, transportation, engineering, urban planning, and computer sciences.

A few highlights from the 104-year OOH advertising research review:

• Creativity appears not to increase message processing unless OOH media is conspicuously placed.
• Consumer interest in advertised content (e.g., message content or advertised brand) appears to enhance message processing more than consumer interest with the context of where the ad is placed (e.g., sports and an ad in an arena).
• Current categorization of OOH media by format appears inadequate to address the unique considerations art directors and media planners have in designing and selecting ads to maximize attention capture and promote message processing in complex OOH environments.
• To solve advertising problems, researchers in the hard sciences are leveraging big data, such as social media check-ins, geotagged Twitter posts, bike rental and taxi trajectory data, Bluetooth, and GPS, to estimate audience measurement, segmentation, and pricing.
• Several topics are under researched in academia, including programmatic ad buying, behavioral KPIs (compared to recall, recognition, and attitudes), mobile OOH (e.g., bus, taxi versus billboards), and environmentally responsible production of OOH media.
• The link between OOH advertising and auto accidents appears unproven, but more evidence connects it with driver inattention and other driving errors.
• While harmful content and message appeals are not consistently and disproportionately found in areas where vulnerable populations live and congregate, enough data suggests it is a problem in some markets.=

Dr. Rick T. Wilson is an associate professor of marketing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas and studies OOH advertising. He can be reached at rick.t.wilson@txstate.edu.

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