Jesse London has spent 25 years in media sales including 20 years selling out of home. Today he gives 9 tips for selling out of home versus radio.
(1) First, let’s find a way to include radio. Radio and out of home complement each other since they reach the on-the-go audience, and they offer sight and sound to that elusive audience. This is important because people are spending less time at home and more time commuting to work. Radio adds frequency to a billboard campaign. So, if a billboard is seen only once per day frequency from radio can make it work harder.
(2) The obvious difference is that billboards offer sight and a picture tells a thousand words.
(3) Billboards offer geographic targeting, and radio does not. When advertisers need specific neighborhoods or reminders along the path to purchase billboards make more sense.
(4) Billboards are more cost efficient. Bulletins have a median cpm of $2.84 per thousand versus a radio cpm of $6.58 (PJ Solomon). So billboards are more than twice as efficient.
(5) A bulletin buy is generally a four-week minimum, but not radio. Radio flights can be much shorter so the billboard message sticks around longer, and for sure there are no overruns in radio.
(6) In New York we generate a tremendous amount of earned media with social – people take pictures of billboards and post those pics. I have seen these pictures from other markets as well, but never heard a radio spot on Instagram or Facebook.
(7) Streaming radio and podcast are eroding radio audiences. While 93% of US population does listen to some AM/FM each week (Nielsen), reports dig deeper to show that only 70% of all listening is of AM/FM (Jacobs Media). This seems to indicate that there is tune-in to AM/FM for sure, but almost one third of total listening is to a digital alternative. As broadcasters automate local station programming and remove local personalities, AM/FM audiences will continue to erode. Seems it is getting harder and harder to saturate a market with radio, but billboards still reach almost all drivers.
(8) Government dictates the separation of billboards, but radio serves up their ads in clusters making it very difficult for an advertiser to stand out.
(9) Billboards get read, but radio commercials can be easily zapped, listeners just change stations during commercials.
Next week Jesse will talk about selling out of home versus TV. You can reach Jesse at jesselondon1@gmail.com.
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