By David Burrick, Chief Strategy Officer, Intersection Co.

As the calendar turns to September, there is a lot to look forward to – the start of football season, leaves changing colors and, of course, the beginning of a new school year.

This fall, approximately 18 million Americans will be heading to college campuses for undergraduate and postgraduate programs. And while a portion of people in the out-of-home advertising industry will have children attending college this fall, most of us in the industry have a different connection to colleges and universities – they are amongst the largest and strongest advertisers in our industry.

Out-of-home advertising is a perfect fit for higher education institutions. Colleges and universities are essentially local businesses looking to recruit students in nearby areas. Like colleges, buses, trains, billboards and street furniture are deeply integrated into local communities and are an ideal way to reach prospective students.

At Intersection, the education category has been our largest advertising category in 2024 and is growing significantly. Part of the reason we have seen such success in the category is that we have proven that OOH advertising drives real-world results for our clients in the higher education space. As a result, we wanted to share some insights we have learned from working with clients in this category:

1. OOH drives prospective students to campus – We recently partnered with a local college in Brooklyn to advertise on our LinkNYC street kiosks. As part of the campaign, we measured (i) if anyone exposed to the campaign later walked onto the school’s campus and (ii) if there was any meaningful lift in foot traffic to campus when we compared people in New York who saw the advertising campaign compared to a similar group of New Yorkers who did not see the campaign. Working with our measurement partner StreetMetrics, we found that those exposed to the campaign were 95% more likely to walk onto the college campus than the control group.
2. OOH drives online sign-ups – We worked with a Chicago-based college to drive enrollment via a campaign on CTA buses. Instead of measuring foot traffic to the college’s campus, we measured whether the campaign drove meaningful improvement in traffic to key pages on the college’s website. Again, we saw strong success for this campaign. Those exposed to the bus campaign were 21% more likely to visit the college’s homepage, 75% more likely to visit the college’s application page and 112% more likely to visit the course catalog page. In all, those exposed to the campaign were 2x more likely to fill out an online application to the college.
3. The importance of campaign reach – Our studies in this advertising category consistently find that the majority of conversions happen after just a handful of exposures to a campaign. In the aforementioned study in Brooklyn, for example, we found that 50% of the prospective students who showed up on campus after seeing an ad on our LinkNYC kiosks did so after seeing the ad only once. And 75% of those who showed up on campus saw the ad no more than twice. This shows that colleges should focus on reaching the widest audience possible as opposed to spending their budget trying to reach prospective students many times over.
4. Making a splash – Since colleges and universities are essential parts of our communities, in some markets we have seen higher education clients sponsor their local transit stations – more seamlessly integrating their brand into the fabric of the neighborhood and providing additional amenities for students (current and future), faculty, staff and visitors. In Philadelphia, for example, Drexel University, Jefferson University and the University of Pennsylvania all have committed to long-term station sponsorship of their local SEPTA stations.

As colleges start educating this year’s crop of students in the coming weeks, it won’t be long until their focus once again turns to recruiting and enrolling next year’s class. As our data has consistently shown, higher education institutions should be sure to include out-of-home advertising in their marketing mix and that they can expect strong results from their OOH marketing campaigns.

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