By: David Burrick, Chief Strategy Officer at Intersection

The strength of the out-of-home (OOH) advertising market lies with Local advertisers. Consider Outfront Media, one of the industry’s largest players. Outfront’s quarterly filings show about 60% revenue last year came from its sales team that sells to Local advertisers, which grew at over twice the rate of its National advertising segment – a trend seen not just at Outfront, but across the industry, including at Intersection. This indicates that Local advertisers are poised to represent an even greater share of total spend in the years ahead.

Why is this happening? National advertisers enjoy a vast and growing set of options for ad spend, but Local advertisers do not. Traditional local media like radio, print, and linear TV are shrinking due to declining audiences. Meanwhile, changes at big tech companies – especially Apple – have made it harder for digital advertisers to access mobile location data, limiting geotargeting capabilities.

Most importantly, Local OOH advertising works. Numerous studies confirm its effectiveness and marketers know it. Local advertisers see and experience their ads in the community, and recognize the positive impact on business results.

When OOH companies mention Local advertisers, they don’t just mean small businesses. National advertisers typically refer to the 500–1,000 largest U.S. companies. “Local” encompasses all others – including large institutions in education, government, healthcare, entertainment, and law – that often have budgets rivaling or exceeding National advertisers within local markets.

But what about Hyperlocal advertisers –  with limited marketing budgets, few staff and minimal infrastructure? Our industry has traditionally struggled to reach them. Their smaller budgets are often deemed unworthy of sales outreach, and the OOH medium remains obscure to many. Even when they’re interested, the buying process isn’t intuitive. That’s why many turn to Facebook and Google, which offer precise targeting and easy, self-serve tools.

At Intersection, we’ve long been focused on the Hyperlocal segment, which aligns well with our network of digital street furniture that connects with these businesses in their communities. That’s why we recently launched a self-service ad platform for small businesses, starting with LinkNYC. The platform enables Hyperlocal advertisers to easily browse and buy media on their own. In just weeks since launch, thousands have explored the platform, resulting in hundreds of orders.

We strongly believe that, over time, more and more customers will engage with the OOH medium through these sorts of channels. As a result, here are some early learnings we have had on our platform:

1. Most buyers are tech savvy – In customer interviews we have done with some of our early advertisers, we have observed that most buyers are technically savvy and used to purchasing advertising on their own through other platforms like Google and Facebook. They have no qualms about making an advertising purchase without ever talking to a human and are rarely confused with how to select inventory that meets their needs and how to complete a purchase.
2. Inventory needs to be easy to understand – Typically in our industry, we talk about terms like impressions, reach and share of voice. Since almost every buyer on this platform is a small business and likely new to out-of-home, we have had to simplify how inventory is represented. Instead of buying impressions, advertisers are buying a fixed number of plays on a unit for a fixed period of time. We also tell the advertiser what those numbers mean in terms of a percentage of total plays on a unit. Advertisers have really easily accepted this form of purchasing.
3. Creative is the biggest challenge – Most Hyperlocal advertisers do not have access to graphic designers, so designing an ad for an OOH screen is often the biggest impediment to purchase. As a result, we built a templated creative builder into our portal, which allows advertisers to make simple creative choices (logo upload, color selection, etc.) and then type in basic text information (business name, location, hours, tag-line). This has been the way the overwhelming majority of advertisers have chosen to generate creative on our platform. Over time, we expect to be able to create more bespoke content in a simple way for advertisers using AI.
4. Get advertisers used to using your platform – A key part of our strategy is to give Hyperlocal advertisers a limited amount of inventory at low to no cost. We have found that once we can get Hyperlocal advertisers to start using our OOH assets as key marketing tools, even if they are free, many of them want to expand their advertising offering with us – leading to increased revenue. We even see positive benefits from the group of advertisers who never graduate past our free offering. Having a larger and more diverse set of local businesses on our screens has a pied-piper effect of attracting additional customers. Additionally, providing services to a broader set of local businesses fosters goodwill with our municipal partners with whom we operate these street furniture franchises.
5. Embrace your customer facing brands – The average Hyperlocal advertiser is very familiar with LinkNYC and the MTA in New York City. They are likely not familiar with Intersection or Outfront, who are responsible for selling the inventory on those networks. Typical user behavior we are observing is that an advertiser will see our screens, become interested in advertising on them and then go to Google and search for “how to advertise on LinkNYC.” We don’t want to confuse the user by taking them to an Intersection website, so you will see that the entire site is branded as LinkNYC. We expect to mimic this strategy by building out similar sites for our other large digital networks, like at the Chicago Transit Authority.
6. Different from programmatic – Some may say that programmatic platforms are the onramp to this inventory to Hyperlocal advertisers. That is not the case. Most Hyperlocal advertisers have never heard of a Demand Side Platform (DSP), which is the tool for programmatic buying, and, if they did, they wouldn’t know how to use it. Moreover, programmatic is a great tool for buying a broad swath of assets in a given market, but a Hyperlocal advertiser typically wants to cherry pick a very specific asset and purchase it on a guaranteed basis, which is not what programmatic is designed for.

Local advertising will only continue to be an important part of the OOH ecosystem for years to come. We can further fuel that growth by building out and embracing tools like we have built that finally make our inventory accessible to the Hyperlocal customer.

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