Lawton on the bias against out of home.

By Josh Lawton, COO and Co-Founder, Abraxas Technology

It’s not hard to figure out that the out of home industry is moving into the digital world even though, the total number of digital billboards pales in comparison to the total number of analog boards in the US. As of 2017, there were only 7,000 digital billboards in the entire United States. While this significantly underrepresents the full digital signage market, it is instructive of where the out of home market is going, because year on year growth of digital billboards and signage in the US has been 10%. This growth in digital signage is because the out of home market is the one market that can’t be cord cut, whose ads can’t be skipped, and whose marketing can’t be ad blocked.

This growth in the digital signage market is not just due to it being the last medium that can not be avoided, it’s because serious marketers know that it is highly effective.

“…travelers who had passed the billboards could remember specific ads from those campaigns up to 89 percent of the time.”

When you consider that digital signage’s cost per impression is less than 10% of most other advertising mediums, it is hard to understand why out of home marketing is normally the throw away portion of most marketing budgets. (well it’s not that hard to understand since the out of home market has been missing conversion data, i.e. did an individual see a board and turn up in the advertiser’s store or go online, which is why we created Abraxas Technology to provide that data to OOH owners and advertisers.) Many marketers, whose clients are mainly composed of local businesses, discredit the cost per impression of the out of home market. Therefore, they are leading their clients towards online mediums to advertise, even though study after study has shown that consumers better remember out of home advertisement when compared to online ads.

“…71 percent said they felt advertising on digital billboards stood out more than online ads…”

One of the main reasons why out of home advertising is more effective than online mediums is that it is local, consumers are targeted in context, and most importantly the advertising does not interrupt their experience. These factors contribute to why exposure times to digital out of home media was forecasted to increase by 20 minutes per week in 2017 and why the growth in digital out of home advertising spends are going to significantly increase.

“Zenith forecasts that DOOH will grow faster globally than all other buying methods, and PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that DOOH advertising revenues will overtake traditional media spend in 2020, growing at a rate of 15% a year for the next four years.”

This growth in DOOH is directly correlated to the rise of programmatic buying of OOH media. The ability of companies like DoubleClick to tie into companies like us at Abraxas Technology, allows for the combination of their knowledge of your online profile with our knowledge of what you do in the real world to give for the first time a full picture of the customer. This powerful and giant leap forward in data is why more and more marketers and advertisers are turning to the OOH market.

Want to connect with us about how Abraxas Technology can help you know who saw your boards and then came to your advertisers’ stores? Email JLawton@abraxastechnology.com.

Joshua Lawton is the COO and Co-Founder of Abraxas Technology

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