With the permission of and by,

Eddy Herty, VP, National Creative Director of OUTFRONT Studios at OUTFRONT Media

Subjective means based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions… people get stuck here… a lot.

Objective means just the opposite… it’s not influenced by personal feelings or opinions but instead facts… or rather truths.

So a client may say that red is the best color for their brand, or Franklin Gothic is the best typeface for a realtor… and maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong… to be honest, I don’t really care and can work with either or both. But if they say something ridiculous like, “Billboards don’t work.” That is something I can speak objectively about, and prove that that is only true if you let your subjective opinions guide what your final ad looks like.

Being an OOH media expert is difficult or even impossible if you rely only on your subjective opinions and claims like, “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I know better”. If everything you’re basing advice on is subjective, it can be argued… you just can’t be an expert on subjective.

However, if we lean on what we know about ourselves, people in general, what’s been proven we’ll find objective truths about how we work, how we function that can help guide our clients to a successful campaign.

So, let’s start with things that can’t be argued… truths… I’m not talking about relativism… I’m talking about things that are true for everyone.

According to a study at the University of Minnesota, The Human Brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.

In other words, “Keep It Simple!”

Which is why visual content is 40X more likely to be shared on social.

Does that mean I can split a billboard in half and post two different brands on it, as long as they’re mostly visual? Hell no!

When we’re designing this “visual content” we must use our expertise to make sure we don’t overload our audiences… and again, that’s not subjective, that’s an objective fact as 23% of ads are more likely to be noticed when using fewer elements.

One of my other favorite arguments… which is purely subjective, is, “My ad is at a traffic light… people will have time to write down the phone number.” Instead of fighting someone’s opinion (which is sooo wrong), use the objective stat that shows 89% of viewers are more likely to respond to a web address than a phone number. THEN you can add in, “and it’ll prevent your ad from looking like crap.”

At the end of the day, the way we design, and how we create these campaigns matters. The subjective thought that people don’t want to buy crap is actually backed up by an objective stat that says 75% of advertising impact is determined by the creative quality… it’s determined by the thought you put into it, by the craft of our work.

The subjective truth for many of us is that we love OOH because it’s the best damn advertising medium out there.

And if someone asks us why we believe that, we should be able to back it up with plenty objective truths… making us OOH media experts.

I’m sure you’re wanting sources for the above stats, so you can find them all below. Thanks Mike Moss, Christine Rose, and Val Vespa for those stats!

SOURCES: Pew Research Center “Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet”, 800 Response “Consumer Recall Rates of Phone Numbers in Advertising”, Advertising Research Federation, Neilsen “Out-Of-Home Advertising Study” & “Out-Of-Home Advertising Study Location Report”, OAAA “Benefits of OOH Advertising Custom Analysis” & “Color Combinations & Contrasts”, Kantar Millward Brown, 2019, University of Alberta, Canada, “The Link Between Creativity and Eectiveness” Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 2010, “How Advertising Works Today” Advertising Research Foundation

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