Joint industry research uncovers new effectiveness indicators in Out of Home and Digital Out of Home

Conducted by BrandScience, the Omnicom econometrics and data science business, the detailed analysis of over 200 OOH advertising campaigns provided evidence of the effectiveness of OOH and demonstrated the medium’s value in delivering profitability.

The study is the first to use econometrics to demonstrate that using digital OOH can drive additional ROI to campaigns.

The research was commissioned by Talon, in partnership with media owners Clear Channel, Exterion Media, Forrest Media, JCDecaux, Ocean Outdoor, Outdoor Plus and Primesight.

Key findings include:

• Increasing investment in OOH as part of the communications mix drives ROI for advertisers
• Media channels consistently improve ROI across individual categories when OOH is included in the mix
• Dropping OOH from a campaign can lead to a reduced campaign effectiveness
• Cost-effective tactical OOH campaigns can be very effective at boosting total campaign ROI
• The optimal proportion of digital OOH (as a total of the OOH budget) is around 45%.

BrandScience analysed the optimal proportion of digital OOH as part of a campaign’s overall OOH budget and makes recommendations for advertisers on how to maximise ROI when combining digital and classic OOH as part of a wider media mix.

BrandScience and Omnicom now plan to use data from the study to recommend budget levels for all media channels.

Sally Dickerson, Global CEO at BrandScience, comments “We can clearly measure Out of Home effectively and we have proved that a slightly increased Out of Home spend – in many cases – delivers higher ROI.”

Nick Mawditt, Director of Insight and Marketing at Talon adds “This is a great example of the industry coming together to look objectively at how Out of Home works for brands. Not only have we a clearer idea of how it works, we know that digital Out of Home works hard in driving the right message in the right context to complement classic Out of Home messaging – the first real insight of its kind.”

Sarah Speake, Chief Marketing Officer at Clear Channel UK said “The findings validate the huge developments in Out of Home media in the past few years. Advertisers can feel confident that investment in Out of Home, coupled with smart planning across brand and promotional campaigns can deliver significant increase in effectiveness and ROI – both in isolation and when integrated into a broader communications plan”.

The research was conducted by BrandScience in 2015 using 211 advertising campaigns from 2012-2015, using Route data and spanning brands across the FMCG, travel, technology, finance, charity, grocery and retail sectors.