Emerging brands are everywhere; whether you’re a mom & pop local business, a million-dollar funded start-up, or an established top brand in your industry, Out of Home serves a purpose for growth. Brands utilize OOH media to put themselves in front of their desired audience. OOH, professionals can strategically place ads to put your brand directly in the face of the consumers you’re looking for through initial research into your specific audience in your desired market. Let’s explore how Out of Home suits the needs of emerging brands in today’s world.
Out of Home Media for Emerging Brands Builds Brand Awareness
One of the biggest challenges for an emerging brand is building brand awareness. They could be competing against more prominent, established brands in their sector that have had time to develop familiarity with audiences, or they could be creating an entirely new type of service, like DTC mattresses or buy-from-home dental alignment services. Either way, building brand awareness is critical for both short-term and long-term brand success. Never fear, Out of Home to the rescue.
One of Out of Home media’s biggest strengths is driving brand awareness at scale. Out of Home media can reach large segments of the population daily, often repeatedly on their daily commute. With the variety of Out of Home media available, it is possible to put your brand in front of your target audience at multiple points as they move through their day.
According to the Nielsen 2019, Out of Home Advertising Study: “90% of U.S. residents age 16 or older noticed some form of out-of-home advertising in the past month, 80% notice ads in the past week.”
Numerous studies have shown that people buy what is familiar, and for emerging brands, becoming familiar means reaching a large audience.
Out of Home Media Provides Cost-effective Reach for Emerging Brands.
Another challenge for emerging brands can also be budget. Competing with established brands with much larger media budgets can be difficult. But, Out of Home can help here as well.
For many advertisers, OOH media budgets will range from 4-7% of their overall media budget. It is often just a box to be checked on the media plan, without much thought given to the strategic application of the media. This usually leaves a lot of space for emerging brands to use Out of Home to capture a larger share of voice in a given market. If there is a media channel that other brands neglect, it can often be easy to “own” it.
And with Out of Home media, this can be done very cost-effectively. Even at the surface level OOH CPMs compare very favorably to other media channels. It can reach vast audiences with a comparatively modest media investment. It’s also essential to look beyond just base-level CPMs to understand the actual value of the media when comparing channels and balancing your media mix. Just looking at the CPM can often lead to overlooking other aspects of the media that are just as, if not more, important.
Out of Home Media Provides a Great Creative Canvas to Build a Unique Brand Identity.
“There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, cigarettes, or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.” – David Ogilvy
Building a unique identity is critical for an emerging brand, and many studies (link) have demonstrated the importance of creativity to the overall success of a campaign. Out of Home media offers one of the most flexible and varied canvases for designers to make the most of their creative talents.
The variety of media available – from huge wallscapes to coffee sleeves, from wrapped busses to gas pump screens, static, digital, full-motion video, and interactivity – all these choices allow for an incredible amount of possibility and variation. This will enable advertisers to make the most out of their creativity by creating a “theme and variations” across multiple formats, thus making the campaign more memorable.
Out of Home is a necessary medium to differentiate an existing or emerging brand through intriguing creative. If a brand has a concept, Out of Home can bring it to life in engaging ways. For example, it could be a series of riddles on the New York City subway system that puzzles the everyday subway rider. It could be a series of back-to-back billboards along a highway to tell a story as the driver passes. Or it could even be a self-deprecating message such as the “IHATESTEVENSINGER.com” billboards along Philadelphia highways leading them to the Steven Singer Jewelry website. Each is a different tactic, yet simple and engaging to the consumer to draw them in and act. Additionally, when you add experiential and mobile OOH options, Out of Home can create space where none exists.
Out of Home Media Integrates Well with Online Channels.
The digital world is now a part of our everyday lives, and it’s hard to imagine life without smartphones. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of Americans own smartphones and other devices that can connect them online anytime. When paired with OOH, online channels can amplify your marketing campaigns even further by reaching audiences that have already been exposed to the brand.
A recent study by WARC showed that consumers exposed to OOH are 53% more likely to search for a brand online and 56% more likely to make an online purchase. Emerging brands often rely on online sales as their primary, if not only, point of the transaction, so the ability to drive traffic online is critical. And the power of OOH to make online ads more effective, and therefore making them deliver better ROI, makes it an indispensable partner for online media.
Out of Home Attribution Helps Emerging Brands Identify What’s Working
So, we have built brand awareness cost-effectively using Out of Home ad, grabbed your audience’s attention with engaging creative, and helped drive them to online channels. Now what? Emerging brands need to monitor the effectiveness of their advertising budgets closely. In the past Out of Home media was difficult, if not impossible, to measure effectively. That meant it was difficult to include in media mix models and hard to justify budget levels. But that is changing. The use of website URLs, coupons and discount codes, and even the resurrection of QR codes are some of the most popular attribution methods. To track ROI, you can interact with your desired audience through these various attribution methods.
Out of Home is also starting to use more detailed attribution methods to provide more information. Walk-in studies, website tracking, and geofenced conversions can all help to provide a lens on the effectiveness of OOH in helping drive sales.
Summary
Any brand can utilize OOH advertising, but for emerging brands, it can provide a media channel that allows them to grow faster and compete with larger, more established brands. Successful brands take the time to understand their target audience and what they want to measure and draw those consumers in with engaging creative.
Those who take that time initially in their first Out of Home campaign see the success that encourages them to utilize OOH as the central portion of their advertising budget. Don’t know where to start? Let us know what you’re working on, and we’ll help determine if Out of Home is the right fit for your campaign.
