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Out of Home: Standing on the shoulders of giants
by Susie Mcavoy, Business Director, Rapport, and Ross Wilson, Head of Insight, Rapport

Susie and Ross demonstrate how Out of Home (OOH) advertising can drive brand fame and esteem, and impact new customer acquisition.

14th January 2022 Read time: 3 minutes Watch time: 56 minutes
You know who the giants are. TV, radio, press and online are all big players well-positioned in the advertising world to capture consumer attention. However, something that can stand on the shoulders of these giants and play a powerful role in amplifying and elevating campaign effectiveness is Out of Home (OOH) advertising.  
 
Ross Wilson, Head of Insight at Rapport, a unique Out of Home media specialist, joined the What’s Possible Community Bitesize sessions to outline Out of Home’s role in accelerating brand growth and what contribution it can make to customer acquisition.  
 
Joined by Susie McAvoy, Business Director at Rapport, the pair focused on how Out of Home can drive brand fame and esteem and secure increased customer loyalty. 

Using data to eliminate the long-held assumptions

Marketers are under ever-increasing pressure to justify their media investments. 
 
“A common thing we often hear from the client and our agency partners is that, while they love Out of Home, historically they have found it difficult and often challenging to quantify its effectiveness,” Ross said.  
 
To eliminate the ambiguities and provide evidence of OOH’s effectiveness, Rapport enlisted the help of analyst Peter Field, a leading marketing analysis guru. He set out to comb through the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s (IPA) Effectiveness Databank, which has over 2,000 case studies containing a wealth of data on market share, campaign research, sales figures and profit analysis.  
 
Field embarked on a journey to prove that power-users who had used OOH in their campaign’s media mix grew in fame and esteem compared to brands that had deployed no OOH. Brands that use 15% (or more) of their media budgets on OOH were considered power users. 
 
The IPA defines fame as getting the advertiser noticed and increasing the likelihood that it features more prominently in conversations. The IPA defines esteem as the ability to build belief in the brand and its quality and services associated with it. 
 
He identified 55 case studies where brands deployed OOH, compared them to 92 cases where a business had not relied on it and measured its impact on business effects.  
 
He discovered that half of all brands were using OOH for sales activation purposes, and the other half were using it for brand-building. This was considered surprising, says Ross, since the popular opinion in the industry has been that OOH fails to influence sales in the long term. The long-held assumptions of how OOH works, and its wider role in the communications mix, were dispelled.  

What OOH can do for your brand

Rapport has collected the study’s evidence and laid them out for brands to contemplate. Their conclusions were:
 
  • OOH adds stature and fame to campaigns  
  • OOH power-users are more effective at delivering business outcomes  
  • OOH boosts the business effects of all other media – especially search and social 
Brands that used OOH’s esteem rose by 41% and fame by 32%, versus brands that used no OOH. Ross says that new or emerging brands could significantly boost esteem and fame, especially when taking a new product to market.  
 
Power-users of OOH recorded a 15% uplift in new customer acquisition compared to non-users. There are also positive outcomes in profit and market share in the longer term. In short term sales, the report found that OOH provided a 47% uplift for brands.  
 
When it came to how OOH stands on the shoulders of those previously mentioned giants, the figures are clear. OOH boosts the business effects delivered by traditional channels: of press by 7%, plus radio and TV by 17%. However, the significant influence OOH is having is in the digital world.

The digital future

The amplifying of digital channels, Ross says, is where OOH’s strengths lie. The Databank indicates the uplift to business effects on paid social are 20% and paid search a whopping 54%.  
 
Concluding, Ross demonstrated the versatility of OOH in the marketing mix when OOH gets paired up with one of the giants and what the differences in business effects are.  
 
Susie McAvoy, Business Director at Rapport, gave the Community a picture of what newer, emerging forms of OOH technologies are making their way into the sector. Maximising the data that marketers can report from these new forms of OOH can help them track and communicate with customers in a more targeted way in a plethora of environments. 
 
“It’s enabled us to mirror online strategies and targeting and bring that into an offline world. It enables and reaches those audiences at scale. So, beyond what would have been a typical demographic targeting, especially using mobile data, or Adsquare, we’re able to really connect and find those audiences and engage with them,” Susie said. 
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