Could staying local bring new revenues to OOH?

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Sam Tidmarsh speaks with Realworld, a specialist in the automation of location-based advertising about a product to provide a more local connection

WARC/AA estimate that OOH, alongside cinema, will see a 57% bounce back next year.

While PwC explains that as consumers exercise more control than ever over personal media preferences, advertisers will “continue to gravitate to OOH, which cannot be blocked or skipped.”

Posterscope optimistically argues that the OOH industry has a significant role to play as “the healer of brands, of consumers, of communities, and of all our public spaces” as we take our first steps back out into the world.

The OOH and location marketing specialist conducted research in late September as the Government began locking down areas of England in response to a second wave.

It discovered that 45% of people found OOH advertising more noticeable, eliciting a more positive response than before the pandemic.

Perhaps now, as the market hibernates for winter, it has never been a better time to revise strategy, think and plan for the future.

But does this make for a good time to launch an OOH product in the UK?

For Realworld, the Australian-based technology company, which has announced a new product to help media owners target local advertisers, the answer to that question is certainly a ‘yes’.

The company, which specialises in the automation of location-based advertising, has launched Adfindr, a self-serve OOH product.

According to a 2016 report from research charity Nesta, the total size of the UK local advertising market is estimated at £2.6 billion a year.

Michael Scruby, CEO at Realworld, says Adfindr helps media companies tap into this demand by finding the contact details of all potential advertisers in any location.

“For years, the local advertising market has been the realm of Google and Facebook,” Scruby tells Mediatel News.

Arguing that there isn’t a clear way to find or prospect for local advertisers, Scruby explains: “The closest thing would be someone looking on Google Maps and trying to pull up businesses around a certain area. But it’s not usable, [and it’s] highly inefficient.”

“It doesn’t make sense when billboards are the most localised medium on earth. Adfindr helps the OOH industry bridge this gap.”

Planned correctly, OOH can support advertisers to convey contextual and relevant messaging to a local audience.

According to Posterscope, although movement has been limited due to the pandemic, people are still travelling locally to exercise and go shopping, and so the UK’s network of OOH provides an opportunity to reach local audiences.

In a March joint study conducted by Clear Channel, JCDecaux UK and Posterscope, it was found that there is an 18% average increase in brain response when displaying content that is contextually and locally relevant, such as weather, time or a live update.

Moreover, when residents of an area were asked about attitudes towards their local town or city during the pandemic, 65% of respondents said they paid more attention.

This new-found awareness of their local environment is resulting in stronger feelings towards OOH advertisers, with 40% feeling more positive towards brands currently using OOH than before the pandemic.

“You’ve got a very profitable sector out there and it’s not being capitalised on,” Scruby explains.

This is largely due to the fact that the market has been difficult to tap into for traditional media owners such as cinema, press and TV. There is often no agency in the middle, and so for those companies with inventory, finding advertisers can be akin to door knocking.

Adfindr allows media owners to type in the location of their assets, and it will quickly run an API which pulls from Google, Yelp, Bing and TripAdvisor, feeding this information back in real-time to the media owner.

“It really helps to streamline the process for a sales representative,” explains Scruby.

“Companies have been really shocked by the pandemic, and have a lot of inventory available. But the national advertisers just aren’t there at the moment, in the same way they’d have been pre-Covid. There are a lot of assets to sell, and companies need a new way of prospecting and demand sources.”

However, the ability to tap into the local market has “been a hard one to scratch”, largely due to the work involved in trying to find advertisers and contact them with tools that aren’t set-up to do the job efficiently en masse.

So Adfindr has been launched, according to Scruby, to remove the “nitty gritty” of sourcing all of the correct information on local businesses.

Although targeted at the OOH industry, the tool is also being used by Sky to identify location-based prospects for its ad-targeting platform AdSmart.

Commenting on the launch, David Sanderson, director of Adsmart, local and development at Sky, said: “With Adsmart looking to lead the way in digital advertising at a hyper targeted level, the power allowed by tools like Adfindr is very valuable.”

The need for tools to provide hyper targeted, localised information is shared by the wider advertising community too.

For Philippa Snare, SVP EMEA at The Trade Desk, it is unsurprising that digital looks set to steam ahead in the new year: “With ongoing uncertainty, the live data insights provided by digital advertising will be invaluable to marketers,” she says.

“DOOH, forecasted to improve year-on-year by 60%, allows marketers to create broad, scale brand awareness, while ensuring they can turn off or tweak messaging according to the local context.”

“Looking to the future, those who embrace digital advertising are most likely to bounce-back in the coming months – so now is a crucial time for marketers to be nimble, adaptable and ready for when the industry returns to pre-pandemic health.”

To claim a free $100 coupon to use against an Adfindr subscription and start finding local advertisers, click here.