Global announced today the launch of Billboards by Global, a trade marketing initiative that encourages advertisers to rethink the role of billboards in modern media campaigns.
Revealed at the company’s outdoor Upfronts event, the campaign is built around three pillars: scale, creativity, and data and outcomes.
Alongside the campaign, Global unveiled two planning and measurement tools: Access All Audiences for Billboards, and Outcomes, both of which are powered by its insight and data platform Global:IQ.
Mike Gordon, chief commercial officer at Global, said the company recognises there is “a growing demand from brands looking for a simple, high-impact way to reach mass audiences”, and wants to put “fresh momentum” behind the OOH sector.
Speaking at the event, Simon Pitts, group CEO, noted that OOH is only included in 5% of media plans, despite its ability to build brands, adding that the company wants the channel to be “viewed differently”.
Sarah Gale, Global’s director of insight, data and outcomes, said the tools being launched alongside the campaign were designed to address OOH’s longstanding measurement challenge.
Access All Audiences for Billboards uses Global’s audience and location data to help advertisers identify target audiences, optimise locations and plan campaigns with more precision.
Gale said it would let advertisers “target any audience with confidence” and that “smarter planning drives better outcomes”.
The second tool, Outcomes, is designed to measure campaign effectiveness and, according to Gale, “explains the why behind your results”.
As part of the launch, Global ran a full-funnel Outcomes measurement pilot for 45 key advertisers. Global’s insight, data and outcomes team modelled three years of media and outcomes data, including each brand’s recent outdoor campaigns, and found that when billboards were included in a campaign, there was an average 2.4-times uplift in brand-building impact compared to when they were absent from the media plan.
For the creativity pillar, Anto Chioccarelli, director of creative outdoor at Global, advocated for its commercial impact. She referenced a McKinsey & Company study that found highly creative campaigns are 11 times more likely to deliver above-average organic revenue growth.
“So when we invest in creativity, we are not just creating better campaigns. We are creating better business outcomes,” she said.
As a result of this commitment to creativity, Global has expanded its partnership with D&AD to include sponsorship of the Yellow Pencil for the Outdoor Category and supporting the ‘Creativity: Dead or Alive?’ D&AD x Uncommon campaign.
In light of the campaign, Nils Leonard, founder of Uncommon, spoke via a pre-recorded video at the upfronts, emphasising how OOH provides an “opportunity to matter”.
“How dare we waste that opportunity by being invisible, or being normal, or being familiar,” he said. “The new rules of posters are they have to bang. They’re a genuine chance for you to appear.”
The campaign’s third pillar, scale, stems from Global’s nationwide inventory, which includes more than 4,500 48-sheet frames. The company said the network reaches 43.1m people a fortnight, equivalent to 77.5% of the UK population.
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