Talon’s Sophie Pemberton explores the role for full motion out-of-home alongside social
It’s not new news that out-of-home (OOH) is undergoing a revolution. Our landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years into a far more sophisticated and attractive channel that is capable of delivering much more varied content to mass audiences.
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is now able to reach nearly 60% of UK adults on a weekly basis and is continually gaining scale but too few advertisers are taking advantage of its most basic capabilities.
Whilst we’ve been going through a digital transformation, other channels have experienced change themselves but none so much as online video. Last year, the UK market video was worth a whopping £1.61bn, an increase from the previous year of 47% making it the fastest growing ad format in the industry.
The fact that nearly three-quarters of this spend went to mobile formats gives an indication as to the way in which video consumption, and consequently content, is changing.
Consumers have steadily migrated from channels which restrict access to content and have embraced those which allow flexibility and choice of what to watch and when to watch it.
They want information and entertainment quickly and more effortlessly than ever before and this, alongside increased competition for attention, has seen the content itself change.
There is still a place for long form, storytelling, crescendo building content in the right context but the sizable growth is coming from short form, immediately attention grabbing videos which the average UK adult spends nearly 2 ½ hours watching every week.
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They are increasingly sound-off clips placed within busy, social environments designed to reach mobile users on-the-go and capture their attention in less than a second. Online, this content often appears in outstream formats, predominantly within social media feeds. Offline, we believe that it should appear on digital out-of-home screens.
The quiet torment of walking past a dynamic, HD quality, full motion digital screen with a repurposed press ad on will be a thing of the past.
Full motion digital OOH content is proven to capture the attention of on-the-go audiences. It’s twice as likely to be seen and is 2.5 times more impactful than static copy and the ability to deliver video at scale is now possible.
There are over 15,000 screens across the UK which can host short, silent video with the brand-building power and impact that mobile video lacks.
We don’t believe that online video should be renounced by advertisers, far from it. However it is important to understand the role that it plays within the wider channel mix and that OOH can add a brand-building dimension which online, is more activation orientated.
Talon Insight studies show that OOH consistently performs brilliantly well at a brand building level but advertiser and agency planner perception on channel effectiveness is increasingly swayed towards those channels which deliver immediate answers. The recent ‘Re-evaluating Media’ report from Ebiquity and Radiocentre underpins this with dramatic effect and serves as a notion for planners to consider with more intent that ‘digital’ can mean more than just online.
Whilst reviewing existing research and case studies about online and OOH it became apparent that there has been little work done to understand the impact of video distribution across these two channels which have a clear symbiotic relationship. As such, we’ll be undertaking a study at Talon alongside Facebook to understand and quantify the additional impact of including DOOH alongside social media on a video plan.
Crucially, any media planner’s job is to get ads to the right people, the right number of times, in the right places. By considering DOOH as another channel in which to distribute video content, we believe we can better help advertisers achieve their campaign objectives.
TV and desktop were the first and second spaces for video content. Mobile is now the 3rd and has been driving the market growth but DOOH is where we think video will be seen in the future. It is the 4th Space.
Sophie Pemberton is strategy director, Talon
