Out-Of-Home advertising and the twisting customer path to purchase

Rosie Merrell, marketing & communications director at Limited Space, says the recent OMC research lays a good foundation for others to explore the findings further and to obtain a deeper understanding of how the medium’s influence alters within individual environments…

The Outdoor Media Centre (OMC) announced its latest research study looking into the customer journey, conducted by ICM Research and On Device Research last week. It’s a complicated and broad topic to address, and one which is getting more complex by the day when factoring in new payment channels such as Google Wallet and Near Field Communication payment methods on mobile.

In a nutshell, the OMC found that Out-Of-Home advertising in its many varied forms not only increases positive brand perceptions, directly influencing the act of obtaining a product but also ranks as the second most influential medium when planning a purchase and sharing information afterwards. It further found that Out-Of-Home is the medium most strongly associated with mobile search, and outdoor-exposed audiences are more active on social media than the general population.

The customer journey is undoubtedly no longer directly travelling from a to b, and medialand is constantly striving to keep up, to be able to steer it mid-way. That Out-Of-Home in its many ambient and outdoor formats is able to both subtly engage consumers and direct the sales purchase is surely no great surprise – its ability to increase product awareness through scale and ubiquity is one of the medium’s greatest strengths.

But Out-Of-Home is a diverse medium and some formats and environments will have a greater effect and/ or more relevancy than others at various points of the purchasing cycle. Malls, for example, of course offer a great push towards the ‘obtaining’ phase, what with their proximity to retailers and an audience with a strong shopping intent, but the concentration of similar retailers naturally feeds into aiding the ‘planning’ phase too. However malls are also social environments where people are mixing with peers and word of mouth influence is likely since they are in a topical environment – consulting and advising friends and family about their brand experiences.

A recent study Limited Space commissioned demonstrated that exposure to an in-mall campaign running on our Adlift format increased positive brand perception by an average of 49%. The same study found that this group were 78% more inclined to endorse the brand among their peers, which would demonstrate the influence the outdoor campaign had on the ‘sharing’ stage of the cycle. In fact this increase in positive brand perception is a trend we’ve found across our numerous research studies now accounting for over 1,500 face to face interviews, and supports the OMC’s own findings on brand perception.

The key aspect of this new OMC research is touching on how Outdoor works hand in hand with other disciplines to complement the entire sales journey. After all, Out-Of-Home by its very nature is often all around consumers during their physical shopping journeys as the last medium they encounter before passing through the shop doors, while influencing and informing other physical journeys to feed into online search terms and internet shopping excursions. While often being seen – literally – as a medium which stands alone, Out-Of-Home is far more influential than that, especially as it is also the only medium which has a physical presence in shopping malls themselves – often it is the last chance to see before buying in the physical space.

In terms of integration, previous OMC research has even made the Outdoor connection with search more tangible, as it delivers more cost-effective search uplift than TV. Clearly a well-placed outdoor campaign is impactful enough to get people reaching for their mobiles. An online ad would prompt a search or direct click through to an associated site just as an ad placed in a mall can drive footfall into a store where the purchasing cycle is typically completed.

It makes sense then that if consumers have acted upon one or the other forms of advertising, they may be looking for an additional information channel to support their decision making. For those who wanted to find out more about a particular phone brand in a recent study, visiting a store was the next port of call for 100% of those who had already seen the campaign online and to then be exposed to an ad in a retail environment is only going to support this inclination by providing a reminder at the crucial time.

The OMC research is of course broad, championing the role Out-Of-Home plays in general at each of four purchasing phases, but it also lays a good foundation for others to now explore these findings further and to obtain a deeper understanding of how the medium’s influence alters within individual environments. Mall are of significant interest to me but I am also extremely curious to delve further into how the mediums complement one another at various stages of the purchasing cycle – particularly Out-Of-Home and online.

With the growth in the smartphone market, as well as interactivity in Out-Of-Home (via both static and digital formats) and its potential for integration with social media we are already experiencing a bridging of the divide between these media channels and it is one area where I think malls offer tremendous scope for brands to communicate with consumers throughout the purchasing cycle.