The UK is the most innovative market in terms of creativity, technology, research and application of digital out-of-home advertising. That’s why we at Pikasso were very enthusiastic to host a conference with Mike Baker, a recognized expert in the Out-Of-Home field, with more than 25 years of experience in the sector. Mr. Baker had served as CEO of the Outdoor Media Centre, the UK’s promotional body for out of home advertising for four years.
The event, ‘Breakfast With Mike Baker’, took place in Beirut on the 21st of April and in Amman the following day, both at Four Seasons Hotel.
The topic of the presentation was ‘The Key Dynamics of the UK OOH Market’, and those attended included executives from advertiser clients, creative and media agencies. .
Mike attributed the success of the OOH sector in the UK to heavy investment by the media owners and confidence in the medium across a wide variety of categories.
According to Nielsen, 49 of the top 50 UK’s biggest advertisers used outdoor in 2014, and multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Samsung, Warner Bros, American Express, KFC and Diageo spent a quarter or more of their budgets on OOH.
Digital screens now contribute 27% of total UK OOH revenue – second only to China. The footprint of digital has expanded to cities such as Newcastle, Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh. What’s more, with the high penetration of smartphones, consumers can interact with sites in a rich variety of ways – texting, tweeting, uploading content, downloading vouchers, sharing location data, making contactless payments and so on.
Examples shown included Walkers (Twitter and vending), Microsoft Windows phone (user generated content) Despicable Me 2 (texting and social media). The example of Harper Collins showed how even analogue sites can be digitized by means of NFC chips and the smartphone.
Mike talked of the growing importance of mall advertising and the seamless integration of advertising sites into the fabric of the mall environment, leading to better visual displays and revenues that were significantly higher than for equivalent sites elsewhere – at the roadside or in transport locations.
In the audience research section, Mike went on to explain the new audience research into the Active Space. This used a world-first combination of eye tracking and skin conductance measures, recording both for 140 hours in 20 respondents.
The conclusion of the research, carried out by Cog Research, was that people had on average 33% higher levels of alertness out of home than in home across a range of activities undertaken. The exception was looking after small children, where levels were high for both in and out of home.
In another research initiative, The Last Window of Influence, 88% of shoppers could recall seeing OOH advertising in the last half hour before shopping. Route research confirmed that consumers in urban areas were exposed to more than twice as many OOH advertising impressions compared to those outside cities.
The final key theme was effectiveness. Mike referenced a large scale study by Les Binet of DDB, called The Long and Short of Advertising, which scrutinized the learnings of 700 brands and a thousand UK case studies.
Binet had concluded that the optimum marketing and media mix should include short term sales activation but be tipped more towards long term branding, and he noted that outdoor’s branding power were similar to that of television. The results of the Cannes Effectiveness Lions 2014 awards seemed to confirm this, with 92% of shortlisted and winning entries having utilized OOH, second only to social media which was used in all 2014 winning entries.