Opinion

Outdoor makes an impact (beware of the drop)

It’s not every morning you start the day by handing over your mobile phone, taking off your watch, strapping on a hard hat and striding out into the wind on a narrow gantry above a terrifying drop.

So it made something of a change to be on top of Glebe Island Silos in Sydney in the name of outdoor advertising.  

The site is the one that owner Eye would like to lay claim to as the most high impact in Australia.

Thanks to yesterday’s launch of MOVE, they’ve got some data to back it up.

1.2m contacts per month, as they put it on a message that will be up for today only (and I suspect that they must have been very charming to persuade advertiser Colonial First State to lend the slot back to them).

It’s hard to tell the sheer scale from the image to the right. But it took us about three minutes to walk from one end of the catwalk at the bottom of the message to the other (while being careful not to look down).

The reason for the stunt is that for the first time, there’s a buying metric that will give a number for LTS, or Likelihood To See for any advertising billboard. MOVE means that you can finally make a reasonable guess at how many people might see any given advertising panel in about 60,000 metro locations across the country.

Because of its size and impact, Eye today focused its attention on its Glebe Island Silos site. (The reason we had to hand over our phones and watches, by the way, is that the silos store concrete and sugar. Sugar dust is, I learned, potentially explosive.)

Funnily enough, Eye is not claiming the site as the most seen in Australia. It actually has a site in Sydney’s George Street, near Town Hall station, which rates a bit higher, for instance. However, that’s in a more cluttered media environment. Instead, Eye is positioning Glebe Island Silos as “undeniably the largest iconic billboard of its kind in Australia”, as it says in its press release today.

On one level, this was just a stunt – take a bunch of trade journos out onto the roof of a building and give ’em a boat ride back to Darling Harbour afterwards and enjoy the coverage that inevitably follows.

However, it does point to what could be quite a major change in how outdoor media is planned and traded.

Effectively, outdoor was the last big medium without a currency.

With many outdoor media sales people never having worked in other media, adjusting to new types of conversations with media agencies is going to be a big challenge, as well as an opportunity to sell some more inventory.

And none of the outdoor owners have had access to rivals’ data. So the race is on among media agencies to come up with some answers about who is the biggest and the best as they’re the only people currently able to make those comparisons.

There will be, I suspect, more than one winner. While on a single day a site may score a higher potential LTS number, that may fall away if it becomes a conversation about monthly reach. If the same commuters see it daily, it’s going to fall behind posters at airports, for instance, where new people are travelling each day. Frequency, mind you, would be a different conversation altogether.

So more than one media owner will have bragging rights.

But more importantly for the medium, all those conversations will also be about putting together more effective media schedules.

If that results in an increased share for outdoor – and 4% to 6% is a big task – then the $10m spent on MOVE will start to seem a pretty worthwhile investment.

The work of the Outdoor Media Association in making this happen, should certainly make a few other trade bodies ask themselves if they can raise their game. We’ve got some baseline scores from our survey late last year on what Mumbrella readers think of them, and it will be interesting to repeat the process in a few months’ time.

Yesterday’s launch of MOVE – in front of an audience of about 300 senior people – was very smooth indeed. A roadshow follows over the next ten days or so. It all sets a standard for the other trade bodies to look to. It does raise the question of just what have the other bodies done to sell the medium to advertisers recently?

Arguably Free TV doesn’t need to – its focus has been in the more lucrative direction of successfully lobbying the government for that $250m rebate.

Other than what it puts out on their own stations, commercial radio’s message seems to be aimed more at creatives.

The Newspaper Works, meanwhile, is busy demonstrating that it’s not as easy as the OMA made it look to create a new currency with its current woes taking on Roy Morgan.

The big magazine players have fallen out leaving Magazine Publishers of Australia in what appears to be its death throes (Publishers Australia, the body mainly made up of the smaller players is on the up, but from a low base).

Indeed, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is the only other major trade body I can think of that’s got a sense of momentum about it.

Right now, everyone’s talking about outdoor – and it’s a while since that’s been the case.

Meanwhile, any advances on who’s got the most iconic billboard?

Tim Burrowes

  • (Declaration of interest – probably because of MOVE, most of Mumbrella’s advertisers seem to be outdoor companies at the moment.)

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