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Adshel says marketers aren’t using digital outdoor to ‘capacity’ claiming new study shows contextual ads are ‘19% more effective’

Screen Shot 2015-09-16 at 4.54.56 PMOut of home advertising company Adshel has said clients are still not using the abilities of digital outdoor ads to their full potential, pointing to the results of a study the company has recently completed.

Adshel will roll out a new national outdoor digital network Adshel Live, on October 5 with 270 digital screens across Australia’s major metropolitan cities.

It has now released research, carried out in conjunction with neuroscience firm Neuro-Insight, claiming adverts placed with contextual relevance are 19 per cent more effective than those which are not.

Adshel claimed the results quantify the effectiveness of contextual out of home placements for the first time, with the results to be used to convince media agencies and clients of their worth.

Adshel head of marketing, Charlotte Valente, said the launch last year of digital ads on Sydney trains demonstrated how marketers were failing to use the platform anywhere near its full potential.

“Not one of our launch clients last year used the screen to its digital capacity. Every single advertiser basically put poster creatives on a digital screen,” she said. “I don’t think we educated them enough.”

While CMO’s have since become more savvy, Valente said they, and their agencies, have been unclear just how much more effective out of home adverts, when placed in the right environment, can be.

“A number means a lot of difference,” she said. “This research has proven it is 19 per cent more effective which is a powerful number for agencies to take to their clients and educate them on the effectiveness.

“It is logical and common sense [to run contextual ads] but putting a number to it was something we had to do in order to show agencies and clients just how effective it can be and how much more cut through they can get.”

The experiment conducted by Neuro-Insight monitored the brain activity of consumers on two 15-minute commutes in Melbourne, one in the morning and the other at night.  They saw the same adverts on tram platforms during each journey.

Neuro-Insight sales and marketing director, Peter Pynta, said adverts seen by the consumer in the right environment – such as an advert for vodka at night rather than early morning – generated an increase in visual attention, emotional intensity and engagement.

That in turn leads to “greater memory encoding”, he said.

“Our work is quite often concerned with quantifying what everyone says is obvious and the results were pleasing for us to see. Neuro should make sense. After all, it’s what consumers are thinking and responding to. But context is one of those aspects of media placement that has been hard to quantify.

“These context effects are quite significant and it’s all part of the march to more accountability and measurement.

“There are really no excuses now if a CMO says ‘I need to cut through the clutter and I’ve got to find a way to out smart my competitors’. Here is one of those ways you can find an advantage”.

Valente said positioning ads against relevant programs has been done on TV for a long time but from an out of home perspective “CMOs have never really been educated that you can do this”.

“It is quite revolutionary in the sense that brands have all this data on their customer but it is not being used,” Valente added.

The launch of Adshel Live will help to address the issue, she said.

Steve Jones

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