Media’s unicorn: The year that was for out-of-home
As 2024 comes to an end, it is clear the out-of-home industry is leading the way in many areas of media innovation. Sara Lappage, chief operating officer at QMS, takes a look back at some of its biggest highlights from the year.
Despite tough economic conditions, weakened consumer spending and flexible advertising markets, the out-of-home industry (OOH) didn’t slow down this year.
Instead, it sped up by offering something few others can: the optimal blend of digital innovation, consolidated and scaled audience reach and measurable campaign outcomes to prove the channel’s effectiveness and ROI to advertisers.
It was also a year that saw the fusion of technology and digital capability supercharge campaign creativity. There was an inherent uptick in creative innovation, from 3DOOH and full motion activations that captured the public’s imagination, to campaigns that leveraged real-time data for dynamic storytelling such as the QMS digital screen network for the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics – with brands that intelligently utilised these dimensions of DOOH, seeing some Olympic sized wins.
In 2024, out of home was finally welcomed into the attention economy, with attention cementing itself as a key metric for planning and buying as the industry looks beyond legacy metrics that focus too much on eyeballs alone.
It’s blindingly obvious that OOH works extremely well though this will less true in coming years as every surface on earth is turned into a billboard.
Marketers should be asking themselves what else have they dismissed because they didn’t have the right “data”.