‘No-one understands how out-of-home works’
Eric Faulkner, chairman of media consultancy Madclarity, explains what marketers are getting wrong about effective out-of-home advertising.
I was tidying up some texts yesterday, and one of them grabbed my attention.
It was a text exchange with the marvellous Jenni Dill, Arnott’s CMO. I had thanked her for the wisdom and insight she had shared in a session she’d run for our team at Madclarity. Jenni’s response was: “Thanks. It’s just common sense, really.”
It got me thinking. A couple of weeks ago, Mutinex wrote an article in the trade press, with the revolutionary discovery that maybe the focus on short-term ROI hadn’t proved to be as successful as had been hoped. You would have thought that experienced marketers would have had the common sense to understand that putting most of their advertising eggs in the short-term sales bucket would damage their longer-term brand strength and hence their sales.
But common sense is uncommon.
Eric Faulkner
A week later, I read another ‘native’ piece about System 1’s analysis of a number of out of home ads. It said that 70% were crap. Well, System 1’s Andrew Tindal expressed it more politely:
“No-one understands how out of home works,” he says, “particularly the critical need to land the brand within two seconds.”
We agree. It should be common sense.
Out of home (OOH) advertising is growing—not because of oxymoronic claims of programmatic ‘mass hyper-targeting,’ but because it’s one of the few remaining broadcast advertising channels. And it is broadcast channels, not one-to-one channels, that build brands.
At Madclarity, we’ve been running workshops and advising our clients about this for a while now. We help our clients climb out of their ‘marketing world’ and into the ‘real world,’ in which advertising is not the centre of the universe for everyone walking or driving past a bus stop site.
It’s a battle. Most clients and their agencies think they are creating a magazine ad, not something that sits on the side of the road. So they are packed with information that is never seen by anyone outside the marketer’s office.
We thought it was ‘common sense’ to understand that people walked and drove past outdoor sites, so advertisers had only a second or two to get the message across. Therefore, the message needed to be simple, clear, and short, with dominant branding.
But that must be uncommon sense. Otherwise, most people would be getting it right. Wouldn’t they?
Maybe having a ‘system’ will help creative agencies and their clients get out-of-home right. After all, we’re supposed to be living in a data-driven world now. Maybe the computer will tell us how to do it.
Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to have a brand manager and a copywriter with uncommon sense.
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Funnily enough the social media scroll gets less attention than a OOH
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