Out-of-home (OOH) advertising, also called outdoor advertising, outdoor media, and out-of-home media, is advertising media usually experienced, as the name suggests, outside of the home.
This includes billboards, wallscapes, and posters seen while “on the go;”. Place-based media seen in places such as convenience stores, medical centers, shopping malls, and buildings are also part of OOH advertising.
So it can be divided into six main categories: billboards, streets, roads, highways, transit, and alternative.
But now, digital dominance has paved its way into OOH with Digital-out-of-home advertising (DOOH).
In this article, we’ll go through everything you should know about OOH and DOOH advertising and the significance of location data in these ad formats
According to the Indian Outdoor Advertising Association, the OOH industry is a 40 billion rupees industry as of 2019 and forms 5.5% of total advertising spends in India.
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ToggleEvolution of OOH in India
Back in the ’90s, the Indian advertising landscape was primarily dominated by print ads from brands like Parle, Amul, and Britannia, with OOH advertising not as prevalent as it was in the West.
As we entered the 2010s and beyond, OOH advertising began to gain traction in India.
Prominent brands across various sectors, such as MRF, Reebok, Airtel, and Vodafone, started adopting attractive OOH advertising strategies.
One notable achievement in OOH advertising in India was when Tata Docomo created the world’s largest signage in 2012. Refer to the below picture.
Looking ahead, the OOH advertising market in India is slated to grow at a CAGR of 12.5% from 2024 to 2032.
OOH to DOOH Advertising
DOOH is a programmatic advertisement format that uses digital displays to show your ads. This dynamic advertising nature of DOOH seems appealing to many brands.
Despite these benefits, DOOH is still relatively in a budding stage in India.
Dipankar Sanyal, an expert in the local advertising space believes that DOOH will take at least 3-4 years to gain a strong foothold in the Indian market.
So, if not yet, you might see DOOH in places like,
- Malls,
- Workspaces,
- Metros,
- Airports,
- Other major city intersections.
Here are 6 reasons why businesses use location data for OOH Advertising:
1. One platform providing businesses with 100% geographical coverage
Based on patterns around where the bulk of your consumers live, work, and commute between the two, location data research can help you identify the best spots for OOH Advertising. It can also help to determine the creation of effective audience profiles for on-the-go audiences and audiences observed in specific locations/areas.
2. Cost-efficient compared to traditional marketing methods
Organizations can target consumers at a granular, individual level with offline advertising based on their actual location using location-based marketing. Marketing teams can use location data to reach customers based on factors such as proximity to a store, upcoming events in their area, and more with the help of a single location intelligence platform. Using multiple marketing teams for different areas is the more traditional approach which can be expensive and time-consuming as well.
3. Gain a better understanding of the behavioral/ traffic patterns of the target audience.
If a brand decides they want to try OOH Advertising, they can analyze peak foot traffic time (based on different timings throughout the day) to decide on the best times to display the brand’s message. For example, integrating location data with third-party data sources like weather and traffic patterns can help to tailor content or creatives to show a relevant set of audiences. This can further be used to plan and manage in-store inventory, based on the audience profiles. OOH placement in airports, subway trains, shopping areas has generated a great deal of buzz with interactive creatives that tighten engagement with the brand.
4. Identify the top relevant spots to place billboards/ hoardings.
From discovery and purchase to engagement and retention, location-based marketing has been demonstrated to be beneficial. When done correctly, location-based marketing allows businesses to target specific client categories. With categories personalized offers, while also improving the customer experience.
Detailed analysis of potential customers in different localities helps determine their brand affinity, interests, preferences, income size, gender, commute patterns, home location, dwell time, etc. in the online and offline world. This can help identify locations for OOH placement, which is likely to create impact and increase conversions.
5. Fine-tune marketing efforts from anywhere.
Location data is the collation of data from multiple sources. In fact, GeoIQ has over 2000 granular variables that help to provide better decision-making, powerful targeting, and improved attribution. Location data uses information about a person or group of people’s movement or behavior from anywhere across the country. Location-based advertising and marketing can use this data to fine-tune marketing efforts. Moreover generate better engagement and get valuable insights into customer behavior.
6. One vendor for the whole country
Location data is proving to be beneficial for different industries. This trend continues with data-driven marketing becoming the new normal and has had a huge effect on the way that markers are using data to reach their goals. While traditional methods involve using ground teams for offline marketing in different locations. Whereas location data provides the big benefit of only needing one vendor to cover multiple locations around the country. The rise in the use of data has provided a much better and accurate understanding of how audiences behave in the offline world. Thus location data is allowing marketers to do incredible things, based on cold hard evidence.
Location Intelligence in Action: Identifying hoarding locations for the launch of a Ride Share App
The Client: A mobility startup looking to target the tech park employees for its ridesharing app
Target Population: Tech Park office employees in Pune who benefit from rideshare service. The idea was to target people from apartment complexes that were traveling towards a particular tech park so that this group of people can utilize the app to share a ride
There are several ways in which the business could precisely market this by means of OOH by identifying apartments and tech parks. However, this poses issues of getting permission to advertise within these private complexes. So by using location data, the easier process was to identify roads that the target customer base normally uses for travel to the office as it could reach a bigger audience with lesser interruptions. And high traffic points helped to understand where more visibility is available.
Here’s how location data helped identify precise street spots for hoardings-
GeoIQ created a simulation to understand the working population’s traffic routes towards the tech parks. The simulation was built using data around travel times, traffic intensity, road network, the density of residential clusters, the density of office clusters, nodes connecting primary and secondary and residential roads to simulate near actual traffic movement. Once these routes had been mapped, we analyzed the simulation to identify the top 100 road segments which would be optimal for maximum visibility to the target population.
Using the traffic routes that connect tech parks with residential areas. The top 100 spots viable were pinpointed for placing hoardings segmented based on area.
GeoIQ was able to capture 87% of the ideal marketing locations as verified by the client’s on-ground marketing team.
GeoIQ’s approach to OOH marketing is built for scale. This means that the same method can be used to get optimal marketing locations across all cities with minimal intervention
This location data analysis can be done without the need for another vendor. Also, without compromising on finding the best spots for advertising. And these spots prove to be much more beneficial than on-ground scouting as they are based on data and facts.
At GeoIQ, we specialize in providing geospatial data analytics and location intelligence services by collecting and collating data from various reliable sources to develop a better understanding of locations and make them available for businesses to use.
Visit our website to know more about us.