With the new year underway, we take a look at what’s hot and what’s not in the world of out-of-home. This is an excerpt from the special edition report, The Advertiser’s Playbook for OOH in 2023, giving marketers the inside track of all things out-of-home .

What's Hot: The Biggest Trends for DOOH in 2023

Data-Driven Creatives

Finally, out-of-home has been pushed into the data-driven era, and the gap between creative and media is being bridged even further. Dynamic creative – widely adopted by other digital channels, and now available in digital out-of-home (DOOH) – is a type of advertising that uses data to inform specific elements within an individual advertising creative asset. DOOH is a smart advertising channel through which advertisers can launch personalized campaigns based on an array of data sets and also switch out creative messaging in real time.

Campaigns using dynamic creative will automatically pull in components of the ad from a real-time data feed – for example, in a recent DOOH initiative for the NBA, the organization integrated localized hometown match ups, game day countdowns and real-time live scoring to maximize fan engagement and cultural resonance. 

Mobile Extensions

By pairing DOOH with mobile media, brands and retailers can re-engage consumers exposed to the DOOH campaign on their mobile devices. This allows brands to amplify campaign impact or drive them towards a more specific call-to-action, ensuring their messaging remains top-of-mind and actionable throughout a consumer’s busy day.

For instance, Bounce Curl, a leading online haircare brand, used mobile extensions to add a strategic retargeting layer to their DOOH campaign, enabling the brand to re-engage consumers who were exposed to the campaign on their mobile devices at a later time. The cross-screen campaign resulted in impressive results for Bounce Curl, including a 47% lift in brand awareness, 21% lift in consideration, and 18% lift in purchase intent. 

Smart Measurement

While marketers previously used the mass medium as an awareness driver, today the world’s leading brands are using DOOH to drive KPIs across the entire funnel – including brand health, foot traffic, web activity, online conversions and sales lift. Many marketers are already leveraging these offerings from trusted industry partners in their digital channels; now, DOOH joins the omnichannel mix, giving marketers consistent methodologies across media and a means to proving out the ROI of their once-traditional marketing strategies. 

Below are a few client client success stories: 

• Insperity conducted a brand lift study to assess health metrics across the entire consideration journey, including awareness, familiarity and intent. 
• Tasmania Tourism used a foot traffic study to measure the increase in destination visitors based on DOOH exposure. 
• Betterment, a financial advisory campaign, used online conversion tracking to determine how their DOOH campaign influenced website activity. 
• This major OTC company conducted a sales lift study to calculate the increase in actual sales from activating DOOH media. 

What's Not: DOOH Trends That Should Be Left Behind

Communications Overload

Marketers often feel pressured to pack a lot of information into one creative execution. But in OOH, the simpler the message, often the better the impact. A short, interesting, eye-catching brand message can make a lasting impression. Don’t try to overcomplicate things and don’t overdo it. Here are some helpful hints for maximizing your DOOH creative.

Out-of-Home in Isolation

As DOOH is a powerful one-to-many broadcast medium, there’s a tendency for marketers to place their bets in OOH for one-off brand awareness executions. This is a mistake — OOH is a key connection point between the physical and digital worlds. Brands need to be thinking about how to combine digital tactics, like mobile and first-party data, with OOH to create an omnichannel strategy that ensures they're reaching potential customers at every stage of their journey.

Long Term Commitments

While most traditional OOH requires long-term commitments, advertisers are increasingly looking for platforms which can offer rapid activation capabilities with robust flexibility. Manual booking processes are out while the ability to upload assets electronically and schedule, optimize or pause campaigns in just minutes based on real-world circumstances, is in. 

What else does the future hold for out-of-home? Where will marketers be placing their bets? And how can DOOH play a unique and important role in media strategies? To view the full report, check out The Advertiser’s Playbook for OOH in 2023.