What Are the Different Types of Outdoor Advertising?

You have a million choices when it comes to marketing your products and services. When it comes to selecting advertising avenues, you may think digital, in-home, and web-based advertising are the only result-driven ways to promote your brand, but that is not the case.

What Are the Different Types of Outdoor Advertising?

You have a million choices when it comes to marketing your products and services. When it comes to selecting advertising avenues, you may think digital, in-home, and web-based advertising are the only result-driven ways to promote your brand, but that is not the case.

In fact, consumers become immune to many forms of in-home advertising and also have the ability to pass over or drown out messages they receive digitally.

As such, depending on factors like the target audience and advertising budget, you may benefit more by exploring outdoor advertising for your next marketing campaign.

What Is Outdoor Advertising?

What exactly, is outdoor advertising?

Outdoor advertising, or out of home advertising, refers to advertising that consumers are exposed to outside of their homes and offline.

Far from just large billboards, you see adorning the freeway, outdoor advertising is everywhere and has the ability to reach consumers in a more impactful way.

Consumers are unable to bypass stand-alone, outdoor visual ads like that can bypass television commercials, radio ads, or social media ads.

Unlike social media advertisements, outdoor advertising rarely ever suffers from market saturation. Market saturation refers to the callousness people develop toward marketing efforts that they are continually bombarded with too frequently.

Additionally, outdoor advertising is more affordable than ever.

Once a luxury of large companies and corporations, outdoor advertising is now something sole practitioners and small business owners can harness to drive up their brand awareness, sales and clientele.

Here are six different types of outdoor advertising and how you can use them to effectively market your business and brand.

Billboards

Synonymous with outdoor advertising is, of course, the billboard. Billboards are essentially large posters displayed in prominent locations.

Most famously, billboards line freeways, interstates, highways, and other heavily traveled arterials where consumers view them from their passing cars.

You can have static billboards like the kind you most likely see roadside, digital billboards like the ones that adorn the corners of Times Square in New York, or interactive. Interactive billboards are typically installed in places of high foot traffic and allow consumers to interact with them.

Billboards are a subtle, yet effective way to advertise. Almost every consumer is exposed to some form of outdoor advertising when they are in their vehicle. Most commonly, this will be a billboard.

Research has shown that more than 70% of consumers read the messages contained on billboards, making this form of outdoor advertising one of the most effective ways to reach target audiences.

Additionally, billboard advertising is more affordable than ever. Depending on your market, target audience, frequency, and reach, using outdoor advertising can even be more cost-effective than other forms of marketing. Also saving you money is the use of a reputable outdoor advertising marketplace like AdQuick.

Using a broker gives you easy access to all media owners who are bidding for your work. You know you’ll get the lowest price possible without the haggling and the headache of attempting to purchase media space on your own.

Street furniture

Advertisements attached to transit shelters, newsstands and kiosks, bike and scooter shares, urban panels, phone kiosks, city information pillars, street poles, and some in-store structures are all forms of street furniture advertising. This form of outdoor advertising places advertisements at eye-level with consumers.

Street furniture advertising is effective in reaching consumers through high frequency, low cost, and target market specific displays. Commuters, pedestrians, and motorists are all targets of this particular method of outdoor advertising.

Most popular in highly trafficked, urban areas, street furniture advertising has the ability to provide both broad and neighborhood-specific marketing coverage.

In addition, consumers typically view this type of advertising as an enhancement to their outdoor experience.

An aesthetically pleasing add not only draws their attention to your brand but complements their outdoor experience.

The availability of outdoor structures is virtually limitless and it can be difficult to determine the demographic upon which to focus your marketing campaign.

Using a company like AdQuick to help you determine the target audience and find the best possible locations and pricing for your campaign can help you execute it faster and for hundreds to thousands less than working directly with individual media owners.

Wallscapes

A unique form of outdoor advertising, wallscapes offer the ability to advertise in highly populated areas and in places where more conventional forms of advertising may not be available.

Wallscapes are usually placed on sides of buildings, parking garages, construction sites, and any other high profile building available. They can be painted or attached to the exterior of the structure itself.

In addition to offering eye-catching, dynamic advertising, wallscapes are generally thought of as a part of urban beautification and are seen by consumers as an outdoor enhancement. This positive influence ties to your brand in the mind of a consumer.

A huge benefit of these types of advertisements is their sometimes unusual shapes and sizes. Unlike a standard-sized billboard, these advertisements set your campaigns apart by being more noticeable and compelling. This allows wallscapes to be a powerful arrow in your marketing quiver.

While pricing for a wallscape may be slightly higher than other forms of outdoor advertising, the fact that they are likely to be shared on social media and other online platforms makes them incredibly effective in crossing over into in-home advertising without cost.

This can mean an even bigger impact for your marketing campaign and an even further reach than just the actual wallscape itself provides in the urban area in which it is placed.

Wildpostings

A more grassroots form of outdoor advertising, wildposting refers to numerous posters placed strategically throughout densely populated urban areas, usually in eye-level locations to garner maximum attention without the expenditure of a lot of funds.

This type of outdoor advertising has been extremely popular among up and coming artists in the entertainment industry as a means to spread the word about album releases, concerts, and appearances.

Pricing of wildposting style advertising varies depending on the volume of posters, location, and duration of the campaign.

Transit advertising and wraps

Placed in or on different forms of public transportation, transit advertising and wraps are aimed at marketing to commuters and consumers who not only use public transportation but also pass alongside it. Transit advertisements can be placed on the sides of busses, trains, subway rail cars, and taxis. They can also be ads placed inside bus and train stations, and ads placed inside these modes of transportation.

These advertisements provide high visibility for your campaigns while they are traveling from place to place and are positioned where consumers are not likely to ignore them, as they would a television or radio ad (i.e.: by simply turning the channel or station).

These ads have more of an impact on consumers because they are more closely studied and viewed with greater attention.

Point of sale displays

As you may imagine, point of sale display advertising involves all forms of advertising directed to a consumer at the point of a sale in a retail store. This can include things like screens, posters, banners, signs, floor stickers, window stickers, and posters, recorded audio messages, poles, banners, logos, and other more specific types of attention-grabbing devices like wobblers and kakemonos all placed in the till area of a store to grab the attention of the buying consumer and influence them to purchase.

These advertisements have been shown to influence consumers to not only make future purchases but also to make snap-decision purchases at the time of sale. As such, point of sale displays are largely thought of as highly effective for certain industries, especially industries focused on selling products via retail market channels.

With so many new options for outdoor, out of home advertising, finding the channel that is right for your brand and product can be challenging.

How can you know which method of outdoor advertising has been shown to be most effective for your industry?

And how can you know which media owners to work with to get the best locations and prices for your campaign ads?

Trying to determine how to make the most out of your marketing and particular campaign budget can also be a trying and arduous task. Using an out of home media  company can leave the guesswork out of making these difficult decisions.

Relying on their compiled research and data ensures you will make the correct decisions when it comes to media style, location, and reach.

It also means you have access to outdoor advertising outlets in every possible market and that the owners of those structures will bid for your advertisements, meaning you will always get the best possible pricing across the life of your campaign.

While it may seem that digital, or in-home advertising is the most popular way to market your products and services and ensure your brand receives maximum exposure, this is simply untrue.

More than 70% of our lives are spent outdoors, so it’s easy to see why outdoor advertising is effective in reaching the masses. Making the switch to advertising outdoors can mean reaching more people more effectively with your products and services.