Speaking the Language of OOH Advertising in 2022

As we kick off the new year, and people begin returning to their offices, the race to reclaim out-of-home (OOH) media space is on. Consumers are fatigued from two years of pandemic-related stressors and seeing a tsunami of digital ads. As the world opens back up and people begin spending more and more time outdoors, advertisers have an opportunity to deliver their messages in a new way that feels fresh to consumers. It also means media buyers have their work cut out for them.

Before embarking on your next OOH media buys, it’s time to brush up on the lingo of OOH advertising and go over a few things to keep in mind when booking your next OOH campaigns:

Beginner-Level OOH Lingo:

• 30-sheet & 8-sheet Billboards: When people picture billboards, it’s often of large posters on the side of a building or interstate. But billboards actually come in a variety of styles that are aimed to target different messages and customers. In print or digital form, the smaller 30- and 8-sheet billboards are ideal for advertisers with smaller budgets who are looking for decent coverage in a targeted area or demographic. Think heavily traveled and small, non-residential streets alike.
• Eco-Flex Vinyl: Diving further into billboard lingo, these are environmentally friendly, recyclable vinyl posters that can be attached as a single sheet to structures of all shapes and sizes.
• Glamour Shot: No, we’re not talking the soft-light, big-hair photography of the ’90s. This term has been adopted to describe snapping a beauty shot of an ad. On photo sheets (also known as ride sheets or photoliths) you’ll see glamour and approach shots that depict an ad’s quality and location.
• POPs: Proof-of-performance – more commonly known as POPs – are sent to advertisers within hours of their ad going up. In the past you might have received a photo of your billboard or other display ad. Today, companies have the capability to dispatch drone pilots to collect fly-bys of locations and POPs.
• Ride Along: A.K.A, a "market ride, this is an actual spin around town to view billboard locations. Of course, with AdQuick's interactive map-based platform, the ride along of today can be an entirely virtual experience.
• Spectacular Billboards: These are the grander OOH displays you’ll see along every U.S. highway and in dense commercial areas, from Times Square to the Sunset Strip. Super-sized and unique in scope, these are a powerful, dominant advertising tool designed to captivate viewers.

• Street Furniture: Picture street-level ads on transit shelters, bike share stations, information kiosks and the like that catch the attention of pedestrians, riders and drivers where they live, work, commute, and shop.

• Tri-Vision Billboards: For cost-effective, eye-catching advertisements in high-traffic areas, look to these rotating, three-message billboard signs to reveal your brand and make a big impact.
• Wild Posting: Wild posting is a guerrilla-like style of marketing that you may know by its other names: fly posting, bill postings, or wheat pasting. It’s an effective, and inexpensive, way to strategically bring a brand or message to high-traffic areas.

Advanced OOH Lingo:

• Attribution Analysis: Who gets credit for a customer conversion? Attribution analysis (of both online and offline events) provides a framework for determining which touchpoints or marketing channels get credited with a view, sale, or lead.
• Audience Reach Measurement: While easier to quantify in the digital ad realm, there are proven, reliable methods of calculating OOH advertising’s audience reach. With billboard, transit, street furniture and wallscape advertisements, metrics are typically measured by traffic counts that quantify the number of people passing a given OOH advertising campaign.
• Behavioral Targeting: People are creatures of habit. We follow certain patterns in our day-to-day lives. Utilizing data built off of people’s movement patterns, behavioral targeting allows you to understand not only a consumer’s interests, but also their in-market buying behavior.
• Causal Impact Analysis: Think of causal impact analysis as a bird’s eye view evaluation of an advertising campaign’s real-world impact that uses a time series analysis — based on a number of comparable control groups or markets — to forecast a series of baseline values.
• Dwell-time: This term references how long people are near an out-of-home with the potential to view it. Certain OOH ad formats – like transit ads, bus shelters, and place-based ads – tend to have higher dwell times.
• Geo-Fencing: This refers to setting a virtual boundary around a geographical point or area in which you want to show ads to a nearby audience. Companies like AdQuick make it possible to define custom polygon geofences in order to easily identify OOH inventory that fits your geographic ad buying criteria – such as ads that fall within your delivery zones.  
• Halo Effect: It is well-known that OOH boosts the effectiveness of your other marketing channels.  This is often referred to as the “halo effect” – the indirect, positive impact of your OOH campaigns on the performance of your other media channels.  
• Lift Studies: These are advertising follow up studies that gauge your consumer-brand interaction. Simply put, they measure the effectiveness of a campaign. Integrating targeted lift analysis can help you better understand your true ROI.
• OOH Retargeting: With OOH retargeting, the convergence of mobile and OOH advertising allows you to use real-time exposure data from your ad campaigns to retarget your customers in other marketing channels.
• Programmatic Ad Buying: Simply put, this is technology that automates the ad-buying process, from rate negotiation and campaign set up to optimizations and actualizations. One of the primary advertising buying tools available is a DSP (or Demand Side Platform) that places digital OOH inventory at your fingertips and allows you to launch campaigns in minutes while viewing impressions, projected pacing, and costs in real-time.

Whether you’re a seasoned media buyer or new to the field, OOH media can up-level your advertising efforts. Want to learn more about unleashing the power of OOH advertising?  AdQuick can help! Schedule a strategy session with one of our OOH experts today.

Note: a version of this article originally ran in Smartbrief.