With so much attention going to social and mobile marketing, it is easy to forget that traditional marketing media – print, radio, TV, billboard etc – is not exactly dead. I am continuing a series on how those channels are evolving, surviving and thriving. The Economist reports on the continued attractiveness of outdoor advertising:
"Outdoor (or what adepts call “out of home”) advertising “is one of the few traditional media channels forecast to grow over the next few years,” says Anastasia Kourovskaia of Millward Brown Optimor, a consultancy. America’s $6.5 billion market grew by more than 4% last year and is expected to top that rate in 2013. Global spending is rising faster. People may fast-forward through television ads and dispense with newspapers, but they still drive and take the train, where outdoor messengers can get to them.
Much of the growth comes from a switch away from paper and neon to digital billboards and posters, which makes signage almost sexy. Now advertisers can vary images by time of day (commuters long for cappuccinos on their way into work, and decide on the way home what to watch on television). Tim Bleakley of Ocean Outdoor, which shows big ads in prime British locations, boasts that when Usain Bolt won the 100-metre race in last summer’s Olympics, Strongbow, a cidermaker, hoisted a celebratory advert within 15 minutes.
Screens are being fitted with cameras to determine the age and sex of people drawn to them and tailor messages accordingly. With WiFi they can zing ads to the mobile phones of passersby. Soon shoppers may buy things by touching phones to digital displays."
And Ad Age reports on the most expensive outdoor advertising space in the world at $ 4 million a year! The video below shows some of the creative billboards in Times Square of some of the best known brands
"Adland execs say that Times Square commands the highest prices for billboards in the world, but marketers are still paying up -- eager to take advantage of both the heavy foot traffic in the area and the high-profile visibility offered by ABC's annual special "New Year's Rockin Eve," which is watched by millions. .. It's worth noting that that's just the price to buy the media; it doesn't include the ever-increasing cost to create custom digital signage that's weatherproof, which can cost several million in and of itself."
Comments