Reaching Distributed Audiences with Out of Home

By Chris Grosso, Chief Operating Officer of Intersection

If the audience doesn’t come to ads, the ads need to go to the audience.

That must become the mantra for marketers as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to change the routine for urban dwellers in major U.S. cities. As more businesses reopen, people are spending time out of home in their local neighborhoods and advertising needs to find its way there as well.

With audiences fragmented, distributed Out of Home (OOH) media — in the form of street furniture (i.e., kiosks, urban panels, and bus shelters) and bus exteriors — will be the best way to send marketing messages deep into the neighborhoods of major cities and right up to the points of sale, reaching audiences and recapturing the momentum OOH had up until March 2020.

Out of Home advertising was on a tear before the pandemic (up 7.5% in 2019), for good reason. OOH is a cost effective way to reach mass audiences, with important advantages over digital in terms of brand safety, viewability, and location-targeting. And recent advancements in technology and data have also made OOH much more measurable. The availability of robust data sets and proven methodologies now provide statistical confidence and actionable results for advertisers, on par with digital.

Moreover, Out of Home has maintained its massive reach while traditional alternatives like newspapers lost readers, local TV audiences fragmented, and local digital media startups from Patch to NextDoor struggled to build significant reach. Out of Home now stands alone as the best media to reach local audiences at scale.

The lockdown certainly slowed OOH down. Across all advertising, even online, advertisers paused campaigns during Q2. And for the first time, the audience in big city centers declined. In Times Square, foot traffic was down 88% in May. In the meantime, the way people travel has also changed, as subway ridership is still at 20% of pre-pandemic levels in New York City even as Phase 2 reopening begins.

Now, as cities reopen, people are out and about, but behaviors are changing. People are still not commuting to city centers as they continue to work from home, but they are shopping at the neighborhood store, eating at a local restaurant, and checking out the nearest park.

For instance, Apple’s mobility data shows pedestrian direction searches are 30% higher than pre-COVID levels as of June 13th, after dropping close to 70% less than normal in mid April. Walking is up 76% in New York City (even before Phase 2), 114% in San Francisco, and 82% in Chicago off their lows in early April.

Even though people aren’t commuting to their offices or congregating at city center tourist hubs, they are traveling out of home, even in New York City. As of June 19th, Cuebiq’s mobility index shows overall movement at nearly 90% where they were at the same time last year in New York City’s 4 outer boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island), while Manhattan is at 76%. Other cities are even closer to normal levels of mobility.

Audiences are back, but they are more fragmented across neighborhoods. Even after cities return to normal, it is likely that many companies will allow their employees to work outside the office, whether at home or in a coffee shop, for a few days per week.

The trick for marketers to re-aggregate a fragmented audience (in any media) is to add more placements at efficient costs, ideally in the neighborhoods where the people are. In OOH, that means using street furniture and buses. The good news is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of street furniture, such as kiosks, urban panels, and bus shelters, in most major cities.

In New York, LinkNYC has more than 1,800 kiosks, each with two digital advertising screens. The ad network covers over 3,250 city blocks and intersects the city’s most trafficked streets and avenues. A campaign on LinkNYC can easily reach where people are today, instead of waiting for them to start congregating in Times Square or get on the subway. Other powerful networks include urban panels on the streets of Chicago and bus shelters in Philadelphia, both of which can deliver similar results.

The other option to deliver marketing messages into neighborhoods is the exterior of the buses. Buses are moving billboards that traverse the city, and remain a cost effective way to blanket multiple neighborhoods with messaging. Even with lower ridership, bus schedules remain robust as transit authorities must maintain routes for essential workers and support social distancing.

A well designed bus campaign in major cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Dallas can easily cover 90% of the market quickly, with high impact. People out shopping, exercising, or eating outside will see the buses and their exterior ads.

While the mix of how marketers use OOH will change during and after the pandemic, it still remains the best way to generate a mass audience in a local market. The key will be following the audience, and reaching them where they are with a message as broad and powerful as the display it’s on.

To learn more about the best way to reach local audiences, contact us.