During the Pandemic, the world was essentially put on hold, and OOH advertising got put on hold with it, with OOH Advertising expenditures dropping some 30% during that period.
Thankfully, those days are now behind us, and OOH Advertising has come roaring back to the fore. In fact, spending in the OOH ad sphere is stronger and more robust now than it was in the days before the pandemic.
It’s tempting to look at the trend and simply conclude that the current surge in Advertising spending is due mostly to the demand that was pent up during the Pandemic, but a deeper look at the data and the trends surrounding it reveals that there’s more going on than just that.
The simple truth is, over the past year and a half, there have been a whole range of spectacular technological innovations that have been taking Advertising to dizzying heights. Today’s billboard ads can do things that the billboards of just a couple years ago couldn’t even dream. Here are just a few cutting-edge examples to inspire your next ad campaign and guide your thinking:
- Coca Cola has a brilliant ad that blurs the line between VR and the real world. Viewers watch a painted figure grab a digital coke and toss it down a digital pipe to an actual vending machine that vends a real coke for an onlooker.
- British Airways has a billboard that pairs a digital child with its real time flight tracking data, allowing the digital child to look up at a plane flying overhead, point to it, and have the verbiage “Look, it’s flight number (whatever the actual flight number is) from (whatever the actual city it came from is).” That’s staggering.
- The Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, MI “gamified” a recent billboard ad campaign, encouraging players to scour the city and photo document all the billboards showing nonstop flights. Collect the full set and send it into the company for a chance to win fantastic prizes, which instantly turned their billboards into destinations in their own right.
- The explosion of low-cost drones has led to a resurgence of “skyvertising.”
And more!
The bottom line is that increasingly, companies are finding new and inventive ways to leverage Big Data and combine real time tracking and metrics with AR/VR assets to create immersive, interactive experiences that are spreading far beyond the billboards themselves.
When users see such an ad, they’ll invariably make a video of it and share it on social media, which increases the advertiser’s exposure organically, allowing you to reach tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise may not have seen your offering.
Perhaps the best news of all is that you don’t need an advertising budget that’s measured in millions of dollars to take advantage of most of these innovations. The price of the tech has been steadily dropping, meaning that even smaller firms with more modest advertising budgets can take advantage of the OOH Advertising Renaissance. Exciting times indeed!
This is the kind of thing we do, so if you’re struggling to come up with a killer idea for your next ad campaign, we can help with that. Just give our office a call or visit us on the web and tell us a bit about your business. We’d be thrilled to help you come up with an idea that will dazzle both you and your customers.
Even better, we can help you maximize your ad spend ROI by ensuring that your billboard ads are placed in optimal locations, given the business you’re in. The bottom line is, if you’re not advertising where your customers and potential customers are, then the money you’re spending on those ads isn’t doing you any good. We’re happy to help with that too. You can reach us at 770-391-8528.