What is out-of-home (OOH) advertising?

While we are all overly familiar with the advertising we come across daily in our homes, such as TV ads, internet banners and popups, and mailers, there is an entirely different side to the same marketing coin. Out-of-home (OOH) advertising encompasses everything we encounter in our travels beyond our own four walls, including:

Outdoor banners
In-store signage
Window graphics
Vehicle wraps
Backlit displays
Digital signage
Standoff displays
Flags
Smart signage
Environmental graphics

Any marketing we come across as we interact with the outside world can fall under the category of OOH advertising. Billboards are perhaps the most readily pictured example. Everyone can remember a lot of billboards they’ve seen over their years of driving through urban and rural settings. Billboards are everywhere, and the best are ones that are easy to see and understand while moving at highway speeds, while offering an eye-catching graphic and a simple call to action. While billboards are excellent forms of OOH advertising, there are a hundred other types of OOH ads, and you’ve likely seen millions of examples in your lifetime. SpeedPro printers are experts at helping you take your designs to the next level and apply them as large format projects that will get you results.

The Effectiveness of OOH Advertising

OOH advertising has been proven to work extremely well over the years. Much of this effectiveness is driven by behavioral and psychological factors. People are generally out and about for specific reasons, whether that is to shop for groceries, see a movie, eat at a restaurant or buy a new television set. Someone goes to a destination with the full expectation that they will come back home having satisfied their goals. However, once at a given destination, a consumer is mentally open to learning about similar choices related to those goals. Thus, Joe Shopper may be browsing the latest iPhone models but is readily available to also read a poster ad for a new gaming console or watch a video advertisement on a digital sign for office furniture. To put this bluntly, OOH advertising takes full advantage of marketers having captive, receptive and highly targeted audiences for their products.

OOH advertising’s value is backed up by research from many sides. A recent study by Neilsen showed that OOH advertising is actually the most effective advertising mode at driving online search. Westmount has shown that OOH ads on a business’ site are overall the biggest ROI of any advertising form, averaging less than one and a half cents per impression. The Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America’s data shows that, among other impressive stats, nearly 60 percent of people who see an outdoor ad perform a web search (usually mobile) after seeing it, and a whopping 70 percent of people confirm that OOH ads actually influence them to purchase. In addition, in the United States alone, OOH advertising results in an astonishing 101 billion impressions every week!

How is OOH advertising best applied?

The concept of environmental, or experiential, graphic design is not extremely new, but it is now more important than ever as a way to differentiate how a consumer encounters your advertising. Gensler Research Institute released a study which shows that consumers share experiences that involve memorable environmental graphic design up to ten times more often. Those same people also tended to rate their experiences in well-designed venues two times higher than experiences in places considered poorly designed.

The Gensler Institute goes on to define various “experience modes” that set the stage for a consumer’s interaction:

Task — guest is focused on a singular goal (conference center, workplace).
Social — guests are out enjoying a good time with friends or family (restaurant, club).
Discovery — guests are exploring and actively seeking new things (mall, museum).
Entertainment — guests are engaging in a fun audience-based activity (concert, movies, sporting event).
Aspiration — guests are trying to better themselves in some way (fitness center, classroom).

The effectiveness of a given experience mode is then determined by how well a marketer applies the following six factors:

Beauty — how pleasant on the eyes is your environment?
Clarity — how easy is it for your guests to grasp what you want to communicate?
Novelty — how unique is the experience you are giving the guest?
Welcoming — how comforting (and comfortable) is your space for guests of all types?
Authenticity — how honestly does your space speak to your brand’s mission?
Inspiration — how well does your space motivate guests to take “the next step,” whatever that may be?

With the right mix of large format graphics to complement your space, and your goals as a marketer, you can focus your efforts to any of the given experience modes and then use the many various products SpeedPro offers to address each of the Gensler Research Institute’s factors. SpeedPro’s huge catalog of signage options (banners, posters, digital and smart), as well as environmental graphic selections (decals, wall and floor graphics, standees and 3D displays) unlock endless combinations for you to test.

SpeedPro Cincinnati North

Downtown Cincinnati has the energy you find throughout this Midwest city known for Skyline Chili and the Reds baseball team. In addition to showing their devotion to local food and athletes, Cincinnati residents like supporting local businesses and entrepreneurs. Many industries have become competitive, and you need a way to make your company stand apart from the rest.

We Offer Large-Format Printing in Cincinnati

People may not notice a radio or TV ad that plays incessantly in the background. But they’re bound to pay attention when a fleet of delivery vans with full, partial or decal vehicle wraps zip throughout Cincinnati. You probably wonder what company sponsored the neat stunt and what they do. You may find yourself Googling the business when you get home. This is the impact of large-format printing and marketing.