Gideon Adey, audience activation director at Kinetic, believes that a sweet spot is emerging at the intersection of mobile and OOH. Here he reflects on the opportunities this presents for brand marketers.

As the recent Advertising Association/WARC Expenditure report revealed, digital media is dominating the advertising industry, now accounting for over half of total UK ad spend. As part of that, Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) is one of the fastest growing digital channels, predicted to grow 13 per cent by 2020 and now worth around 50 per cent of total OOH ad spend (Source: Outsmart). Mobile is also growing at pace. According to eMarketer, there are more than 4.68bn mobile users globally as of January 2019 (an increase of approximately 100m from 2018) and accounted for 52.2 per cent of total internet traffic in 2018.

For marketers, their point of conversion – location – offers an arguably unparalleled opportunity to reach consumers in a way which feels intuitive to them. By leveraging the location-based insights each channel offers, and layering them upon one another, brands will be able to create and launch campaigns based upon a much richer understanding of the consumer.

When paired with DOOH’s increasingly sophisticated digital capabilities, mobile offers OOH the ability to augment behavioural data to deliver a greater depth of audience information and enhance the medium’s broadcast capabilities with digital targeting. Therefore, by layering anonymous and aggregated mobile data with OOH planning systems, marketers are able to gain a thorough understanding into consumers’ movements in real-time.

Contextual understanding
As a medium, Out-of-Home has always traded on its ability to convert details about location into a contextual understanding of a consumer. Now powered by increasingly sophisticated technology, DOOH is able to do this at speed, offering fluidity and dynamism that the medium previously lacked.

Pair these capabilities with a mobile campaign, and you have a powerful way to offer brands “targeted broadcast”. As individual channels, both mobile and OOH offer advertisers the ability to leverage insights about location to reach consumers at crucial moments in their lives, and combining them will only serve to improve effectiveness.

Such a campaign is most impactful when producing an OOH campaign where consumers are most likely to be on their mobile phones, including high dwell-time locations such as shopping centres, train stations or airports. Aggregated and anonymised carrier data can be layered over OOH databases (such as ROUTE) and provide an understanding of how consumers navigate their world on an hourly basis. Such depth of understanding can help advertisers identify new efficiencies and possibilities for their campaigns.

Mobile insights
In scenarios such as these, it’s also possible for marketers to link consumers’ exposure to an OOH campaign through mobile insights. This, along with the ability to analyse user movements, enables advertisers to access specific insights through linking OOH and mobile to better inform their campaigns.

As well as location, mobile holds much potential for greater levels of targeting by segmenting audiences according to users’ individual interests and preferences. This could include social media connectivity, as well as mobile commerce. A recent report on commuter commerce which we produced in partnership with OOH media owner Exterion Media, and the Centre for Business and Economics Research (Cebr), found that 70 per cent of commuters have made a purchase via their mobile phones as a result of seeing advertising whilst on the move. This is significant, as our research further revealed that commuter commerce contributes to 14 per cent of all online sales in the UK. It’s clear then, that this link between OOH and mobile has a real impact on the economy.

Through gaining insights into personal interests and preferences, it is possible for advertisers to be able to understand their target audience’s behaviours. Our report unveiled specific data insights, from the average spend per commuter, to the type of products bought and the form of transport used. For example, the research revealed clothing to be a particularly popular category for spenders on the move, with expenditure generally higher during the morning commute. Therefore, if advertisers can become empowered with the right knowledge, they will be better informed about when and where their campaigns can create the most impact.

As advertising continues its upward trajectory of digital growth, developments in OOH, combined with a smartphone-savvy society, offer marketers significant opportunity to create a tailored, relevant campaign informed by specific insights and consumer knowledge. By joining the dots between these two channels, marketers will hit upon a sweet spot of realisation – that combining the strengths of multiple media will not only inject new creative potential into campaigns, but also connect with the right audience at the right time, driving consumers further along the path to purchase.