In the age of digital media and artificial intelligence, out of home advertising has to fight against a number of misperceptions that tag it as a legacy mass medium: Good for awareness, but tough for driving and measuring performance.
That wrongheaded image is receding, and for marketers who want to make the effort to plan ahead and understand the medium, it can be the ultimate human connector and a way to drive measurable outcomes, says Katie Burwell.
“We definitely do see a shift in what marketers and what brands are understanding about out of home measurement,” says Burwell, senior director of marketplace growth & partnerships at AdQuick. The global out of home marketplace and ad tech platform is working to combat that outdated idea.
A shifting media landscape shaped by AI, fragmented consumer attention and growing worries about digital ad fraud gives out of home an opportunity to deliver something the most personalized digital media can’t guarantee: real human engagement. After all, bots don’t look at billboards, Burwell notes.
“Ultimately that ad has to display to a human,” she says. “If you’re investing a dollar in out of home, you know that that dollar will be displayed out to a human.”
The measurement myth
But measuring those humans and connecting them to those dollars faces perhaps the biggest challenge surrounding out of home: The belief that it cannot be measured with the rigor marketers expect from modern media channels such as digital advertising.
Out of home is handicapped by the view that its performance “is at best hard to measure, or at worst, can’t be measured,” Burwell says. But thanks to new digital technologies and data analysis techniques, measurements today go far beyond the traffic counts that used to be the norm. Mobile movement data, audience intelligence, location analytics and sophisticated attribution models now let marketers understand both who is being exposed to messages but also how they influence consumer behavior.
“The models are getting more sophisticated,” Burwell says. “We’re looking at the broader reach and how we can quantify that and say: ‘This piece of out of home is delivering.”
Researchers now can gauge everything from audience demographics and mobility patterns to dwell time and the physical characteristics of advertising locations. This gives a clearer picture of outcomes beyond awareness, including website visits, lead generation, customer acquisition and sales.
“Those placements aren’t there by accident. They’re there to serve the brand’s needs and serve the consumer’s needs,” says Burwell. “For audience targeting, where we’re using the same kind of audiences that a digital marketer may use. We’re just using it at a mass scale.”
Technologies that allow dynamic messaging that targets audiences based on everything from weather patterns to breaking cultural events provides new flexibility. Together with the reach of the locations available, it translates into a strong advantage, when combined with the new scope of analytics, Burwell explains.
“Our location and our reach are two of our greatest assets,” she says. “It allows brands to build contextual, cultural relevance and broad awareness while still using the same kind of targeting where they can say: ‘I want to reach my audience here.’”
Marketers focused on the speed and personalization offered by digital media may think out of home falls short, but they need to apply a wider perspective about the entire plan, says Burwell. Not every marketing challenge is solved through one-to-one targeting, says Burwell, noting that the most successful brand-building – Apple’s or Nike’s, for example – was not based on one-to-one messaging.
“Not everything needs to be personalized,” she says.
Speed isn’t everything
Digital media offers the instant gratification of seeing clicks and traffic in real time, but Burwell argues that out of home is not far behind, developing insights in the first 48 or 72 hours. Additionally, true insights develop over time, by measuring metrics further down the funnel, such as landing page visits or searches which are trackable and provide context.
“I don’t think speed is always the most important thing,” says Burwell. Multi-media marketing mix modeling (MMM) or multi-touch attribution (MTA) often takes a month or two of results, and understanding how all of the channels in the media plan work together may take longer, she notes.
All measurement is imperfect, Burwell says, noting much is driven by sampling and experimentation.
“We do try to remind marketers to not let perfection be the enemy of progress and not let it be the enemy of getting insights,” says Burwell. Even results that don’t match their hypotheses or benchmarks can produce valuable insights and drive optimization, she says.
On a weekly or monthly basis, out of home can hold its own, she says. It can be complimentary to the whole media plan and track results and halo effects on other channels, Burwell says.
“The more we can work in conjunction, we can see what’s working best… and how we can attribute these offline activities to out of home exposures,” she says.
In one instance, AdQuick worked with the online grocer Fresh Direct on a campaign using out of home media in the New York City market to drive customer acquisition. The effort measured how many consumers exposed to the creative were driven to place orders and it showed a significant 6.5% conversion rate.
That gives the lie to another misperception: that out of home is only good for the top of the funnel.
“We can measure for the mid-funnel, measure for the lower funnel,” she said. “It just adds some complexity and it requires a certain level of preparation. It requires a certain level of investment.” When marketers plan ahead their investment with their desired outcomes in mind, measuring them becomes a lot easier, says Burwell.
Reaching real humans
Ultimately, it’s the chance to engage living humans that makes up the best opportunity for out of home. With the explosion of AI, marketers are struggling with questions about audience authenticity, as bots and agents complicate long-time worries about digital ad fraud.
“There are farms flooding these display networks with AI agents that are very, very hard to filter out,” Burwell says. “Now the audience that you may be sending ads to could just be entirely agentic.”
Burwell sees the trend as a strong selling point for out of home. There’s a place for AI technology in data processing and audience analysis: planning, targeting, measuring and optimizing, she says, but in the end, “we’re not reaching agents. We’re still reaching humans.”
It’s no coincidence the Outdoor Advertising Association of America titled its annual conference “The Human Medium,” she says: “We’re very much in the public, very much physical media, very much real-life.”
