Ian Dallimore jokes that Lamar Advertising has the equivalent of a corporate swear jar: Mention Minority Report in a meeting and pay $100.
The futuristic movie where in-store displays call out shoppers’ recent purchases sounds like dystopia to some, but Dallimore says out-of-home advertising can be that personal, minus the Big Brother feel.
“We provide a blank canvas for brands to show off the most dynamic creative opportunities in the world,“ says Dallimore, vice president of digital growth of Lamar Advertising. The 124-year-old company operates over 360,000 displays across 190 markets, including more than 5,500 digital billboards.
Ironically, the biggest misconception marketers have of OOH is that it is a static medium, like the highway billboards and Burma Shave ads of yesterday. “That may have been true 15 years ago, but not today,” says Dallimore. Digital tools have made the medium dynamic, personal and addressable for consumers, but also measurable and accountable to marketers.
“Out-of-home today behaves much more like a premium traditional media,” says Dallimore. The medium has modernized with digital tools so that it is targeted and programmatic, he says. Lamar now plans, activates and optimizes campaigns using data such as proximity and audience movement patterns to target and optimize ads. And with dynamic creative optimization, campaigns can now adjust messages based on real-time data. Displays can update with live sports scores, traffic patterns, even retail activity. Billboard campaigns can stream social media content or interact with nearby mobile devices.
Dallimore recalls being at the Cannes Lions festival last summer when all panelists were focused on the “attention economy.” That’s a promising trend, he says, because “we were physically built for the attention economy.” The presence of outdoor advertising is disruptive and has scale, which makes it a good tool to break through in a media-saturated environment.
“We just physically exist in the physical world, where people are already moving, living, and experiencing culture,” says Dallimore. “Out of home is at the epicenter of culture and of that consumer.”
Displays play a big part of large events such as the Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and other occasions. “Out of home is really at the heart of culture,” says Dallimore. “We can impact brand exposures at these events in a larger-than-life way.”
“Real-time storytelling”
Programmatic planning allows brands to reach consumers when it matters most, whereas in the past, advertisers would have to buy a static billboard for four weeks. Now a brand can connect with that consumer at a certain place and time, and continue reaching that consumer through their journey with other media, thanks to mobile data.
“Now it’s real-time storytelling in the real world,” says Dallimore. “That’s truly attention impacting the consumer when they’re on their journeys.”
Executions can get extremely focused and measured. For example, Dallimore noted Lamar is working with a sunglass company that will stage a pop-up shop at the Coachella Festival and it will have a billboard on the road to the site that will change over the nine days of the festival. Lamar will be able to measure festivalgoers who were exposed to the billboard, how many came into the shop and purchased specific pairs of sunglasses advertised on the billboard.
In a way, social media and the mobile device are two of the best things to happen to OOH. It was always an effective way to gain awareness, but now it’s effective throughout the marketing funnel, says Dallimore.
The tracking also brings up the Minority Report caveats, but Dallimore notes that is a topic that has been top-of-mind in the industry and is being addressed through privacy laws. For its part, Lamar tries to handle data in a way that’s “inherently privacy forward,” using anonymous device IDs to target niche audiences or measure movement patterns across aggregated audiences, without triggering users to opt out of tracking.
“That allows brands to better understand reach and frequency, and even outcomes, without compromising privacy. Because everyone on their mobile device is looking at ‘How do I opt out as much as possible?’” says Dallimore. “It really helps create this healthy middle ground, but the accountability is still there, the performance metric is still there and we can measure.”
The “anti-algorithm”
Billboards were always a channel for established brands to polish their legacy status, but with this new flexibility, OOH has also grown into a channel for challenger and emerging brands to break through.
“For established brands, out-of-home reinforces that scale, the credibility, that cultural presence,” says Dallimore. “It amplifies digital campaigns, it drives that omnichannel performance that a lot of major brands do.”
But for an emerging brand, it can be a game changer, says Dallimore. A striking, well-placed billboard in the right spot “could honestly be their breakthrough moment,” he said.
Social media amplification also plays a big part; influencers have embraced billboards, says Dallimore. “We see it at every major cultural event, all the way down to the smallest events at the local level. Every time, we see some boutique owner that’s standing under their billboard, or influencers that are making it a part of their stories on TikTok,” says Dallimore. “That’s the power of out-of-home.”
With so much media now driven by algorithms, it’s hard to find a channel that can reach a wide swath of consumers effectively—like every single person driving on the road to Coachella or walking into the same stadium for a World Cup match. Buying four or five billboards in the right market can create enough talk about the brand to break through, says Dallimore.
“There’s so much digital fatigue and privacy regulations. Out-of-home, we start to become the most powerful brand-safe alternative,” he says. “We become that anti-algorithm, where we break through the noise, the clutter of social media. Honestly, it’s where brands can really kind of stand out.”
