Out-of-home was supposed to be about reach was it not? A royal retrospective

Looking back, September of 2022 was an eventful month for Britain. Climate protesters glued themselves to the seats of our parliament, Lizz Truss began her 45-day tenure as PM, and our late monarch Her Majesty Elizabeth II ended a significantly longer stint as our queen and head of state in her passing. These following Brexit, the Covid 19 pandemic and a slower economic return that its international competitors – it a was a turbulent time when the UK most needed stability.

Amidst all of this the public bore witness to some peculiar occurrences; news readers magically adorned black attire between camera shots, the world’s longest queue formed from Westminster Abbey to Southwark Park in London and every single digital advertising screen in the UK almost instantaneously switched to displaying the same tribute to our late queen.

These all formed part of a longstanding and rehearsed protocol for UK media – a sort of instruction manual for what needed to happen in the event of the monarch’s death.

Fast forward to last week, it occurred to me that for UK DOOH media owners, simultaneously displaying the same message on every screen in the UK was an industry first and that using Route’s audience measurement capability, we could analyse how all of this played out; so why not? I figured.

8 September 2022

6:30pm

The queen’s death is announced by the BBC triggering Operation London bridge for the UK’s media. Within minutes advertising on digital OOH screens is swapped out for static tribute messaging. Commercial advertising on TV and radio is suspended and pre-recorded programming takes over the TV schedules.

7:00pm

30 minutes in and as the last of the evening’s commuters arrive home, 1.8m have already seen the digital screen tribute across the various OOH formats up and down the country.

7:30pm

The nation’s Thursday evening kicks into gear albeit with a muted sort of tone. Countless planned events, from concerts and parties to sporting events are opened with someone hastily paying tribute before committing that ‘the show will go on’ Outside, 2.7m people have now seen the messaging on DOOH screens.

9 September

9:00am

By the time morning office commuters arrive at work on Friday morning over ten million have seen the digital tribute. Countless snaps of the messages are being share on social media by a public mesmerised by the seemingly spontaneous appearance of the blanket message – TV news crews have camped up at prominent DOOH locations to film in front of the screens. Even long-time ad sceptics like my friend Jen were noticing and reacting by sharing pictures of the screens in various group chats – if we were being being crass we’d call that ‘great engagement’.

7:00pm

24 hours after the content was first pushed, twenty-two million people have now seen the royal creative on DOOH. At over 40% of the UK, this is roughly the same number of people who tuned in to watch England vs Spain in last year’s Euro 2024 finals.

10 September

7:00pm

At 7pm on Saturday, 48 hours after Operation London Bridge was activated, normal service was resumed on DOOH screens. By this time, thirty million or 56% of all UK adults had seen the tribute message – a higher cover % than the 52% of Americans who tuned in to this year’s Superbowl half-time show.

Fast-build cover

Despite DOOH’s evident ability to reach a whole lot of people very quickly, we very rarely see this type of activity in the out-of-home world. Data from Nielsen shows that 40% of all DOOH campaigns of 31 days or fewer run for exactly 14 consecutive days – coincidentally exactly the same length as the standard posting length for a paper and paste campaign.

And this practice of using fewer screens for more days has a detrimental effect on overall reach for most campaigns.

Data from Route shows that a single day advertising on the UK’s 1,726 digital 48 sheet billboards reaches +13% more people than a 14-day campaign for the same number of impressions on a restricted, random selection of sites.

Aside from the boost in total reach, there’s also significant merit in reaching people in a shorter period of time – when 12 million people tuned in to watch the Gavin and Stacey finale on the BBC last Christmas there was a real sense that everyone was talking about it - this buzz helped catapult the total audience to over 20 million in just a couple of days

It’s the same reason that those Superbowl halftime ads command a significant premium on CPM vs regular broadcast television.

Culturally significant moments

Our most memorable moments happen when we experience things at the same time as others. Major sporting events, family occasions and holidays stand out but there’s room for advertisers in this space too.

From the annual release of the John Lewis Christmas ad to Coca-Cola’s iconic ‘Holidays are Coming’ – the most memorable ads tend to be ones that we experience at the same time as everyone else rather than those hyper-targeted addressable ads that bombard our personal social feeds.

Shouldn’t then we be seeing more shorter, high-reach campaigns on DOOH? For movie releases, flash sales, and major TV moments? We’ve got the infrastructure and tech to do this today, so isn’t it time we moved on from the 14-day posting cycle hangover of classic paper posters and embraced the full capability of our new digital world.

Let’s embrace our new digital technology

I’m sure marketeers would agree with the above statement, so what needs to happen then to make this a reality?

One objection we often hear about moving campaigns away from 14-day cycles is that it makes pricing audits more complex. When auditor’s hold decades of per-panel 14-day prices, it is certainly far easier to compare today’s pricing if the campaigns run in the same way.

This seems to me to be a luddite mentality that’s surely holding our industry back. We’ve long been able to measure campaign impacts accurately at spot level using Route and so can comfortably audit campaigns on CPM rather than per-panel pricing.

Campaigns delivered using impressions also create far more availability for brands across our inventory vs the complex Tetris like mess of scheduling fixed spots on individual screens that inevitably leaves behind countless unusable gaps in our networks.

The benefits to brands, agencies and media owners all seem evident in making this switch – if complacency is what’s holding us all back then it’s time to change that.