Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re feeling relaxed, excited, and ready for this upcoming week — it’s going to be a good one. Now that you’ve started reading the second sentence of this newsletter, I hope you’ve assumed the position: feet up, beverage in one hand, AC on, and maybe some light LoFi jazz in the background. Today, we’re going to chat all about out-of-home advertising (you’ll notice me say “OOH” in this email, that just stands for “out of home”).
But, before we get into this week’s newsletter, did you get a chance to listen to this past week’s episode of Limited Supply? It was the season 3 finale, and we talked all about Ryan Reynolds, Allbirds, and more. To bridge the gap between season 3 and season 4, we decided to create a Limited Supply Slack Channel. Join it! Also, if you want to be our community manager for Limited Supply, email me!
If you haven’t listened to Limited Supply yet, think of it as the [insert your favorite source of news and commentary] for the retail and eCommerce industry. Moiz and I release episodes every Wednesday, and as of this morning, we recorded episode 2 of season 4… let me tell you, season 4 might be the best one. The energy is off the charts, even just in the first 2 episodes. Click here to listen to Limited Supply!
On Tuesday, I’m going to be grilling Keith Rabois about the new OpenStore product, Drive. My tweet got a good amount of skepticism, so I asked Keith if he’d be down for me to get answers for the community — he was game! If you have any questions I should ask him, drop a reply to this tweet, and I’ll make sure to ask him on Tuesday.
Alright… let’s get into today’s newsletter. I hope today’s newsletter takes you from someone who just sees billboards to someone who really understands the power of billboards and how to use them within your marketing strategy.
So, WTF is OOH?
OOH advertising is exactly what you think it is — it’s any ad that’s outside of your home and visible outside. This includes physical and digital billboards, subway ads, posters, signs that are being spun on the corner poining to a car wash, wrapping a car, bus, or delivery truck with your brand, planes that fly with a flag behind them showing men where to get their ED medication, and more.
Until recently, OOH advertising used to be all mostly analog, but with the innovation of companies like Clear Channel, OUTFRONT, and Intersection, there’s a new category of digital OOH (or “DOOH”) which unlocks not only more revenue for the owners of the digital inventory, but also more capabilities for the brands as well. If you’re in New York City, you’ll see these along the sidewalk, at bus stops, or even above the taxi’s (the irony is that the digital ads on top of taxi’s are powered by Uber’s OOH platform).
You could technically say that even getting ad placement within malls or stores could be considered OOH, but I like to keep that in the “Shopper Marketing” category of media, just to not cloudy the waters too much.
Why is OOH important and how/when should you use it?
Historically, OOH has always been best used for brand awareness. It makes sense, right? It’s hard to track, the estimated people to view a billboard is quite literally a guess, and there’s no way someone can “click” a billboard to get to your landing page. So, how can you use OOH effectively as a brand that’s focused on driving a return with every marketing dollar spent? I’ll focus on the performance side first, and then add some unique use cases of how else to use it.
First off, when running an OOH campaign, you don’t have much “data” available to leverage. When you run Facebook ads, you can actually see that someone watched a video for 9.75 seconds, then clicked the ad, then landed on the PDP and selected the Black Jeans variant in size 32. With OOH, the only piece of data you might get, is mobile device ID data. How does one get that? You don’t. But 15% of consumers are opted-in to sharing their mobile device location data, whether or not they know it. It’s usually derived from your “free” apps that you have on your phone — it might be weather, a game, a streaming service, or something else. But when you’re getting something for free (whether it’s a game, or a table at a club, YOU are the product).
In this case, because you have some silly game on your phone, I can see by using AdQuick that you walked by my billboard, and then see if your same mobile device came to make a purchase on my website. AdQuick can understand the percentage of people who are “opted-in”, which is usually about 15%, and then build an attribution model around the incremental lift driven from your OOH campaign.
This is similar to how Adgile works with their product, Polygon. When you go into Target or Walmart, Polygon can pickup that your mobile device ID walked into Target, and then as a brand, I can buy an audience of customers who visit Target, Walmart or really any geographic location, and load it into any digital ads platform. If I sold a lip-balm exclusively in Sephora, I can pay for that audience, load it into FB, and run ads to you, knowing you visit Sephora 2-3x per quarter. This technology is how their truckside billboards are direct response — they can upload the routes of the truck into Polygon, get the anonymized list of people who saw the truck in passing, and then you, as the brand, can retarget people who saw your truck.
That is probably the main way to leverage OOH as a direct-response channel. Does it sound sort of creepy? Maybe… but don’t forget your have an Alexa, Google Home, and 57 pixels on every website you visit. If you’re concerned about your “privacy”, you’re going to get more miserable as time goes on and you learn that there is no such thing. The good news, is that all of this data is anonymized — so no one can just find you and look up everything you’ve done.
Ok, now what about other use cases for OOH to be effective?
Brand awareness is an easy one. Launching a new product line? Launching a new brand as whole? Launching a new collaboration? Launching into a new retailer? OOH makes perfect sense to run alongside your other channels.
Another smart play is when you are looking to go into a new retailer, you want to show the retailer that you’re just as invested in driving sell-through. You can do this through your organic social, your email list, even paid social. But nothing gets retail buyers more excited than seeing your brand telling people that they can walk into their store and buy the product. To them, it shows that you’re committed to spending money and building the partnership, and it drives more foot traffic. At the end of the day, buyers want more people coming into the store, and they want people buying more items per visit. If you’re contributing to that goal, you are the golden child in their eyes. I also personally think it’s incredible social proof and credibility for your own brand to say that you are now sold in a nationally-recoginzed retailer.
Lastly, I think using OOH similar to how you would build out media plans for your promotions is another way to think of it. Roman does a great job of this — when they launch a new campaign across digital, you see that reflected in New York City subway stations or behind homeplate at a baseball game. It’s just another media channel to get your message out there, and drive awareness for whatever your current campaign is.
In any case, I think it’s important to include your logo prominently, and maybe a QR code or an easy URL to visit. You’re not going to get a ton of scans or URL visits (for the most part), so don’t be thinking you’re going to be able to back the media buy into a reasonable CPC.
What do you not want to do?
Unless you are swimming in money, you probably don’t want or need an evergreen digital billboard in Times Square. Especially if you are just starting out, you want to be smart and focused with your OOH experiments to better gauge ROI. In fact, we’ve only ever run a Times Square billboard once, and it was for a big celebrity brand launch. It doesn’t do much — do you think tourists care? Nope. But, it’s amazing for the photo you take in front of the billboard and post — it’s a status symbol and the industry of OOH/retail loves to see it. But general consumers? Nah, they don’t care. In fact, real New Yorkers avoid Times Square like the plague.
Instead, you should start with small tests using remnant or last-minute inventory. We always get the best inventory from Brian Rappaport at Quan Media. The guy is on speed dial for every main OOH inventory vendor, and when there’s last-minute inventory, Quan Media is the agency you want to be friendly with. For context, Quan Media is the team behind the OOH ads for Roman, The Farmer’s Dog, Coterie, Shake Shack, AWAY, Fresh Direct, and more. Brian is the man.
You can test OOH, effectively, with just $25-50k. You don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see a positive return.
How do you buy inventory?
Just like Sharma Brands is the go-to digital agency for DTC companies who want to launch or scale, there are agencies that specialize exclusively in OOH, like Quan Media Group.
Alternatively, just like you could not use Sharma Brands to buy your ads, and go direct to the inventory holders, with OOH, you can use companies like: Adgile, Outfront Media, Lamar Advertising, Kinetic Worldwide, Clear Channel Outdoor, etc. The problem is, the placement is just one piece of it, just like the FB ads platform is one piece of the online customer journey.
There are also online platforms like AdQuick that exist, where you can browse and book billboards, just like you would an Airbnb, however you’ll need to pay a membership to get into their catalog. Then you can buy billboards across the country with just a few clicks. The downside here, is you might not understand the culture and the local context of a billboard when buying this way.
Just like any other ad buy, you need to search for the inventory, evaluate their placement, who it’s targeting, what the creative is, the KPI you’re tracking against, pricing and the end results. If you feel confident that you will hit the things you need, then you can make that buy with confidence.
It’s easy to spend a ton of money with OOH ads that’s not efficient, which is why we like partnering with a single agency to help us evaluate everything from the placement to the audience and the creative. Then you also don’t need to worry about if the billboard went up, if the wild postings were pasted over and hidden, etc. They take care of all that for you (at least the good ones do!).
How can you make the most of OOH for your brand?
I still believe that if you are just starting out (under $5M/yr in revenue) you should be focusing almost exclusively on one digital channel (almost always Meta) before you get fancy and do OOH.
I view OOH as a great “brand awareness investment” and an excellent way to create some viral buzz (around a brand launch, new product launch, fundraise, etc) and then reuse that OOH campaign for other digital/social ads. It ads a ton of credibility to be a brand that can have OOH as a placement (no one who dropships garbage across the world can afford a billboard in New York or California, it means you’re legit).
We have an upcoming product launch for Long Wknd where we plan to do some billboards and our goal is to leverage that on social and for content. For that goal, our investment into making it happen will be low, but the outcome and repurposing of that wild posting will be worth 10x more than what we paid for it.
On the other hand, if you are a larger brand (doing $50M/year or more) I think more significant OOH activations make sense because at this point, you should definitely be investing in more long-term, strategic branding and brand positioning initiatives like OOH for your brand.
How do I make the OOH ad stand out?
In my opinion, the biggest variable for success in OOH advertising is your creative execution. OOH is not a channel where you want to “play it safe.” Typically, you want to create and run eye-catching creative that will make people literally stop in their tracks (this is much easier said than done).
Bright colors, bold CTAs, powerful copy, and creative imagery is what you should be going for here. You need to think outside of the box and push your creative boundaries to get this done.
A few of my favorite OOH campaigns include.
- Hims doing above the bathroom stall ads at sports stadiums to drive early viral growth.
- Nike’s “3D” Digital billboards that use mind-bending optical illusions to make it seem like their products are literally bursting out of the screen (this has since been copied by Samsung and many others).
- Skim’s provocative billboards across NYC (also executed by Brian’s team)
- Eight Sleep’s Billboard on a Boat during Miami Tech Week
- Coca Cola’s float in the Macy’s day parade (unique OOH integration)
Memorable Moments + Repurposing:
The point is that these brands flexed their creative muscles and pushed hard to create what I call “memorable moments” for their brands that they could reference and repurpose for a long time.
If you are smart about using OOH, it’s not just the installation. Like I mentioned above with Long Wknd, OOH is about the videos, images, UGC, press coverage and other earned media that you can get from creative and memorable OOH campaigns.
For example, running a digital billboard in NYC once, then taking some photos or videos of your digital billboard and using that as ads for months to come can crush it for your brand.
It’s all about being smart and knowing exactly how to leverage and repurpose your OOH activations to drive the most impact that you can.
That was a lot, what are the key takeaways?
In closing,
- OOH is a relevant channel for brands who have found success on traditional digital channels (i.e Meta or Google) and want to find other smart places to invest in building brand awareness.
- Buying OOH is easier than you thought. Find an agency who can take care of you end-to-end, and let them guide you through making the best investment.
- Focus on “memorable moments” and producing eye-catching creative that can stop people in their tracks to notice your brand.
- Get smart about how you can reuse and repurpose your OOH campaigns.
- Spend with ROI in mind. Like anything else in marketing, you should test and learn to see what works and then double down on the campaigns that perform for your brand. OOH is the same. Use it as a tool, and have some fun!
Ok… enough talking about OOH. Now, onto some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
PartnerHero — The customer service support partner that we all wish existed 5 years ago.
6 years ago, I remember when we ramped up our ad spend, the one piece we didn't ramp up accordingly was customer service. As a result, so much of our inbound customer service inquiries turned into a nightmare. Let alone, when we ramped up ad spend and started selling out of product, and then had to update customers, we were slow to do so, and caused an absolute sh*tshow for the brand. If only we had PartnerHero at the time, we could've completely avoided the entire issue of scaling up without the proper staffing.
PartnerHero is a staffing agency that focuses on customer service operations for high-growth startups. The catch is, you don't need to individually hire and train the talent, they help you do it.
It's essentially a productized-service offering where as you need more capacity, they scale with you. When you need less, you can lessen your costs. Their teams are fully trained in all eCommerce platforms, and work across all customer service platforms (Gorgias, Zendesk, Gladly, Kustomer, etc).
Don't be like "Amateur Brand-Operator Nik" and waste your marketing dollars on a poor customer experience. Sign up for a free call with PartnerHero to see how they can help streamline your CX operations, and lower your costs to deliver a 5-star customer experience.
LP of the Week:
Today's landing page is one that I was personally really excited about. The home cleaning category is one that I am insanely bullish about (I'm shocked I haven't started a cleaning brand yet), and so when I saw this deal come through at HOOX, I was STOKED!
You'll see this page beautifully describes the cleaning products, their benefits, how they work, what you get inside the kit, and anything else you might have questions about as it relates to the brand itself.
Seeing Jack tweet the page with excitement this morning made my Sunday! If you're ready to get your own HOOX page to launch your spring campaigns, Mother's Day, Father's Day or Memorial Day, book a demo with HOOX by clicking this special link. We'll talk through what we believe would be the best LP strategy for you, and how we can 2-3x your conversion rate.
That's all for this week
I hope you found this newsletter helpful to understand more context as it relates to OOH advertising and how you can incorporate it into your own media strategy.
It feels like this is now the "busy season" for a lot of us in CPG, Retail, eCommerce, or the services business... so please stay hydrated, keep your sleep at a high priority level, and make sure you take time to go outside and touch some grass too.
I'll see you next Sunday, where I think I want to talk about how to build the most optimized product pages (I've been seeing some PDPs that just completely miss the mark as it relates to conversion rate). If you have a better idea, reply to this email and if I go with your idea, I'll buy you lunch for a week!
Have a great week!