New Year, New (Old) Advertising Strategies - Incorporating OOH into Your 2020 Strategy

Happy 2020! As we move forward into the new year, marketers and brands alike are gearing up to deliver their best efforts at capturing new audiences and staying connected to existing ones. 2020 promises to offer consumers that are harder and harder than ever to reach, higher demands of brands from their consumers, and more and more online competition and marketing 'noise' than ever before. 2020 also promises advanced technologies, deeper data analysis, and a truly seamless User Experience from beginning to end, across all devices. Here's a few ways that brands and marketers can incorporate Out of Home advertising into their 2020 advertising strategies.

Connect Digital with Physical

2019 was the year of VR on social media and endless amounts of ads on endless amounts of streaming services. However, despite the highly digital nature of most of our lives, consumers are more and more turning their attentions away from their screens, and are instead looking up from their devices and craving real world experiences once again. Ad blindness and sensory overload on our screens mean that most of the time, we as consumers are being shown ads that we no longer internalize or remember. Marketers and brands must reconnect with the real humans that make up their communities by...being real humans.

Connecting digital back into the physical world, from experiential events to Outdoor / Out of Home advertisements that are engaging and memorable, will be big in 2020 and years to come.

Programmatic - and What Programmatic Means

Programmatic advertising is advertising that has been automated based on a series of demographics. By automating the buying and selling of ad space, programmatic media buying allows advertisers to streamline the process and only target the audiences that are most important to them at any single time. It's no surprise that programmatic remains on the rise. Standard demographics, such as gender (when applicable), age, geolocation, language spoken, etc. can now be layered on with deeper user data, such as mobile device, favorite applications, social media habits and info, and more to create smart, targeted campaigns that can connect more strongly with a given audience.

Programmatic ad buying has already been around for a hot minute, and with advances in data collection and tech (we'll cover those in a minute), 2020 promises to include programmatic media buying more than ever.

Location Planning and Data Collection

Location planning and targeting by demographic is key to any advertising strategy, and Out of Home is no different. Heading into 2020 and beyond, the OOH industry is expected to become considerably more advanced and sophisticated in collecting necessary data for accurate location planning. By optimizing ads for specific locations, marketers and brands can drive better performance from their OOH campaigns and deliver ads that are more relative to audiences than ever before.

Access to more audience data points, such as preferred device, preferences, average age, type of vehicle, and a variety of other demographics means that we can learn more than ever about the way people behave and are reached. Many outdoor ad platforms rely on 3rd party data to make educated guesses about how to target consumers with Out of Home ads. Commoot advertisers know the importance of data collection when it comes to understanding a local market, and we know that data collection will continue to be of utmost importance in 2020. We're so sure of it, in fact, that we added an extra service dedicated to equipping existing trucking fleets, including those currently hosting advertisements, with proprietary data collection cameras. By arming ourselves and brands with as much data about the market as we can, OOH marketers can step up their location targeting game. If you currently have a branded fleet, but aren't using machine learning data to learn about the world around your trucks, you are missing out on an incredibly valuable amount of data. If you fleet is already on the road, make it work harder for you with Smart Fleet.

Improved Audience Measurement

Hand-in-hand with Advanced Data Collection goes improved ways of understanding that incoming data. By improving campaign planning and performance measurement, marketers and brands utilizing OOH can elevate existing marketing campaigns and see stronger performance. Mobile data collection plays a huge role in understanding audiences and what makes them tick. Even despite stricter privacy laws in 2020 than any other year previously, much of the mobile data collected is still readily available to marketers. This means that ad platforms like Commoot can layer the data they collect over custom audience behaviors. That's a nerdy way of saying that the possibilities are almost endless for customized targeting based on advanced audience measurement.

All About Engagement

In 2020, it's all about engagement. Ad blindness is real, and fortunately for us, this has forced advertisers and brands to take a step back from digital-only campaigns and focus on the importance of engaging the consumer IRL. With so much digital noise, it's no surprise that consumers crave advertising experiences that are funny, memorable, different, or engagement or excite them.

If you're ready to engage with your consumers at eye-level in ways they can't ignore, get in touch with the team here at Commoot.