Daniélle Ackermann Content Writer
Daniélle owes 20% of her B2B success to a combination of coffee and Grammarly and 80% to her hard-earned experience writing 81+ articles on SOC2 compliance. In her spare time, she listens to Wolf Alice and walks her dog. Connect.
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What do Shelf, a 100-year-old Spanish woman, and the most successful campaign in JCDecaux’s history have in common? They’re here to prove that out-of-home (OOH) advertising packs a mean punch and remains one of the most powerful tools available to marketers and their clients. And yet, relatively few B2B brands are doing it.
Why is that?
For starters, let’s recap what OOH actually is.
What is OOH advertising?
After the rapid decline of OOH ad spending in 2020, we get it — it may have fallen off your radar. Here’s a quick refresher: out-of-home (OOH) advertising includes any advertising seen outside of someone’s home. No, duh.
Let’s refine. Generally, this includes billboards and signage, but with the rise of digital and programmatic technology it has come to include geofencing, tracking, retargeting, personalisation, attribution, and measurement. So, why the sudden hype about OOH advertising?
Don’t let that 2020 memory fool you, especially if you’re in the B2B world. After all, the only reason that OOH advertising nosedived during that period was because nobody was out-of-home during lockdown. Studies show that advertisers will spend over $8b on OOH advertising this year, returning it to pre-pandemic levels. But despite the undeniable impact of OOH advertising, many B2B brands are clinging to digital ecosystems.
OOH no! Why are B2B brands hesitant to invest in OOH advertising?
There’s no denying that digital marketing holds significant value and can produce incredible results with easy-to-track ROI.
Let’s face it: OOH advertising has always been considered more of a B2C campaign format. In the highly-digitised B2B world, we’re obsessed with click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement levels that provide clear performance indicators. OOH advertising, however, makes it harder to assess the direct impact on lead generation and sales. Business-minded B2B brands need tangible results. We’re not arguing with that.
Traditional OOH advertising poses challenges regarding measurement and targeting, a massive con when it comes to determining ROAS. Even if you had a billboard in a popular spot in town, how would you know the right people from your target audience were seeing it? More importantly, how would you know if it was working?
Hence, the rise in the popularity of digital advertising campaigns with transparent, quantifiable outcomes. Everyone’s on the bandwagon because it’s easier to calculate ROI. Incidentally, that makes the space all the more competitive (and crowded) — we’ll get into that later.
But traditional OOH is changing, and they are changing fast. We’ll catch you up to speed.
Have you met Marina Prieto?
In June this year, Ogilvy Spain took home the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the B2B Creative category for an OOH campaign they did for JCDecaux (the largest outdoor advertising corporation in the world) called Meet Marina Prieto.
“Who is Marina Prieto?” Good question.
The same question pursued thousands of Spaniards when they stumbled upon Instagram screenshots of a 100-year-old civilian woman plastered across Madrid’s subway stations without context. Overnight, social media snapshots of Marina watering her plants, eating churros, and taking a nap took over hundreds of previously empty subway ads in Madrid.
People began searching for her, talking about her on social media, and even snapping selfies with her ads to be shared on their own Instagram grids (very Meta indeed). Everyone had one question on their lips: who is this woman, and how did she end up there?
This campaign was the most successful in JCDecaux’s history, yielding the following results:
- Marina, the subject of the subway ads, increased her Instagram follower count by 39,285% (that’s not a decimal — we’re talking over thirty-nine thousand per cent)
- Engagement on Marina’s Instagram page went up by 13,405%
- Marina had impressions in 14 countries
- She was approached by multiple brands for paid partnerships
But JCDecaux didn’t thrust a local centenarian into internet virality out of charitable goodwill. They strategically unveiled the thinking behind the campaign at the precise moment they knew that a bunch of marketing professionals employed by their ideal clients would be captive in the same room at the same time: at the Effie Awards.
The spectacular explosion of Marina Prieto into public consciousness was potent proof that OOH advertising was worth investing in. After the campaign strategy was revealed at the Effies, David Lanos — the Media Manager for Europe for Havianas — promised he would “[d]efinitely include OOH in our media plan this year.”
What made this campaign particularly successful was Ogilvy Spain’s ingenious deployment of a hybrid media strategy. The point of the campaign was to prove how successful OOH advertising can be, but how do you do that when OOH is an inherently analogue form of advertising?
You create a digital twin.
That’s exactly what the advertising agency did when they linked the billboard campaign to Marina’s existing Instagram feed. Not only did this allow them to qualify the success of their OOH campaign by tracking the readily available digital metrics of Marina’s social media, but it also increased the reach and visibility of the billboards themselves, even as they remained fixed in the subway. As Samsung’s Integrated Media Manager Elena Fernandez put it, “I’m not a subway user, but I did see the campaign. Great idea!” We agree, Elena. It was a great idea.
Ogilvy Spain was so successful at proving that OOH advertising is a worthy investment that JCDecaux signed a whopping 185 new brands in the wake of the campaign’s success, doubling their business and resulting in record-breaking bookings.
OOH isn’t what it used to be — it’s better
The Marina Prieto campaign did a phenomenal job of demonstrating the enduring power of OOH advertising, but it did even more than that. The campaign proposed a new, hybrid approach to syncing the emotional potency of OOH formats with the quantifiable metrics of social media, allowing JCDecaux to prove the efficacy of OOH advertising with digitally-derived insights. Perhaps there is a way to track the success of OOH campaigns after all.
While that is a comfort to stat-obsessed CMOs, that isn’t why B2B brands should invest in OOH marketing strategies. There are two much better reasons why B2B brands should plunge into the world of OOH advertising:
- Digital advertising ecosystems are becoming increasingly crowded, competitive, and costly.
- It’s time for B2B brands to make bolder moves.
Yeah, we said it. Grow a pair.
The bold and the B2B
Look, we’re the last ones to deny the quantifiable impact and ROI of digital marketing. We live for it. But we also can’t deny the fact that, although digital content works, it’s losing its potency. Even as we Shelfians fight the good fight against B2B mediocrity, crowded digital ecosystems contribute to emerging phenomena like “banner blindness” — an unconscious blindness to banner ads for internet users whose webpages are so saturated with ads that their brains edit them out of sight.
Digital media spaces are oversaturated with advertising, and B2B brands are struggling to differentiate themselves from numerous competitors. Digital marketing metrics create a false sense of security in an oversaturated market — sometimes, all they can achieve is 100% certainty that your campaign generated 0% leads. Womp, womp.
The solve? B2B brands stand to benefit from some bravery. It’s time to let go of the illusion of security and embrace bolder marketing strategies with less definitive returns on investment. There’s no question that digital advertising and its myriad metrics are a mainstay of B2B marketing, but there is room for risk — because OOH B2B marketing isn’t a novelty any more. It’s a necessity.
