Smart & Beautiful: Out of Home Delivers Measurable Results

By Michael Rosen, CRO of Intersection

Out of Home (OOH) is one of the oldest forms of media. From cave paintings, to highway billboards, to today’s data-driven, contextual screens across public spaces, OOH has evolved to a modern day storytelling platform. And while it’s known for enabling creative, human-scale experiences that increase brand awareness and foot traffic, marketers often ask: Can OOH drive measurable business results?

The short answer is: YES.

In addition to being fundamentally fraud-free, brand-safe, and 100% viewable, OOH can produce reliable ROI measurement that compares very favorably to other digital media channels. In fact, with the availability of robust data sets and proven methodologies, advertisers can measure the bottom-line impact of their OOH advertising campaigns and achieve powerful results.

For example: A leading online sports betting platform used NJ Transit media in 2019 to reach people who passed through the busiest stations each day. Leveraging Intersection’s proprietary Campaign Impact Measurement offering, the advertiser was able to track cross-device conversions to prove the direct-response success of their campaign. They found that their station dominations were not only highly effective at building brand awareness, but also demonstrated a 51% lift in app registrations compared to consumers who had not passed through targeted stations. In 2020, they expanded their campaign to SEPTA transit stations and saw a 60% lift in registrations.

In another example, an online grocery service wanted to leverage LinkNYC’s massive network coverage as part of a performance-driven campaign to yield subscriptions. Web visitation and organic search traffic soared throughout the campaign and the online retailer achieved a .22% conversion rate, which is on par with Twitter (but without all of the brand safety concerns).

OOH is also highly effective in driving results for omni-channel campaigns. When looking at online activations indexed against media spend, OOH outperforms TV, radio, and print by nearly 4X per dollar! This is despite accounting for only 7% of total ad spend (source: Nielsen OOH Online Activation Study). OOH has particularly generated increased engagement with search engines and social media channels. According to the Nielsen study:

  • 46% of people ages 18+ have used internet search (ie Google, Bing, Yahoo) after seeing OOH media in the past 6 months,
  • 38% have visited a webpage or posted a message on Meta after seeing an OOH ad,
  • 25% have posted to Instagram after seeing an OOH ad,
  • 23% posted on Twitter after seeing an OOH ad.

Meta even created its own study to measure the effectiveness of OOH in driving user engagement on Meta, and the results were surprisingly positive:

“when comparing different approaches, using both Meta and OOH ads worked best — with the combined impact proving to be 13% more efficient than expected.”

People are living life outside of their homes again and OOH is still the best media to reach local audiences at scale. It also delivers substantially more online activity per dollar spent than any other traditional channel and has been shown to drive significant bottom-line impact. All things considered — from unrivaled creative possibilities to measurable results — OOH is a highly effective medium for advertisers.

To learn more about OOH measurement, contact Intersection.