The last couple of years have seen the out-of-home (OOH) industry evolve more rapidly than ever before, but 2015 is set to be the industry’s most transformative year yet. An ever expanding network of digital inventory and increasingly sophisticated targeting technologies are enabling advertisers to increase both campaign efficiency and effectiveness, reaching their audiences in creative and engaging new ways. Here are Posterscope’s top five predictions for what 2015 holds for OOH advertisers. These predictions are just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll also see advances in OOH accountability, increasing amounts of content served via DOOH screens and a growing focus on furnishing consumers with experiences via multiple channels. The industry is at an incredibly exciting moment in its history, and 2015 will see it become an even more important consideration for advertisers.

1. Five Top Trends for Out-of-Home in 2015
Real-time OOH gets real with increased adoption
by advertisers
Activating campaigns or adapting creative in real-time ensures greater impact
and relevance to audiences. This is welcomed by consumers with 59 per cent
of Londoners believing real-time DOOH makes brands more innovative and
up-to-date, according to OCS 6. Events, market intelligence or numerous
sources of data, from weather to sales to social activity and more can be
used to trigger the activation of a DOOH ad. Likewise, highly engaging
creative executions can be crafted from real-time data and content sources
with automation and moderation integrated. Both of these real-time
approaches will increase in popularity in 2015 with fully automated
real time OOH trading platforms emerging that allow advertisers
to buy and serve adverts only when a set of conditions are met
at scale.
2
1 £1 out of every £3 in OOH will be on digital
Sustained and significant multi-million pound investment by media owners
over the last five years has driven significant digitisation of the OOH medium.
Digital screens can now be found across almost every OOH environment and
most formats. Posterscope’s consumer study, OCS 6, revealed 88 per cent
of adults nationally claim to notice digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising.
Recent investment has focused on accelerating digitisation of the medium
outside London, making the UK a world leader in DOOH. This will result in
increased advertiser spend pushing DOOH past the one third share
of total OOH spend in 2015 for the first time.

2. 5 OOH media becomes point of sale for the mobile mall
Today’s consumers can browse and buy at speed and the online shops are
always with you wherever you go. M-commerce is ever increasing, evidenced by
mobile purchases growing by a third year-on-year on 2014’s Black Friday and
Cyber Monday. To make the most of this behaviour brands will need to make
a greater effort to prompt and influence this purchase behaviour. At the same
time the whole process is becoming more frictionless with solutions such as
Apple Pay and Amazon Firefly reducing the number of clicks involved.
OOH is fast becoming point of sale for the mobile mall and using
data from partners such as EE it is becoming even easier to find
the right times and places to influence this behaviour.
4
Brands will take an increasingly ‘location first’
approach to cross-channel planning
From a macro perspective, geographies will be increasingly aligned in
the planning process across OOH, TV, display, search, mobile and other
channels. At a hyper-local level this means consideration of physical inventory
such as proximity OOH and also digital location-based opportunities such
as geo-fenced mobile display, targeted SMS, Facebook local ads and
others. ‘Location first’ thinking will become an essential skill in
constructing integrated cross-channel campaigns.
Mobile behaviour data will increasingly
inform OOH planning
The UK consumer in 2015 will own at least four connected devices.
Increasingly this will include wearable and internet of things (IOT) devices.
These connected devices will produce progressively more granular data
about people’s behaviour out of the home. Recent results show a 200 per
cent increase in terms of ad awareness, purchase consideration and online
searches when OOH is planned using mobile data. Posterscope’s unique
partnership with EE supplies anonymised and aggregated group level network
usage data, which provides an understanding of location-based mobile
behaviours and hotspots in relation to OOH sites. This data is incorporated
into the Posterscope ‘Planner’ app. Analysis of new location-based data
sets such as mobile & social will continue to uncover previously
unknown value in specific OOH locations.
3