{"id":35822,"date":"2018-06-13T09:53:13","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T16:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=wherenext&p=35822"},"modified":"2025-06-02T05:14:24","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T12:14:24","slug":"out-of-home-advertising-and-location-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"wherenext","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/publications\/wherenext\/out-of-home-advertising-and-location-intelligence","title":{"rendered":"How Billboards Are Challenging Digital Advertising"},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1001,791],"tags":[281,20762],"department":[476812,488812],"wherenext-category":[],"industry":[],"class_list":["post-35822","wherenext","type-wherenext","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commercial","category-digital-transformation","tag-location-intelligence","tag-marketing","department-business-growth","department-emerging-technologies"],"acf":{"short_description":"Billboard and street furniture advertising is growing more sophisticated\u2014using location intelligence to target viewers and measure its audience.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is having its Hollywood moment, thanks to the Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri<\/em>. But in the digital age in which consumers receive targeted offers and messages<\/a> on their smartphones and within their browser windows, OOH advertising might seem to be a bit of a throwback.\r\n\r\nNothing could be further from the truth.\r\n\r\nOOH advertising\u2014the category includes billboards, point-of-sale displays, bus\/vehicle wraps, and street furniture (bus shelters, newsstand kiosks, city information panels)\u2014is enjoying a resurgence. The adoption of new measuring techniques and location intelligence is empowering OOH to keep pace with advertising on digital channels like Facebook and Snapchat<\/a>. Now, OOH advertisers can better understand who is viewing their ads, which helps them target content more precisely than ever before and better measure the ads\u2019 impact.\r\n\r\nA richer array of data sources is at the heart of the revolution in OOH advertising. The ability to measure where and how people move<\/a> anonymously and in aggregate, combined with demographic data, enables the creation of profiles that are extremely useful to advertisers and brands when planning campaigns."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Right","content":"

Top 10 OOH Advertisers in 2017<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nAlmost one-quarter of the top 100 OOH advertisers were from the technology sector, and a dozen advertisers more than doubled their investment in 2017.\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. McDonalds<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Apple<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Geico<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. American Express<\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Google<\/li>\r\n \t
  6. Amazon<\/li>\r\n \t
  7. Coca-Cola<\/li>\r\n \t
  8. HBO<\/li>\r\n \t
  9. Verizon<\/li>\r\n \t
  10. Chevrolet<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\nSource: The Outdoor Advertising Association of America","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Geographic information system (GIS) technology delivers location intelligence by integrating many types of data into visualizations using maps and 3D scenes, revealing patterns and relationships that foster deeper insights and drive better decisions. In the case of OOH advertising, that deeper understanding of aggregate patterns, volumes and demographics lets advertisers fine-tune their messages, making it more effective and attractive to their desired audience.\r\n\r\nBrands and advertisers are getting the picture. The growth in OOH advertising revenue is now outpacing growth in other traditional media globally<\/a>, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA). In the United States, OOH ad spending<\/a> has risen nearly eight years in a row to a total of $7.7 billion, according to the OAAA. As the heroine of Three Billboards<\/em> Mildred Hayes learned, billboards can be devastatingly effective. And thanks to the new high-powered measurement techniques, the vehicle is taking its place next to the most advanced advertising methods.\r\n\r\nBeyond Demographics: Audience Segmentation Gets Granular <\/strong>\r\n\r\nThe OOH advertising market looked quite different back in 1933 when the Traffic Audit Bureau for Media Measurement Inc., now known as Geopath, was founded to help advertisers rate the effectiveness of their billboard ads. Back then, the tracking method involved deploying people in the street with a clicker counting how many cars went by.\r\n\r\nNow, it is possible to match anonymous location data with other data sources through powerful GIS-driven analytics to gain a much clearer understanding of who is viewing the ads. Previously, the best information advertisers could obtain was an audience profile with basic information like age, gender and ethnicity. Now, advertisers can learn much more about who\u2019s passing by, where they\u2019re going, and what makes them tick.\r\n\r\nData from mobile devices, GPS, and connected cars can be fed into a modern GIS to produce a massive population movement dataset that gives a 360-degree view of audience movement without accessing or storing personally identifying details. Leveraging data from these sources yields fine-grained targeting that advertisers and brands have long sought."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Rather than just using OOH media to target a message for females aged 28\u201344, for example, brands and advertisers can target a specific segment called \u201csoccer moms\u201d (with a host of associated demographics down to what the women in the category spend money on and their education levels). Or, a luxury car brand can now home in on locations for five billboards that will touch 80 percent of the population. Even more refined segmentation is possible\u2014high-earning Millennial professionals who own an iPhone X, for example\u2014and catching on.\r\n\r\nHaving this level of granularity makes it possible for advertisers to be more strategic in their planning and connect to other media channels including online or addressable TV or mobile advertising. They can examine the movement of product by ZIP code or social engagement and discover correlations that would not have been possible to see before. The Holy Grail: Tying this data into actual sales of the products being advertised. Those close to the industry say that day is coming.\r\n\r\nPowered by Location Intelligence \u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\nOne company offering this type of insight with the help of GIS is Citilabs. Through partnerships with data providers, Citilabs creates location intelligence<\/a> by running high-powered analytics on cellular data, GPS tracking data, and demographics. The result, according to Michael Clarke, the company\u2019s president and CEO, is an advanced audience metric system for the OOH industry.\u00a0Citilabs provides a critical component used for creating unique audience profiles in the US OOH industry through Geopath.\r\n\r\nThis next level of analytics represents a breakthrough, Clarke says. Until very recently, OOH customers received a traffic count that was typically done by a state or local department of transportation; it would take many days or even weeks to determine how many cars went by. Those counts were often not taken near the relevant OOH panel, and they quickly became obsolete.\r\n\r\nWith that limited data, advertisers were missing the story line, or location intelligence, of the people who passed by the panels\u2014including such contextual insights as where were they traveling, where were they coming from, and whether they were going shopping."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":35812,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Now, advertisers who opt for advanced audience measurement receive a host of information about those vehicles and the people in them. \u201cWe give them hour-by-hour information, what neighborhoods people live in, where they are going from and going to,\u201d Clarke says. The data includes the type of day (Monday through Thursday is one bucket, Friday is another and the weekend is a third). There is a lot of information about what is happening by location.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe get the latitude and longitude and a time stamp as people move around,\u201d Clarke says. That data is then matched with where these people live at the aggregated, anonymous U.S. block number (so no personal addresses are retained). The system also collects all the available traffic counts from government sources, which currently number over two million. Being able to leverage this data is very important to the industry, which wants to know, \u201cHow many eyes have looked at this panel?\u201d he adds.\r\n\r\nA Sophisticated Way to Measure Value<\/strong>\r\n\r\nNew measurement techniques and the wealth of information they yield represent a breakthrough in what OOH advertising companies can to offer brands, according to Mark Costa, chief digital officer, for outdoor advertising giant JCDecaux North America."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Left","content":"

    OOH Growth Categories <\/strong><\/h2>\r\nWithin the top revenue categories, those with the greatest growth increase in 2017\r\n