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How To Mount an Effective Outdoor Advertising Campaign
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The How-To Business Book
11/20/2000
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Cruising down the interstate, you spy your company's billboard blaring its big, beautiful message - what an ego trip!
But that's not the reason you should consider outdoor advertising for your business. Here's a better reason: It's effective.
As with undertaking any advertising investment, business owners need to begin with a clear understanding of who your target audience is. That can be defined geographically - where they live - as well as demographically (age, gender, income, education, etc.).
Outdoor advertising can be effective on both levels. Outdoor-advertising professionals keep close tabs on the demographic characteristics of people who travel on different highways (as well as when they are most likely to be traveling on them, and in which directions).
There is a high positive correlation between time spent traveling on highways and both education and income, reflecting the fact that managers, professionals and executives aren't chained to Dilbert-like cubicles. In part due to their mobility, this group is less dependent than the general population on mass media such as TV for information. No couch potatoes are these folks.
That makes them hard to reach via traditional broadcast media. That's why outdoor can be a highly effective rifle to bag these moving targets.
But most advertising campaigns, of course, are not either-or affairs. And outdoor professionals say billboards can be a highly efficient means of reinforcing campaigns in other media. Outdoor works especially well hand -in-hand with radio: The listener who hears your radio message, then sees it, very likely has gotten a healthy dose of your message.
Different kinds of billboard messages work for different geographic targets. Commuting patterns - on Connecticut's interstates, for example - are well established and documented. Also, they change very little over time. That allows the advertiser to choose billboard locations with proven track records for reaching desired audiences.
Of course, the interstates are teeming with long-distance travelers as well as commuters. That's why restaurants, hotels and other travel services, in particular, are active outdoor consumers, since they find it simple to track the link between delivering the message and welcoming a new customer. And in travel-services businesses generally, that link tends to be immediate and quantifiable.
But even if you are successful in identifying and securing the perfect locations to reach your desired audience, it won't matter unless you can craft an effective message. Copy is critical, because the average viewing time for any single billboard is only about seven seconds. That's your window of opportunity, and you had better make the most of it.
So your message needs to be simple. And concise - experts say seven words is the absolute maximum you should employ (although we can all think of contrary examples). Some highly effective campaigns have employed no words at all.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and a good graphic can not only attract the eye, but lead it through to the key selling proposition of your message. And the eye tends to be more interested in shapes than words; shapes that protrude off the sides or top of a billboard tend to be interesting as well.
Then there is the issue of color, which has been the subject of s surprising amount of scientific inquiry in the advertising field. The color yellow tests very high for impact (which may be why it's the preferred color for highway signs). But as a color, yellow doesn't “play well with others,” and working colors other than black in with it can be tricky.
Now that your message has captured the motorist's attention, what will he/she do with it? Recall is a critical - if not the critical - measure of a billboard's effectiveness. Studies show that nearly three-quarters of billboards within a driver's field of vision are at least noted by that person, but only slightly fewer than half (48 percent, to be precise) are fully read. In between those two numbers are billboards with poorly thought-out messages, bland graphics or copy-heavy design.
Repetition is key to the effectiveness of all advertising, not just outdoor. That's why it's important to see your campaign through for a sustained period. Auto-dealers are particularly active consumers of outdoor advertising. And those who get the best results from it are those who go the distance. It's not difficult to see why: On any given day, most of us are not in the market for a new car; but when the time comes, we're much more likely to shop for it at a dealer whose quality or value statement has been imprinted on our brains - over and over again.
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