CHANNELS

OOH in the USA

From the NYC subway to Portland, Oregon, marketers are getting innovative with excess out of home (OOH) advertising inventory.

First, the high-level stats: To take one OOH channel as an example, billboard spend had a trampoline-like response to the pandemic: 

• Roadside OOH traffic fell 55% since the first week of March (when the pandemic had its initial surge in the U.S.).
• But between April 19 and 26, billboard traffic rebounded by 26%.

With that quick turnaround, OOH might not be the bargain-basement category some expected it to be during the pandemic. But it’s remained an attractive option for some creative marketers.

Small but mighty

In Portland, COVID restrictions have devastated local brick and mortar businesses. This challenge led one agency to rethink the OOH expertise it has to offer.

Portland indie agency North is offering local retailers free space on tiny billboards around the city. The charitable effort is part of PDX SOS, a Portland organization supporting local businesses. 

• “The original idea for the Tiny Billboards came from an epiphany about the Little Free Libraries in Portland. There are hundreds of them, so we…reached out to the LFL stewards to ask if we could attach them to their little libraries,” said North CEO Rebecca Armstrong in an email to Marketing Brew.
• “Once we'd made a few billboards it also made sense to put them in highly trafficked shopping areas. We're reaching out to all local media that deliver high impressions,” said Armstrong.

Armstrong also noted that Billups—an ad tech company specializing in OOH—contributed free digital billboards to the effort. 

Out of sight, out of mind?

This unique time for OOH extends beyond a charitable effort in Portland to de Blasio’s NYC mid-quarantine. 

As viral videos of crowded St. Mark’s Place bars in New York City circulated in June, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office partnered with creative agency TBWA\Chiat\Day NY to create MTA subway billboards educating New Yorkers on ways to stop the spread of the virus.

• 84% of Gen Z pays attention to outdoor advertising—the same group that also considers themselves less susceptible to the pandemic’s effects, per OOH Today.
• TBWA\Chiat\Day NY designed these MTA ads to be as psychedelic and colorful as possible to catch the eyes of young partiers.

Zoom out: While some marketers pivoted to social platforms like TikTok as lockdowns went into effect, research shows that Gen Z might be less susceptible to digital advertising due to their huge exposure from an early age. 

Bottom line: While it may not seem like an ideal channel during a pandemic, OOH advertising is being used in creative ways to help out struggling businesses and spread public health messages.

BRANDING

A Restaurant Called Bojangles Tries “Modern” Branding

As southern fast food chains fight to win back customers post-lockdown, Bojangles got a rebrand for the first time in its 43-year history.

Bojangles is revamping itself for the digital age:

• It’s transforming its logo from a bulky 3D design to a flat 2D visual identity. The reason? Flatter logos look better on phone screens.
• And until now, Bojangles was “Bojangle’s.” (Or was it Bojangles’?) Apostrophes are fine on restaurant signs and menus, but they can’t be included in Twitter handles or URLs. 

Why now?

As every marketer knows, branding and sales go together like puzzles and people living in studio apartments. 

• 45% of customers expect great design across marketing and sales collateral, per Lucidpress.
• Quality branding is also proven to create customer loyalty and build awareness, even when you’re running short on dollars for glitzy campaigns.

Bottom line: Bojangles 2.0 highlights how the pandemic has accelerated companies' all-encompassing embrace of digital platforms.

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PUBLISHING 

Meredith Eats Some Kroger Cookies

Here are two names I never thought I’d see together: Meredith and Kroger. The media conglomerate and the supermarket chain recently partnered to launch an audience-targeting service. 

The goal is to solve for the end of third-party cookies, which currently fuel much of the digital advertising system. New privacy restrictions mean that publishers now have to hunt for first-party data to replace that third-party info.

How they’re getting it done: 

• Brands can now use Kroger’s data to advertise in Meredith publications like People and InStyle. 
• This could encourage brands to increase advertising in Meredith publications, since they’ll have more stats to measure performance.

Meredith needs advertising $$$ now more than ever. From March to May, an estimated 36,000 U.S. news media company employees had been laid off or furloughed, or had their pay reduced. 

“This advertising downturn has been swifter and more severe than what we experienced during the trough of the Great Recession,” said Meredith’s CEO in the company’s last earnings report. 

My takeaway: This partnership represents just one approach to collecting more first-party data as other publications experiment with different cookie workarounds.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Apple’s longtime VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller stepped down. 
• Publicis Groupe fired exec Tom Goodwin after his tweet about COVID-19 deaths started an agency leader Twitter brawl. 
• Snap is rolling out a music feature à la TikTok this fall.
• ViacomCBS announced plans to launch a unified video ad platform called EyeQ.
• Facebook launched a Messenger chat plugin that allows businesses to reach users who aren’t on FB.

ADWEEK OR ADWEAK?

Which headlines are real marketing news, and which one is from marketing satire Twitter account @ADWEAK? 

1. “Big Tech Beware, Congress Is Learning Ad Tech Lingo”
2. “Trump Campaign Pauses Advertising For Strategy Review”
3. “More Agency Staffers Changing LinkedIn Status To ‘Unemployed From Home’"
4. “Apple Buys Startup To Turn iPhones Into Payment Terminals”

Keep scrolling for the answer.

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ADWEEK OR ADWEAK? ANSWER

C. is the @ADWEAK tweet—they’re probably changing them to say “independent thoughtfluencer.”