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.