While summer in Australia conjures up images of heat shimmering on tarmac, cold beer, sport and legions of people roving the great outdoors, advertisers are still under-spending in outdoor advertising at the beginning of the year, and some are only now realising its potential beyond branding campaigns.
Network Outdoor CEO Brendon Cook said the softening in January is reflective of campaign cycles and the fact that the majority of budgets are spent in the first half of the financial year.
“January tends to be a bit lighter with outdoor, [which is wrong] when you consider that people are moving around in cars more in January than any other month in the year,” he said.
“Outdoor has traditionally got a lot of clients who are supporting a television strategy or a branding strategy. A lot of clients are only just starting to discover outdoor from a retail or direct response point of view and that’s probably the area we’re moving to. Then there are also a lot of clients now recognising that they can use outdoor as a standalone medium.”
Coming into season
Cook said, however, more clients are increasingly appreciating the seasonality of the market, with clients exploring outdoor in the first quarter, where they might have previously used magazines. He said brands such as diet companies and multivitamins are taking advantage of the new year’s resolution market, particularly through shopping centre media.
In contrast, across the board, the last quarter of 2006 was a boon for the outdoor industry – the lead-up to Christmas provided the anticipated lift to all media.
According to the latest figures compiled by KPMG for the Outdoor Media Association, each segment of the outdoor industry showed a year-on-year increase for the fourth quarter of 2006, with a 7.1% average rise.
And while January tends to be softer for the industry, overall growth rates for outdoor easily outstrips those of other traditional media.
But are advertisers taking full advantage of a relatively uncluttered environment to launch new campaigns and experiment with the latest technology available?
Pepsi certainly set the benchmark for experimentation with outdoor when it diverted its entire television budget into a summer outdoor campaign which lifted the soft-drink marketer’s share in one of the most competitive markets.
Austereo uses outdoor regularly and has just launched a campaign for its 2Day FM Hamish and Andy drive show using “live” boards with the show’s tagline “Need a lift home?” on the streets of Melbourne.
Austereo group marketing director Jeremy Macvean said using outdoor has allowed the group to experiment.
“We do use it quite a bit. It’s a really great fit with radio because of the time of radio consumption when people are driving their cars. Also, using out-of-home has allowed us to drive a lot of innovation [in that medium] – being the first radio station to use these boards, the first radio station to use sound bus shelters which actually had the breakfast show playing through bus shelters. And in Brisbane we’ve actually had interactive bus shelters where people can stick their head in amongst the breakfast team.”
But he said it’s not always the outdoor companies pushing the envelope. “There’s a fair amount of innovation in out-of-home, but I wouldn’t say heaps. It’s selecting the right ones when they arrive and there are some we don’t proceed with, absolutely, we wait for the right opportunity that fits with our message.”
More traditional outdoor marketers are using the summer season to explore new technology and variations on outdoor.
Street furniture company Adshel has worked with Coca-Cola brands Coke Classic and Coke Zero this summer with electroluminescent paper, which allows different parts of the site to be illuminated.
As much as this helps the outdoor companies secure more business, balancing the cost and efficacy of new technology is a challenge, according to Adshel CEO Steve McCarthy.
Fresh deliveries
“The media agencies always want something new. The real issue for us with a lot of this stuff is making sure we can deliver. We’ve had some great creative ideas put to us, but the capacity to then actually deliver that on the street and make sure it delivers a consistent quality is one of the reasons why in some instances we have to go through a rigorous testing process.
“It means that the environment can be pretty rough and demanding and the last thing you want to do is come up with some great idea, put it on the street and then it lasts 24 hours if a campaign is going to run for two weeks,” McCarthy said.
It’s not just new technology pushing the bounds of what’s achievable in outdoor, though. Network’s Cook said it has worked with Unilever brand Splice on an outdoor campaign for summer, but has extended the traditional offering.
Along with the outdoor signage, Network has built a cabana to travel to the beach and offer consumers an experience of the brand as well as giving it exposure.
“Network sees itself as an away-from-home business, rather than an outdoor business. Outdoor implies a physical product, in my view. There are other ways to connect with your consumer when they’re away from home… we’re building away-from-home programs,” said Cook.
