Out-of-home (OOH) advertising has seen a meteoric rise in recent years – rising from 4-5 per cent of ad spend to 10-11 per cent of ad spend. Speaking to B&T, QMS CEO John O’Neill outlines his plans to move this up to 20 per cent.
Picking Up A Percentage Of Revenue From TV
One of the areas where OOH could take ad spend from is TV, O’Neill said.
“If we look at TV, there’s a fair bit of leakage there and confusion around the audience dropping off. So there are significant amounts of money that are falling out of that category”.
Whilst the people in TV are “smart operators” who “will work harder on the content or work harder on streaming” and “other ways to keep revenue there”, they will still need to “cut back significantly”, he said.
“I think they are forecast to decrease again.”
“We’re hoping by forms, quality assets, immediacy, digital, we can pick up a percentage of that revenue”.
There’s No Doubt That Demand For Digital Will Continue
When asked what will be driving demand for OOH, O’Neill said there is no doubt that the “digital phenomena will continue”.
A focus on “more quality asset development” will create more demand than there has been in the past.
“We’re going to focus heavily on developing new large format stuff in this market. So you’ll probably see about 30 new development locations and probably around 60 to 70 per cent of them will be in New South Wales.”
The impact of this will be felt when the Olympics happens next year, he says, “we’ve got a partnership with both the Olympics and the Paralympics”.
“So you’ll start to see some great storytelling around brands and partners and some of the athletes and we’ll be able to have live medal tallies and success stories. So it’ll definitely be digital. And it’ll definitely be new assets”.
Extending Out Into Regional Areas
Building on Move and Move 1.5’s success in building demand for OOH by measuring its impact, O’Neill says this model will be extending out to regional areas “where previously there hasn’t been measured”.
“From our perspective, we’ll try to play above the curve there or operate in front of the curve and use Performance plus, which is almost like a guaranteed position like the TV stations do like post analysis”.
Using third-party data to track the ads will give clients more confidence, he said.
