Posters – They make other media work harder

Steve Cox, marketing director at Titan Outdoor, on the elements that go together to make posters a powerful “multiplier” when combined with other media.

I’ve not always had sales in my blood. Many years ago (and by many I mean decades) I was a media planner/buyer in a full-service agency. That ought to give some idea of how long ago it was. Media was on the second floor, Creative on the fourth, and we never spoke much to each other then either. Anyway, I thought planning was a great job. A whole lot better than TV buying at any rate. I’d speak to clients regularly, I’d learn loads about their brands and advertising requirements, and I’d be given a blank sheet of paper on which to come up with an answer (literally – computers were still somewhat thin on the ground back then).

The one key difference back then was that we had fewer “media building blocks” with which to build our campaign solution. This didn’t usually matter that much as we generally only needed one. More often than not that block would be “TV”, or “National Press”, or “Posters”. But seldom a mix of blocks. And “Online” didn’t feature much back in 1990 either. Funny that.

Twenty years later things have changed, and rightly so. The planning mantra today seems to be “the more consumer touchpoints the better”, and I suspect a “one medium solution” would be rejected out of hand by any self-respecting advertiser. I’ve now been selling the benefits of outdoor advertising for ten years, and much as I’d love to tell you that all you need is posters, the truth is that most effective campaigns will need something else as well.

So I’ve learned to accept the hard truth that posters can seldom (though not always) do the whole job on their own. Believe me, it’s been tough. However, of late I’ve increasingly been consoling myself with a new thought. There’s something (or perhaps a number of things) about outdoor that makes it act as a powerful “multiplier” when combined with other media communications channels.

Partly I think this has something to do with the medium’s versatility. Posters do big coverage and big frequency. Most other media only do one or the other. So there’s a natural capacity to add extra consumer contacts where and when it matters most. Outdoor reaches people when they’re outdoors. Not rocket science admittedly, but it’s important. Most other media don’t, which means that most other media can’t reach people when they’re on their way to buy something. So posters remind people to buy whatever it is they read about or viewed last night. Or posters suggest which website people might visit at their desk while having that first cuppa before starting work, or when logging on at home after a day at the office. With posters, the people you reach most are the people you most want to reach. The young, affluent ones who are (generally) hardest to reach with other media. So outdoor once again provides an ideal complement.

So far so speculative. What hard evidence is there to support this intriguing hypothesis? Fortunately there’s plenty, so I’ll just focus on some of the most recent and arguably most interesting. The Outdoor Advertising Association recently commissioned a project from Omnicom’s BrandScience investigating outdoor’s contribution to sales uplift when measured econometrically. Yes, you read that correctly. Econometrics being used to prove that outdoor works? Surely not? But this is indeed the case. The BrandScience vault contains data on around 400 individual mixed-media campaigns, and in-depth analysis of the results has revealed some fascinating learnings. For FMCG brands, the greater the outdoor expenditure the better the ROI it generates. More interestingly, the more outdoor is used, the better the ROI generated by the accompanying TV activity. Outdoor makes TV work harder. Similarly the most recent results (as yet not fully released) indicate that in the Retail sector the greater the expenditure on posters the better the ROI for print advertising when combined in the same campaign.

So posters, whilst admirably effective in their own right, clearly have an ability to increase the returns generated by other communications channels. Or, put another way, outdoor is the medium that works harder than any other medium to make other media work harder!