The Medium You’ve Been Searching For

Last week saw the OOH industry come together in collaboration on a piece of research called The Point of Search. This shows that mobile searches made while out of the home are much more likely to lead to a purchase and critically, that OOH ads play a role in triggering the search.

Being a joint industry currency we are an advocate of pan-medium collaborative research and this study - conducted by Clear Channel UK, Global, JCDecaux and Posterscope - does a great job in adding context to Route’s own audience numbers.

While Route can tell you that 97% of the population will see an OOH ad each week, that 82% see a digital screen and that there are 4.5billion digital advertising impacts to be enjoyed on the streets (and in malls, stations, airports, motorway service areas and supermarket car parks) of Great Britain this is where our remit ends.

The Point of Search research provides context to the medium’s already unparalleled cover figures. It demonstrates that through careful creative optimisation, brands can increase the likelihood of stimulating mobile search among those out and about. It also quantifies that OOH mobile searches are 38% more likely to end up in a purchase - underlining the medium’s effect on activation as well as its traditional brand building role.

The increased purchase likelihood may be linked to the way people are exposed to and see OOH ads. If we look at the distribution of the digital impacts through the day (by daypart) and that of OOH mobile searches you see significant parallels - over 8 in 10 OOH searches and digital impacts happen before 7pm.

It’s also possible that the early and late DOOH exposures are acting as both the priming to lunchtime searches then as a nudge to purchase with the secondary later exposure. This is great contextual piece which helps improve the understanding of one of the roles of OOH and how it can ‘activate’ audiences.

Here you can find a one-page summary of the findings.