Why should you advertise your business with DOOH?

Guide to advertise your business with Digital OOH display screens  

To add a bit of clarification to this question and my answer, here is a quick explanation of what DOOH is and what the capabilities are: What Is DOOH Advertising and How Does It Work? and why advertise your business with DOOH

To sum it up though, it’s basically traditional OOH (out-of-home) advertising (think billboards) with digital targeting capabilities layered on.

Here’s my opinion:

Keep in mind that most of my clients are looking for lead generation or e-comm sales. That’s the perspective I’m approaching this question with.

1. For any business that has a small budget ($10k – $20k hard cost or less per month) for digital advertising, I’d prioritize things like Google Search and Display, Social Ads, and YouTube Ads first. These platforms are going to be far easier to track and attribute the success of your efforts on, and more likely to drive direct leads and sales if set up and managed properly.
2. If you’re doing what I suggested in bullet #1 and you have additional money to invest in digital advertising, I’d next explore whether you can invest those additional dollars into the channels I mentioned in bullet #1. Have you maxed out impression share on Google Ads? Are your social ads reaching your full audience each day?
3. Only once you’ve achieved all that you can by investing dollars into those digital platforms, would I begin exploring additional channels like OOH and/or DOOH. I love the idea of leveraging geo-fencing and other digital capabilities in advertisements out in the world. It’s not going to drive direct leads or sales at anywhere near the rate of the other channels I mentioned, but it’s great for building awareness.

Traditional out-of-home (OOH) advertising shows the same message to the same people. I see the same billboard for a local real estate agent as everyone else does, even if I’m not going to sell a home for another 5 or 6 years and will have long forgotten that agent’s name by the time I do. (That’s an example of an actual billboard I’ve driven by on the Interstate as part of my morning commute for 2 years. I went with a different agent when I did sell my home to move closer to work, and I couldn’t tell you what the name of the agent on that billboard is, even though it’s still up and I drove by it everyday for 2 years.)

However, imagine if the billboards shown at rush hour changed to a product or service more appropriate for morning and afternoon commuters vs. traffic throughout the rest of the day. It’s never going to work quite the same as a one-to-one personalized ad on other digital platforms do, however. It can be narrowed down based on how many people within a specific audience are in one area, but every person who sees the ad is still not necessarily going to be in an audience that it is relevant to.

There are some problems as well. Like the article I linked above explained, this would be difficult to track, difficult to attribute web traffic and leads to (tracking numbers could still make phone call attribution easy), difficult to measure and prove viewability, difficult to integrate into current digital ad buying methodology, and it can’t be priced by CPM because multiple people can view the same ad at the same time. It’s also a premium placement, and thus likely to be more expensive and have a higher minimum monthly budget.

I’d say that if OOH advertising currently makes sense for your brand, your budget, and your priorities, then DOOH is worth exploring, but be aware of the limitations and don’t let someone sell it to you if it’s not a match for your goals and where you need to be prioritizing your budget. Don’t let someone sell it to you as a magic bullet that they claim does more than what it is actually capable of either.