Product News | October 11, 2021

Beyond digital boundaries: How to maximize campaign impact with DOOH and social media

In 2023, being active across multiple channels is a top priority – and forward-thinking advertisers are embracing omnichannel strategies that activate both online and offline ads. As these types of integrations expand, the convergence of digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertising and social media is revolutionizing how brands engage with their target audience.

A new study from Ocean Outdoor supports this claim; building on a decade of work with Neuro-Insight, their latest wave of neuroscience research helps establish how DOOH advertising can strengthen campaigns running on social media across KPIs like brand relevance, likeability, and authenticity. If a brand has a social media strategy in the marketing plan, it should incorporate DOOH to make it better and more effective.

The shifting social media advertising landscape

Social networks, from Instagram and Facebook to Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube, have become essential tools for any company hoping to promote its product and service offerings. Social media advertising accounted for roughly a third of all digital ad spending last year and is projected to surpass $207 billion in global ad spending in 2023. However, the rising popularity of this channel has made it more challenging for brands to stand out from the competition. With more marketers investing in social media ads, brands must allocate bigger budgets to their paid marketing strategies to remain competitive. A 2022 report from Hootsuite found that even though marketers were spending considerably more on social media ads than they were a year ago, they saw fewer overall impressions for their investment.

That doesn’t mean social media advertising is going away any time soon, though – far from it. Even with global economic uncertainty and the mounting pressure on marketers to deliver more with less, 52% of organizations say that social media has become more important for them in 2023, and close to half (42.62%) say they’re planning to increase their social media budget in the next twelve months.

Social media has established its place in the marketing and communications mix. But as the social media landscape continues to evolve, marketing professionals must adapt to these changes and be willing to embrace new strategies for engagement. In particular, the mix of digital out-of-home advertising and social media platforms has paved the way for compelling advertising that captivates audiences like never before.

The synergy of DOOH and social media

In an era where consumers are constantly connected and forever transitioning between online and offline experiences, DOOH and social media seamlessly complement and enhance each other. In harnessing the dynamic capabilities of DOOH and the widespread reach of social media, brands can create impactful and immersive campaigns that engage consumers across multiple touchpoints.

Let’s dive deeper and explore how integrating DOOH and social media drives brand awareness, engagement, and business success.

Extended reach

On top of increased competition, today’s marketers must contend with widespread digital fatigue and “banner blindness.” When you also consider that almost a third of global consumers now use an internet ad blocker, this significantly reduces the likelihood that your ad will reap the expected impact. Digital OOH signage, on the other hand, is unskippable and Adblock-proof in addition to being highly visible. And as consumers return to commuting and spend more time outdoors, there’s evidence that OOH advertising is becoming more effective. By integrating these two mediums, media buyers can achieve an amplified presence, engaging online and offline consumers and creating a cohesive brand experience.

The integration of DOOH and social media advertising also allows for cross-platform amplification. Your social media campaigns can be extended beyond the digital realm by leveraging DOOH screens to promote hashtags, user-generated content, or contests. Simultaneously, your DOOH displays can encourage offline audiences to engage with your brand online, creating a continuous and immersive brand experience across channels.

Contextual relevance

Another critical aspect of this synergy lies in the ability to deliver contextually relevant messages, which have been shown to increase engagement, recall, and purchase intent. Social media platforms offer robust targeting capabilities based on demographics, interests, and behaviours. When combined with DOOH, media buyers can leverage data-driven insights to tailor real-time content displayed on digital screens. This enables you to deliver highly relevant and timely messages that resonate with your audience in specific locations, optimizing the effectiveness of your campaigns and enhancing overall engagement.

Expanded creativity & storytelling

Additionally, integrating DOOH and social media advertising unlocks new creative possibilities. DOOH allows for captivating visual storytelling, utilizing large digital screens to showcase dynamic content, videos, animations, and interactive elements. By seamlessly integrating with social media, media buyers can extend the reach of these creative executions and enable deeper interactions with consumers. This combination of visually stunning displays and interactive engagement creates a memorable and impactful brand experience, driving brand recall, loyalty, and advocacy.

Resident Evil’s 3D zombie billboard went viral on social media, with many sharing their thoughts on the ad.

Three ways to supercharge your campaigns with DOOH and social media advertising

By combining the power of both mediums, advertisers can create truly immersive and impactful campaigns that seamlessly bridge the online and offline worlds. But as consumers become more discerning and marketing budgets tighten, standing out and engaging your target audience requires a strategic approach that leverages the strengths of both DOOH and social media channels.

To help you get started, we’ve uncovered three tactics that will help you maximize the impact and effectiveness of your integrated online (social) and offline (DOOH) campaigns. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just venturing into paid media, these tactics will provide valuable insights and practical strategies to elevate your advertising efforts.

1. Cross-channel promotion & amplification

According to Ocean Outdoor’s latest neuroscience research, DOOH primes social media content positively. In other words, people are drawn more toward a brand on social media when they’ve seen the brand campaign on DOOH first. Socially amplified DOOH content shared by brands was shown to strengthen brand familiarity and relevance, and when participants saw the same piece of DOOH content in person and then amplified socially, there was a tangible uplift in brand perception and engagement.

The pre-release campaign for Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ album is an excellent example of the power of this kind of cross-channel synergy in action. Known for her penchant for leaving breadcrumbs for fans to decode on social media, Swift once again engaged her followers in unravelling hidden messages – this time, incorporating billboards as a key element. As the album’s release date drew nearer, snippets of lyrics adorned DOOH screens in prominent locations like New York City’s iconic Times Square, amplifying anticipation and uniting #Swifites worldwide. This innovative approach exemplified how OOH advertising can simultaneously captivate mass audiences and generate widespread excitement across various platforms.

Using a cross-channel approach enables advertisers to maximize the impact of their campaigns, creating a powerful synergy that amplifies messaging, increases engagement, and ultimately drives better results.

Tactics and insights:

Maximize the reach and engagement of your campaigns by promoting your DOOH content on social media and vice versa.
Encourage social media users to interact with your DOOH ads by sharing photos, videos, or experiences related to the campaign.
Similarly, display social media handles and hashtags on your DOOH screens to drive online engagement. This cross-channel promotion generates buzz, expands your audience, and fosters a community around your brand.

Taylor Swift’s OOH promotion for her *Midnights* album went viral across social media.

2. Interactive & user-generated content

Savvy advertisers are beginning to grasp the potential value of earned media generated through social platforms and digital out-of-home. Fortunately for brands, these channels’ integration also seems to occur at the audience level. Thanks to the new creative capabilities of digitized OOH units, today’s DOOH ads have become much more eye-catching. And with that, it’s becoming more common to see people capturing these ads in the real world and voluntarily sharing them with their social media followers.

As an example, Samsung’s Galaxy S23 activation turned a Brussels metro station into an immersive “botanical experience” replete with two giant LED screens, a 40m²botanical flower mat, and a selfie wall that leveraged user-generated content to forge deeper connections with their target audience, both in-person and online.

Advertisers who understand the potential value of these types of interactions can analyze these shares to incorporate better the earned media that comes from each device.

Tactics and insights:

Encourage user participation and engagement by incorporating interactive elements and user-generated content into your integrated campaigns.
Create interactive experiences on social media platforms, such as polls, contests, or challenges, and integrate them with your DOOH displays.
Encourage users to share their experiences, photos, or videos related to your campaign and showcase them on social media and DOOH screens. This approach not only boosts engagement but also generates authentic user content that enhances the credibility and reach of your campaigns.
Analyze these shares to incorporate the earned media from each device better.

3. Contextual (re)targeting & conversion tracking

One powerful tactic seen amongst today’s leading advertisers is to combine the precise targeting capabilities of social media platforms with the location-based targeting offered by DOOH. Doing so enables them to target (and retarget) audiences more effectively on mobile devices while delivering contextually relevant DOOH ads in their physical vicinity. This can be through location-based mobile research, offline metrics like footfall measurement, or cross-channel attribution.

When Samsonite wanted to improve brand awareness and consideration amongst late Gen Zs and younger millennials – a digitally-savvy audience segment that consumes content across multiple social platforms – they took a unique creative approach that extended ad messaging from online media channels to IRL. Their omnichannel Take What’s Yours campaign ran DOOH ads with other media channels, including social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Over the two months, the campaign served over 1 million ads, resulting in nearly 15 million impressions.

Advertisers can also leverage retargeting to reinforce campaign messaging and drive conversions. For example, if someone sees your DOOH ad but doesn’t convert, you can retarget them with relevant social media ads to keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage them to take action. This integrated retargeting approach maximizes campaign effectiveness and boosts ROI.

Tactics and insights:

Leverage social media’s advanced targeting options to reach the right audience online while using DOOH’s geotargeting capabilities to display relevant ads in specific physical locations.
Integrate offline metrics, like footfall measurement, with online measures to see the impact of DOOH in the social space.
Utilise retargeting to reinforce your messaging and drive conversions. By tracking user interactions with your DOOH and social media campaigns, you can identify interested prospects and retarget them with personalized ads across both channels.

Samsonite’s *Take What’s Yours* campaign featured a mix of digital and offline channels.

Want to learn more about the benefits of implementing DOOH into your social and broader digital media strategies?

Contact our team to get started!

Product News | October 11, 2021

How 75Media increased its fill rates by 15% with the Broadsign Platform

2024 was a record-breaking year for out-of-home (OOH) advertising in the United Kingdom (UK). Total OOH revenue for the region grew 7.7%, pulling in a record-breaking £1.4 billion in revenue. While spend is expected to cool down slightly in 2025 at 7.2%, the medium will grow through technological innovations like dynamic digital billboards, interactive displays, and programmatic advertising.

Digital OOH (DOOH) now dominates the OOH landscape, accounting for 67.1% of total spend as brands seek the flexibility and creativity that digital offers. That being said, demand for static OOH – also known as classic OOH– isn’t going anywhere, remaining an effective medium for long-term brand-building campaigns.

With both formats offering distinct benefits to advertisers, the most effective campaigns combine both. This is where UK-based media owner 75Media comes in. As one of the leading providers of large-format static and digital roadside billboards in the region, 75Media makes it easy for brands, big and small, to tap into the power of OOH with the flexibility, scale and simplicity that modern advertisers need today.

How 75Media makes out-of-home simple for buyers

Wanting to provide brands with national reach through large-format, high-impact roadside billboards, 75Media’s sites are strategically positioned in high-traffic locations across the UK. These include key commuter routes and busy city centres, with placements carefully chosen for their proximity to gyms, shopping centres, supermarkets, and other points of interest.

Through a series of strategic acquisitions, 75Media has exponentially grown its network, going from 140 to nearly 1,300 digital and static billboards across the UK in just five years. Today, with just over 1,000 large-format static billboards, 75Media’s hybrid network is about 75% static and 25% digital.

75Media’s static and digital roadside billboards

In addition to their wide-reaching network, advertisers choose 75Media’s network because they make OOH measurable and efficient without compromising on quality. Wanting to deliver real audiences to clients as quickly as possible, 75Media focuses on minimizing the back-and-forth typically needed to book OOH campaigns.

75Media’s network attracts a broad mix of advertisers and campaigns, including major brand campaigns, fast-moving consumer goods promotions, as well as ads for local businesses, the public sector and charitable organizations. On the digital side of its network, there’s exciting momentum toward dynamic creative optimization (DCO) campaigns. Collaborating with their data partners, DOOH.com, Veridooh and Artbot, 75Media has been unlocking new ways for brands to engage with their audiences in real-time.

One notable dynamic, data-driven campaign that ran on 75Media’s network was Nike’s campaign featuring renowned Norwegian professional footballer Erling Haaland for the promotion of its new Mercurial football shoe. Leveraging the dynamic triggers available on the Broadsign Platform, the artwork and messaging of the DOOH ad would dynamically update whenever Haaland scored a goal during a match.

How Broadsign makes it easy for 75Media to run its network

One platform to efficiently scale, manage, and sell their digital and static out-of-home inventory

75Media has been using the Broadsign Platform since day one. Operations Director Alex Simpson—one of 75Media’s founding directors—had previously used Broadsign at his former company and saw first hand how reliable and effective the platform was. So when 75Media launched in 2020, continuing that partnership was a natural choice. And with their significant growth plans, they needed a platform that was capable of seamlessly scaling alongside their business.

In addition to the platform’s robustness and reliability, 75Media chose Broadsign for its content and network management capabilities. The manual work typically tied to campaign scheduling, booking and execution is now automated, freeing up the team’s time to focus on enhancing advertisers’ experience with OOH.

Moreover, managing their static and digital assets through the Broadsign Platform not only kept things efficient and organized, but also provided them with seamless workflows to plan, execute, and monitor static and digital OOH campaigns without unnecessary complications.

“The reporting capabilities provided by the Broadsign Platform for our digital and static assets allow us to be totally transparent with our clients. Being able to show brands exactly how their campaigns are performing in-flight is invaluable.”
Alex Simpson, Operations Director, 75Media

How 75Media optimizes fill rates with Broadsign’s flexible campaigns

Another key capability that 75Media has been leveraging is Broadsign’s flexible selling tools for their DOOH campaigns. This gives them access to our flexible campaign types, which are goal-based and data-triggered, allowing you to deliver more targeted results. In fact, 80% of DOOH campaigns that ran on 75Media’s network in 2024 leveraged flexible campaigns.

The most widely used flexible campaign type was the Campaign Average Share of Voice (SoV). This allows advertisers to define the average percentage of screen time their ad should get over the campaign’s duration. So what makes it flexible? The SoV on each screen can vary day-to-day to accommodate other campaigns requiring the same screens, but the target average SoV across all screens over the campaign’s duration will always be met.

This is made possible by Broadsign’s rebalancing feature, which leverages our optimization engine to modify the pace at which a campaign is delivered to guarantee targets are met. Since adopting these new flexible capabilities, 75Media has seen an increase of 15% in its screen fill rates and has strengthened its client relationships by offering more flexible solutions.

“Broadsign’s rebalancing feature helps deliver our campaigns efficiently while allowing us to maximize the space across our inventory. It’s particularly useful in ensuring everything runs smoothly without daily intervention from our delivery team.”
Alex Simpson, Operations Director, 75Media

The Campaign Average SoV campaign type is particularly useful for markets where flexible buying has not been widely adopted. Buyers can maintain the same fixed results typically obtained through slot-based campaigns while providing you with the operational flexibility to fill your network optimally.

What we can expect from 75Media in the near future

While 75Media will continue to invest in new digital and static sites to extend its coverage and reach, its focus in the near future is to become the most efficient OOH operator in the market. It plans to do this by investing in new technology and automation, removing the medium’s preconceived pain points, and providing the quickest way to buy OOH.

Additionally, as programmatic capabilities continue to evolve, advertisers will grow more confident in data-driven OOH. With demand expected to rise, 75Media is actively exploring new audience analytics and multiple data integrations to enhance targeting and boost campaign effectiveness.