You’ve likely seen the headlines — some on our blog — trumpeting the immense pace of growth of out of home ad spending. Cool, you may think. But how big is it going to get?
The deployment of better technology, such as 5G, and the decrease in ad dollars funneled to other media will certainly help fuel ad spending in out of home. Every indication we see points to continued booming growth of the medium, which hit new heights in 2018 and likely did so again in 2019 (final numbers will be out within the next few weeks).
So how high will out of home ad spending growth rise this decade? We looked at a bunch of forecasts and crunched a lot of numbers, and here’s what we came up with.
Factors Contributing to Spending Growth in Out of Home
First, let’s discuss why OOH is seeing such significant gains. Everyone knows other traditional media, like TV and newspapers, are losing ad dollars to digital, and for good reason. Digital does a lot of things that non-interactive media like newspapers and television can’t, like gauge what engages people, target ads very narrowly based on the audience’s social media habits, and retarget with relevant ads over and over.
Well, OOH is interactive, too, in a way no other traditional media is. People interact with billboards, they participate in experiential media campaigns, they stand and applaud for really imaginative wallscapes.
So it figures, at a time when advertisers are all about this interactivity, that OOH would gain favor. (And, of course, there are other factors, too, such as favorable pricing and increasing usage; but interactivity is a big one.)