Late last year, Kellogg decided to stop doing any outdoor advertising. Until then it had accounted for 15% of its total marketing spend, thought to be about $25 million last year, according to Nielsen. The decision was based on mix modelling that identified outdoor wasn’t delivering ROI for the brand.
Kellogg Australia marketing director John Broome has said there is “no reason” for the brand to pick it back up any time soon, despite the outdoor industry making a push to improve its measurement metrics.
“Outdoor in its various different forms – be it large format, small format, transit – did not perform well,” Broome said.
“As a result of that and, obviously, seeing some media channels that did perform well, we decided to withdraw from outdoor and reallocate those funds to the more effective media choices.”
Broome said he is not suggesting that OOH “doesn’t work,” or ruling out a return further down the track, just that the ROI showed it wasn’t an effective medium. It has shifted that spend over to TV and digital and is investing in a major content push for its Nutri-Grain brand.
“Increasingly, marketers need to demonstrate value to the board, You have to demonstrate why your choices and the bets that you are placing on particular media channels are the right ones – and you can demonstrate that with ROI.”
ROI has become a recent focal point of the OOH industry and it’s exactly this that the Outdoor Media Association (OMA) is trying to shift with increased investment in its audience measurement system, Move. It hosted an event last week unveiling a revamp of its software and ways it is exploring measurement methodology for new formats and environments such as train externals.
CEO of the OMA Charmaine Moldrich said Move is the industry’s “most important growth factor”.
“With people using their mobile device to research and curate content, campaigns that integrate OOH’s reach with online – via mobile – will become more frequent in the future, with Move ready to help.”
APN News and Media's street furniture arm, Adshel, has its own ideas on accountability, with plans to install 3000 beacons to its network to sate advertiser demand to knowexactly what is happening with their
customer base.
“A lot of brands are doing a lot of work in-store and online to understand their customers’ behaviour, but the missing piece has been what they are doing when they’re not in those spaces,” Adshel chief commercial officer Mike Tyquin said.
The beacon roll-out will start as a data gathering tool for advertisers – not a way to send push messages. That will come later this year.
“There are very serious inroads being made to the feedback that we have had historically from advertisers that OOH isn’t accountable and isn’t as well connected to their audiences as they would like. It will give advertisers a higher level of confidence in the medium because it will improve their targeting opportunity,” he said.
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