Advertising is a part of our lives, whether we like it or not. In many cases, advertising is the driving force behind the technologies that we are able to use by providing a substantial stream of income to the companies offering hardware and software to the consumer at very reasonable cost. One may argue that the whole concept of Google as a company is based on advertising. In reality it is much more complicated than that, as Google reinvents itself every few years, but digital advertising is always a substantial part of its business.
Since digital marketing is on the rise, more and more pressure is being felt by those earning their income in traditional marketing. In recent years, many insiders have forecast that digital advertising will be the largest advertising platform in the not so far future. If the advertising budget does not grow overall, some other platforms will be seeing significant downward trends.
The OAAA (Outdoor Advertising Association of America) has created a paper that describes the issues with digital advertising in more detail. The organisate says that, by the end of 2017, digital advertising will overtake TV as the largest advertising category in the world. With this outlook come also some questions on the effectiveness of this new platform in comparison to others.
The OAAA represents over 9% of the OOH advertising industry and sets out to demonstrate the effectiveness of its advertising platform versus other platforms. The group created a very complex scheme of advertisements that targeted advertising executives with a specific brand involved in the process. They created a new brand “This ad is real” or Feelthereal.org for this experiment and targetted specifically at advertising professionals, who they directed to a website where they could take a survey. Based on the results of the survey and website traffic, they were able to establish that OOH is a very efficient medium to create brand awareness.
The whole experiment was very well thought out and the results measurement gave them a ton of data to prove their point. One of the real issues with digital advertising is understanding how much of the effort is lost to non-viewable content or how much of the content is viewed by programs rather than human eyes. This particular issue is discussed in great detail in the article.
Overall, digital advertising is here to stay and to be a major advertising category going forward. What advertising planners have to figure out is what all these numbers really mean for the brand paying for the advertising. – NH
