Clear Channel Succeeds in Capturing OOH Incremental Reach

There have been unprecedented advancements in measuring the effectiveness of an out-of-home ad with Clear Channel Outdoor leading that effort. For Campbell Keller, Clear Channel Outdoor’s Director of Product Development, this initiative is not only best-in-class but also sets a new standard for measuring incrementality and, by extension, attribution.

Incrementality is, according to Keller, the observation and comparison of consumer behaviors from a group that is examined pre and post campaign. It ascertains, as he explained, “how actions changed as a result of the campaign exposure causing new incremental behaviors that wouldn't have been seen as a result of the campaign going live.” It is not simply a lift metric comparing exposed versus unexposed. “It's taking into account other additional attributes that can really paint a picture for a brand where they are actually driving new customer interactions among people that haven't visited the brand before or consumers who were already engaging with the brand but are engaging more so as a result of the media exposure,” he added.

To measure incrementality in an unbiased standardize-able manner, Clear Channel leveraged its RADARProof attribution solution which measures, “offline visitation for a consumer visiting a particular location - what days of the week, what times of the day, how often from a frequency perspective,” as well as online activities such as visits to a particular site or other points of interest. “In thinking about it from an attribute perspective, it depends on what are we trying to measure. We wouldn't model visitation behaviors if the KPI was a tune in, for example. We want to make sure it's customized for each campaign goal.”

The results offer added insights not only for advertisers but also for Clear Channel that prove the value of out-of-home. “There has been higher scrutiny on advertising dollars as a whole and we want to demonstrate how our channel is driving strong outcomes for our brand, especially for new customers, or driving increased number of customer interactions so that we can not only preserve spend but also drive new spend towards our channel,” he explained.

To solidify all insights, Clear Channel has partnered with leading attribution providers who set the pre and post baselines for measuring each campaign and construct the consumer groups. In this way, Clear Channel is not grading its own homework, instead offering advertisers an unbiased study of impact using a range of data and metrics. Keller noted that, “From an upper funnel perspective we've been doing brand surveys,” upper funnel lifts, awareness consideration, intent and where lifts in purchase intent are aligned with an actual lift. “But,” he added, “we're seeing a lot more traction in lower funnel not just on CPG sales lift and purchase panels, but also on automotive purchase and driving spend for new categories like pharmaceutical drug lift as well as sourcing loyalty card data to define pre purchasing behaviors.”

There is also an effort to be able to merge different studies using, “multiple different measurement solutions that drive correlations between two different studies, with two completely different panels,” he stated as well as adding more mobile app based data collections. This is particularly interesting because by using geo location data, it is now possible to match out-of-home exposure with as close to a point-of-sale interaction as possible.

The pandemic has changed old parameters and Clear Channel is pivoting to be able to address new consumer behaviors. “There are now these new behaviors from Covid where individuals might not be interested in sitting in a fast food chain restaurant but actually just picking it up and leaving that location and having that engagement driven through their app,” Keller noted.

With some categories, this pivot has presented some challenges. With credit unions, for example, “the market and consumers have changed. Most new account openings are now happening online versus in person so customizing measurement solutions to be more web based for us obviously has its own set of challenges since you can't necessarily click on a billboard. But being able to showcase how we're still able to drive consumers to a brand new website has been incredibly key for us,” he stated.

When it comes to out-of-home and the use of geo location among other data sets, privacy is pivotal. Keller explained that, “We license aggregated and anonymized persistent location data to understand the consumer movement against our assets. Privacy compliance is at the core of everything that we do. It sets us up for a mobile ad ID that is essentially our currency in the attribution landscape.”

Because of the range of data available, it is possible to glean surprising insights from the results. In a specific case where the advertiser experienced no lift, Keller revealed a surprising takeaway. “We had one particular study where there was no lift at all,” for the campaign. “But we were able to identify that out-of-home did a great job in increasing competitive share for the CPG product. We were able to steal market share from other competitors and we were able to drive new customers.” The surprise was, “understanding that lift does not (necessarily) determine success of a campaign. There are a lot of ways you can tell a story and how effective a campaign is through other aspects of conducting measurement and attribution,” he shared.

Challenges are no different in out-of-home than it is in other platform measurement. “Scale – the challenges of scale and wanting to make sure that the measurement that you're running is statistically significant across the different attributes,” Keller stated. “Those are challenges we're going to continue to face with changes in the location data landscape, where individuals are consenting or not consenting to their ID and location services being shared.” The secret is to monitor the privacy landscape and guarantee that all measurement studies are in compliance with state and federal laws.

For Keller, the goal is, “to continue to offer solutions for advertisers to quickly make decisions, especially among sales channels like programmatic out-of-home that drive strong results,” as well as to increase all measureable touch points and align out-of-home with other platforms on both a national and local level.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com 

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

Maximizing the Impact of Out of Home Measurement

Where is out of home (OOH) headed in a world of media fragmentation and greater competition for consumer attention? 

The ARF helped to answer these questions at their Maximizing OOH Impact event this week. A roster of participants including Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President, Research and Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor, Christian DeBonville, Director, ESPN Advertising and Marketing Intelligence and Emma Carrasco Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer, Senior Vice President of Global Strategy, National Geographic Society weighed in on how data, technology and creative can all be leveraged to raise awareness, improve branding and efficiently capture the consumer journey.

OOH at a Measurement Inflection Point

According to Barry Frey, Chief Executive Officer, DPAA, “OOH is one of the hottest media today.” He cited three pivotal societal and technological changes have been a boon for OOH. First, we are spending more and more time out of the home. “We are increasingly an active mobile society,” he asserted, “and we are becoming a more urban society.” As mobile phones become ubiquitous, this fuels the ability to track people wherever they go. Second, Frey sees advertising inside the home as “fragmenting at best and declining at worst.” Third, with the addition of digital data capabilities, OOH is now able to count, measure the impact and attribute usage just like the rest of the media industry. This improvement in measurement coupled with a safe, viewable, closed system that has no ad blocking, places OOH on an equal footing with other establish media options.

Data and Technology

The advent of improved technology that results in more valuable data is pivotal to OOH’s growth. The ability of marketers to track the consumer journey with mobile geo location data, for example, has created opportunities and greater confidence in OOH. Nielsen has been very active in expanding its OOH measurement offerings as are companies such as iQ Media which offers visual detection data that includes mood and engagement metrics.

“There are three reasons why mobile is so important,” Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President, Research and Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor noted, “Everyone has a phone and we carry it with us all the time. In fact, 85% of adults have their phone within arm’s reach all the time.” The full consumer journey becomes evident because the data tells us where people are, their routes throughout the day and their possible exposures to billboards. The methodological road has been long one but now refinements in the methodology, such as radius assessments and direction of travel, give the advertiser greater confidence that ads have actually been viewed.

Clear Channel’s case study “not only used mobile data in the planning and measurement of OOH, we also used it to amplify the impact of OOH by retargeting people who have seen OOH ads with mobile ads,” Stevens explained. This has a priming effect where the lift in store visits with and without the additional mobile ads could be compared. “There is a higher lift from people who have seen both the OOH ad and the mobile ad,” he continued, “It is a one plus one equals three effect going on. There is a natural synergy between mobile and OOH.”  Stevens is finding that these results are valuable sales tools for advertisers who may be using mobile but currently do not have an OOH strategy. “An integrated media strategy can yield better results overall,” he concluded.  

Powerful Creative Is a Must-Have

Powerful creative also plays an important role in OOH effectiveness. Emma Carrasco, Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer, Senior Vice President of Global Strategy, National Geographic Society, has developed a Photo Ark Campaign to help raise awareness of the last 12,000 species in captivity before they disappear. “Our partnership with the Outdoor Advertising Association of America enabled us to take this campaign to a whole new level,” she explained, where association members can get more involved in spreading the message. She shared with me that the feedback has “been tremendous,” with support across traditional out of home, digital, transportation, for example.  Social engagement, and its resulting data, has offered a huge, measureable boost in awareness.

Carrasco sees the next five years as a continuation of National Geographic Society’s efforts to build a complete documentation of all of the species in captivity. Currently 7,000 animals have been photographed, but there are still 5,000 left to do. “We want to bring awareness to what happens to society when these species disappear. We might actually have a chance to save some of them.”  Strong creative in conjunction with OOH ad placement and measurement will help propel this worthy cause.

Data Debunks OOH Myths

OOH exposures are surprisingly pervasive. Christian DeBonnville, Director Advertising and Marketing, ESPN, found that “the OOH audience is seen throughout the year, throughout the day and not just the biggest events in bar locations. It is programming that is on in the morning, during mid-day when we presume people are at work or at the gym or other out of home locations where we are seeing significant lifts.”

He noted that agencies and clients are more receptive to giving credit for audiences that are seeing programming and ads outside of the primary residences. The ability to credit the full consumer journey is great news for both advertisers and content creators.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Perfecting Out of Home Measurement: An Interview with Clear Channel’s Andy Stevens.

Clear Channel Outdoor Americas has improved its RADAR OOH (Out of Home) insights and analytics tool by adding Cuebiq’s real-time mobile analytics and location data. The value? Location, location, location. More technically, “location insights and footfall attribution analysis based on aggregated and anonymized mobile location data, to identify audiences exposed to CCOA’s printed and digital billboards,” per Andy Stevens, Senior Vice President Research, Insights and Analytics, Clear Channel Outdoor. Stevens has a deep background in Silicon Valley with stints at ShareThis and AOL and now, at CCOA, he is tasked with developing strategies to drive ROI growth for the company and its clients.

This exclusive interview with Stevens provided details on this ground-breaking initiative:

Charlene Weisler: Please give us an overview of Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR.

Andy Stevens: Here’s the elevator pitch: Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR uses mobile location data to identify the audiences that have been exposed to billboards. There is complexity in how we translate anonymous aggregated location data that comes from various sources like mobile ad exchanges or directly from apps, but fundamentally the goal is to understand the viewing audience, which then allows us to offer better targeting for advertisers because we know which billboards best reach your target customer. It also allows us to deliver measureable results so we can show you what user behaviors the campaign actually generated.

Charlene Weisler: Is Clear Channel the sole partner of Cuebiq’s OOH data?

Andy Stevens: Yes. They work in other sectors but we are their exclusive partner using data for Out of Home.

Charlene Weisler: What is footfall attribution? How does it work and why is it important?

Andy Stevens: It’s measuring the impact that the campaign has on store visits; people physically going into stores. It’s important because, despite the huge transformative growth of online commerce, 85% of what is bought is still bought offline. That’s a stat from the National Retail Federation. So for marketers, being able to measure the impact their campaign has on real world store visits is incredibly important. It’s particularly transformative for businesses where the location is the key signal of intent. Think about a gym; the measure is that people go there. Same for a QSR; for the most part, people visit the restaurant to buy something. We can measure that foot traffic and show if it has been driven by exposure to an OOH ad.

Charlene Weisler: What has been the benefit of adding Cuebiq?

Andy Stevens: When we rolled out Clear Channel Outdoor RADAR early last year, we knew the location data landscape would continue to grow. We designed CCO RADAR to be sure that we could continue to evolve as new data sources became available and Cuebiq represents the next generation of location data. They not only have large scale data – about 60 million devices – but the data is persistent. They continually measure location data so they know where those devices are. That’s really important for OOH because we need to be able to understand if someone definitely went past a billboard to be able to measure the performance of the ad against them. 

So let’s say you are driving from Manhattan to Jersey City and you didn’t open an app on your phone. Traditional location data sources relied on the ad calls from apps, so we wouldn’t have known that that person made that journey if they didn’t open up an app when they got there. With Cuebiq we now have a persistent anonymized data source at much greater scale than we ever had before. And we now offer more martkets, more detailed metrics - cutting the results by demographics, time of day, day of week and we receivethe results more quickly. In the past we worked on a two to three week turnaround. Now it is two to three days. And we have lower costs.

Charlene Weisler: Can you give an example with an advertiser?

Andy Stevens: Let’s take that gym example: 24 Hour Fitness campaign used location data in two different ways – for planning purposes and for attribution. For planning, they had two target audiences – current 24 Hour Fitness customers and competitive gym customers. We used RADAR data to identify which locations best reached those targets and then identifed the best billboard locations in LA and San Francisco for a highly targeted campaign. The measure of success was whether we could drive more visits to the gym for both target groups. After the 8 week period of the campaign, we measured footfall attribution comparing those who were exposed to the ad and those who were not. We saw a 248% lift in visits. That is really impressive!

Charlene Weisler: Will this help facilitate cross platform measurement and if so, how?

Andy Stevens: We absolutely have our eye on that. Marketers need to better understand not just each channel in a silo but how the entire marketing mix impacts performance. The Cuebiq data is a big part of that because it gives us sufficient scale to be able to sync anonymous mobile ad ids with third party data sets. That’s how digital advertising is measured. We are putting OOH on the same playing field.

Charlene Weisler: What are some areas that still need to be added to your system?

Andy Stevens: We’re contunally adding more metrics and more behaviors into CCO RADAR. But we don’t identify people as specific individuals. We  use the anonymous mobile ad id which brings us into the digital data ecosystem. This is how digital advertising has been so successful because it uses anonymous ids. The first behaviors we looked at with CCO RADAR were offline behaviors. Going beyond footfall, we can now measure tune-in or understand what apps they may use by interfacing with third party data sets to enhance our targeting capabilites.

Charlene Weisler: How many markets do you reach?

Andy Stevens: We’re in 43 of the 50 largest markets in the United States and 140 airports, and that includes street furniture and roadside inventory. But we can’t measure moving ads, such as on a bus, because they change location.

Charlene Weisler:  Where do you see OOH measurement three years from now?

Andy Stevens: We know we have great OOH locations and we know we can provide excellent targeting with the largest creative formats, it’s unskippable – all of the inherenet benefits of out of home.What has held us back in the past is that people couldn’t measure outcomes and lacked the sophisticated analytics and behavioral intelligence to establish where to buy. Today we can connect all of the technologies that are being used to measure advertising performance across the board. The more we can do that in the future the closer OOH will be to the level of digital adverising. And we already have a programmatic component  for our digital inventory. We will continue to do that to make advertising easier and easier to buy.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Sharing the Power of Big, Bold, Unskippable Media: A Conversation with Rainbow Kirby

Rainbow Kirby started her career in sports marketing. “I knew little about sports,” she admits, “and I had to be one of the least athletic people involved in a sports team, but I loved the energy of the fans.” 

Her work for the New York Jets lasted six seasons, followed by the New York Islanders. She then moved into publishing, which was just beginning to integrate digital components in 2006. When she saw where the media dollars were shifting, she immersed herself in learning digital, and then taught her print team the basics.  Now, as Director of Marketing Communications at Clear Channel Outdoor, her job responsibilities are tightly matched to everything digital marketing has to offer.

Charlene Weisler: How did you get into Out-of-Home?

Rainbow Kirby: I had gone back to school in 2012 to get my Masters in Integrated Marketing at NYU and found myself putting out-of-home media into all my projects. It was the only medium that still got my attention. I was no longer reading magazines, I had banner blindness and couldn’t remember the last commercial I had seen. When an opportunity at Clear Channel appeared in my LinkedIn feed, I jumped on it. OOH is the only medium that has experienced 24 consecutive quarters of growth. Messages in OOH are unskippable, always above-the-fold and can’t be blocked. They’re big, bold and can be interactive.  With newer digital capabilities, we can share content in real-time, and even broadcast emergency messaging to communities.

Charlene: Tell me about your current job.

Rainbow: I often refer to myself as  “Jill of All Trades.” When you work in sales marketing, everything is interconnected, and that includes our industry communications and event marketing.  I always look for opportunities to share the Clear Channel Outdoor story with new audiences, whether it’s through executive speaking appearances, conferences or partnerships. Storytelling is another big part of my job, from writing recaps and case studies to overall messaging. I helped launch iHeartBillboards.com as a storytelling vehicle that shares content with personality, smart writing and tons of beauty shots. Another big part of what I do is build client relationships with agencies and brands, and industry partnerships with organizations that include the OAAA, ARF and the IAB, where I’m co-chair of the Digital Out-of-Home Task force.

Charlene: Do you blend creative with quantitative analysis?

Rainbow: Yes, you have to. I was one of those people who used to always go with my gut, but when I started diving into the metrics, I found my gut was often wrong. Sometimes I am surprised at which blog posts or case studies have the most views/downloads. But we now use the data to help fuel our content strategy. What’s resonating and what’s not? Data insights give my team a way to measure our own marketing ROI and share it with sales and senior leadership so that we’re always aligned.

Charlene: Tell me about RADAR.

Rainbow: RADAR is our data and analytics suite that helps advertisers create their media plans with more efficiency. It’s about buying media based on desired audience segments, not solely on location. For example, if I want to reach soccer moms, I’ll be able to see which boards over-index for that segment. Those could be boards near schools or playing fields. Or maybe they’re boards near locations you would never think of, but that’s the beauty of data, I don’t have to go with my gut, I have the metrics to back up my marketing decisions. The mobile-OOH connection is constantly evolving and we can now offer planning and attribution tools that have made online media so compelling.

Charlene: It seems like technology has impacted your job.

Rainbow: Definitely. It has given us more insights to make better decisions. We can see how many downloads we get for a specific case study, or how many opens our client email received, and then follow a lead through the sales funnel with SalesForce and HubSpot data. We’ve become better marketers because we can more easily deliver what clients want.

Charlene: In the three years that you have been at Clear Channel Outdoor, what has changed?

Rainbow: A lot of out-of-home inventory was bought by location, and now the thinking has shifted to buying audiences. Great creative will always reign supreme, and it’s not all about digital. You can integrate mobile into static printed billboards. For example, Apple’s Shot on iPhone6 campaign displayed user-generated photos in their creative, and they were beautiful. This campaign took home the Grand Prix last year at Cannes Lions – and it was other people’s photos. Snapchat didn’t exist three years ago, but today, they’re OOH campaigns are so attention- grabbing because they focus on simple, iconic imagery that connects directly with their mobile users. And contextual relevance is just becoming more commonplace with real-time capabilities on digital billboards. A Target campaign pulled real-time data from the sales floor and updated digital billboards with the most popular products in that neighborhood. That’s relevant, localized and just -- really cool. Another newish channel that’s adding value is Instagram. Our billboards receive so much earned media through social sharing, Just recently, Zac Efron posted a photo of himself saying “that dude is staring at me for sure” next to a super-sized image of himself on a billboard in Times Square, and in a matter of hours that one Instagram post had half a million likes. 

Charlene: Can you give me some tips for effective blogs and billboards?

Rainbow: Sure, for blogs :

1. The headline needs to be concise and catchy. Make it newsy and always timely.
2. When writing, have your target audience in mind. Messaging that you’re sharing with potential buyers is very different that the tone you use with consumers.
3. Get ahead of the sales planning cycle. We share back-to-school ideas in June and Christmas in July.
4. Readers love visuals. With an average 8-second attention span – an image is often more effective than a paragraph of copy.  
5. Tag your photo images. This is a common miss for those not familiar with SEO.
6. Consistency is key. When you post frequently you build trust with your readers.

For billboard creative, keep it simple – be bold, be iconic, be cheeky. The cheeky, mysterious billboards get the most shares on social media.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com