Intro to out-of-home
I know the home page grabs attention by screaming “billboard” everywhere, but truthfully that’s only a small part of what out-of-home (OOH) advertising is.
In reality, any advertising you see outside the home can be considered OOH advertising. Why? Because it’s in the name. Let me give you a few examples of OOH that is *not* a billboard:
Sponsored T-shirts, pull-up banners, coffee mugs.
Planes flying banners.
Car wraps.
Bus stops
Street furniture (benches, bus stops, vertical panels in urban areas)
A lot of these are static. And that means, they’re either printed, painted or otherwise semi-permanent ads that essentially stay there for some extended duration. In the case of most dedicated advertising space, this is typically a month or one lunar cycle.
The disadvantage for smaller businesses is that committing to a month or longer of outdoor advertising gets expensive, quickly.
That’s where digital out-of-home becomes a valuable innovation. Instead of static OOH sites that are semi-permanent, digital OOH (or dOOH) sites consist of an LCD or LED screen that can change content without hiring someone to re-paint it each month.
But being able to forgo the lengthy commitment isn’t the only advantage that dOOH offers. In fact, digital can be used to save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in running cost simply because you are in full control of when your ads are shown to the public. If you know when people are most receptive to your message, why advertise outside those times? With digital, the choice is yours.
Of course, that’s not all. One of the huge advantages of dOOH is being able to customise your message to suit the current context. In fact, you can change it whenever you like. For example, you can change your message after a major sporting event to suit the winning team. That would definitely not be possible (at least, affordably) with a traditional ‘static’ placement.
What’s more, many dOOH sites allow you to go beyond fixed images to dynamic video (and audio) content. This was traditionally the remit of TV and digital online advertising, and now you can reach audiences when they’re away from their home or even when they’re off their mobile phones.
So, how do you get started with a dOOH campaign? Well, here’s where CAASie.co comes in.
In a nutshell, CAASie is doing to billboards what Booking.com did to hotels, but in a slightly different way. She’s basically a website that lets you plan, create, and run a dOOH campaign with a few clicks.
Remember how I said that dOOH lets you customise your message, deliver it at the right time, and save you money? That’s exactly what CAASie does. In fact, you can hand pick the screens (or, ‘boards’, as we call them), decide what message you want to put on them, schedule them to specific times of day and deliver them all from the comfort of your laptop. So, you can take even the wildest ideas and turn it into a dOOH campaign without having to break your wallet.
