Outdoor advertising is diminishing in effectiveness, like many traditional mediums

Not surprising when you think about the increasing clutter advertising billboards have to compete with for attention.

In the Drive section of the SMH the other day one motoring journo observed: “I went to a suburban shopping district and counted 19 road signs clustered around the first intersection. There were 55 road information messages in about 100 metres. Even when travelling at 40km/h you are left with just nine seconds to read them". In the book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt states the average driver must process 1340 pieces of information every minute.

So recently when a client asked UNO to review their annual advertising media budget we weren’t too keen to recommend continuing to spend several hundred thousand dollars for one poster above the M4.

Old habits die-hard, the CEO drives to work each day and passes that one sign. We couldn’t convince management that for about 20% of the cost of that one sign they could develop an ongoing relationship with their customers using the latest Web2.0 technologies and build a valuable database for future use.

While traditional media companies like Eye Corp continue to sell posters, a medium that hasn’t changed for a couple of centuries, newer more effective alternatives are emerging. (When the price is right.) ROI marketing starts with understanding the real stats.

Innovation in signage

Recently Ryan Simpson of Val Morgan showed me the latest research on their innovative take on signage, large video screens in shopping centres.

While I always take statistics with a grain of salt, the figures reflect the relationship between clutter and proximity to where the purchase can be made. Despite the amount of billboards, busbacks and taxibacks that shoppers must have passed on their way to the shops, almost 50% say they didn’t notice any advertising. 30% remembered noticing billboards, whereas this new moving screen medium within shopping centres was noticed by over 70% of the 1,000 people surveyed by Nielsen research.

Pity I didn’t have those sorts of stats on hand when I tried to talk that client out of spending a large chunk of their budget on that one sign.