Agency head: Two-thirds of DOOH media buys are national dollars

February 3, 2009 by Dave Haynes

MediaPost has an article up about DOOH being the Energizer Bunny Sector of media right now, primarily rehashing some of the numbers from the PQ Media study that was released last fall.

What’s new, however, are some interesting comments from the president of Chrysalis, a new division of Agency giant Havas that is focused on this sector.

It’s also equally beneficial for direct response and brand marketing. “It depends on how close you are to the product,” says Connie Garrido. “When you’re close to the product – such as in a retail store – you can push harder. The farther away you are, the more brand-driven your message should be.”

As a young medium, DOOH is primarily regional and lacks scale, despite the fact that 66 percent of all DOOH spending comes from national advertisers. “There are some good networks out there,” says Garrido, “but if you have a network in a coffee shop that is trying to build a footprint with a singular focus, it gets difficult to see where it plays into the plan. It would be smart for these networks to play on the synergies of each other rather than to competitively sell against each other, so you can present the advertiser with a more holistic solution.”

In addition, the capital expenditure for building digital networks is high, resulting in a lot of networks with limited distribution, few of which have a strategic approach to their business model, Garrido feels. 

I don’t think I have seen the 66 per cent figure before, while it seems high it likely makes sense. While there is a lot of chatter these days about hyper-local networks, the buys they get are hard-won and smallish when compared to the buys picked up by Accent Health, Captivate and some of the other networks with big national footprints.   

Photo from AdWeek