MediaWeek paints bright picture for DOOH spend

September 27, 2010 by Dave Haynes

There’s a fairly substantial piece in MediaWeek today about out of home spending, much of it focused on digital.

Interestingly, at least to me, is the article seems to be pretty much talking only about digital, and the people commenting (some with vested interests, mind you) says DOOH is a mainstream budget item.

One reason for OOH’s rising fortunes is a changing perception of its value. “Instead of being a subset of advertising, now we’re being weaved in with other media as a legitimate and validated portion of the media plan,” says Jack Sullivan, a vp and OOH activation director at Starcom USA.

PQ Media’s Patrick Quinn says DOOH is in a “shakeout phase” due to a consolidation of distributors. By distributors I assume MediaWeek means network operators (oddball term). As a result, there will be “a better set of operators with better scale, better content and more cohesive metrics,” he says.

PQ Media, which provides new media data for Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s media forecasts, estimates that OOH will have doubled its share of traditional media ad spend over a 10-year period, to 6.2 percent in 2014. One key reason for that is the increasing number of digital boards. At the end of 2009, there were about 1,600 digital billboards out of 450,000 total boards in the States, Quinn says.

By 2014, Quinn expects there will be 3,700 digital boards. And because they can accommodate multiple advertisers at one time and garner two or three times a traditional board’s CPM rate, that will add to the sector’s overall revenue rise.

Cinema advertising is also among the hottest OOH sectors. Starcom’s Sullivan expects cinema to exhibit double-digit growth this year and increase “nicely” in the next couple of years, thanks to a rising number of lobby opportunities and an increasing number of 3-D-capable screens, which generate higher CPM rates. “It’s basically TV on steroids,” Sullivan quips.