DPAA: 94% Of Media Planners Have Digital OOH Baked Into 2013 Strategy

August 13, 2012 by Dave Haynes

The Digital Place-based Advertising Association (DPAA) has released new survey results that suggest 94 percent of strategic media planners plan to allocate dollars to digital OOH in 2013.

When planners were asked about project spending for 2013, 94.2% said they would include DPb media (worst contrived acronym … ever) in their plans, compared to 86.3 % in the 2011 research.

Other findings:

Just over 40% of planners said that they will fund their digital place-based (DPb) media plans through digital and online budgets, an increase of 75% over the 22.9% who said in the DPAA’s 2011 survey that they would tap digital and online budgets to fund DPb.

Outdoor budgets remained the most popular source for DPb funding, with just over 64% citing this category versus 54% in 2011.

Planners were asked: “When considering digital place-based networks for inclusion in your media plan(s), from which existing media would you fund the ad dollars?” The top five most frequently cited in the 2012 survey were:

• Outdoor: 64.2% (2011: 54.2%)
• Television: 40.7% (2011: 43.8%)
• Digital/Online: 40.1% (2011: 22.9%)
• Experimental/Test 19.8% (2011: 18.8%)
• Zero-Based Planning 15.4% (2011: 19.8%)

Awareness of research tools and services that include data on digital place-based media is increasing among strategic media planners. Among the research services including DPb at the time the survey was fielded, overall awareness grew significantly year-to-year.

Planners’ Knowledge of DPb Research Availability:

• Nielsen: 54.0% (2011: 46.4%)
• GfK MRI: 41.9% (2011: 38.5%)
• IMS: 32.0% (2011: 26.0%)
• Experian Simmons: 31.6% (2011: 23.4%)
• Arbitron: 20.2% (2011: 20.4%)

“Digital place-based media is a sector on the rise,” says Sue Danaher, president and CEO of the DPAA. “The trend lines are all positive, the most notable being a steadily increasing intent to incorporate DPb in media plans and a greater awareness of the availability of research to aid in the planning process. These two trends obviously go hand-in-hand, and their solid upward tracking bode well for our sector’s continued revenue growth in the years ahead.”

The survey was conducted online from May 1-May 29, 2012 by the DPAA among 1,761 media professionals employed at full-service and media service agencies around the country. The response rate was 11.9%, or something like 200-ish.