“(The research) challenges people to question how people may have thought about Out of Home and the role that it can play in a communication strategy. It’s about that more granular understanding between passive and active and how you can use that to further optimise your out-of-home campaigns,” Christian Zavecz, chief strategy officer of QMS, told Mediaweek after presenting the findings from a new report, in partnership with Dr Karen Nelson-Field of Amplified Intelligence, on day three of SXSW Sydney.
The results from its global-first research explored the role human attention plays in out-of-home (OOH) environments, which debunked the myth that OOH is a glance-only medium and showcased how brands can leverage the attention flywheel to maximise their OOH investment.
It revealed OOH ads scored an average of 12 seconds of total attention.
The data also found that 90% of the digital outdoor media company’s sites tested by Amplified Intelligence secured more than 2.5 seconds of active attention, which is the global threshold for something to be committed to long-term memory. It also revealed that OOH was 5.9 times more likely to deliver above the attention memory threshold than other digital channels.
The initial phase of the research included 11 different advertiser categories on 12 large and small format sites in Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast and captured a significant sample size of 1.23 million – the single largest sample collected by Amplified Intelligence globally.
On the research, Zavecz said there has been a trend among clients to invest heavily in out-of-home, driven by digitisation, which helps drive greater attention metrics.
“I think there’s always the argument around reach. Reach is important, but what we’re trying to do is challenge and not have so much emphasis on these legacy metrics because they’re only one dimension of the possibilities within a medium. Attention is so critical for driving outcomes that it needs to be more and more prevalent in consideration from clients.”
A wide cross-section of the industry was present for the presentation, from agencies to clients and competitors. For Nelson-Field, she said that she hoped they took away her point of reducing or getting rid of silos between media and creatives.
“They’ve worked quite separately and have done so for 20 years; I think it’s a really important point now that they (media and creatives) both have to work together to understand this stuff and build media strategies that support the creative.
“Make the chicken and egg work together rather than having them separate… Brands need to look for brand growth mediums as well as performance marketing mediums.”
Nelson-Field added that she hopes attendees also understood that “not all reach is equal.”
“The user experience is truly how you interact with different platforms. I don’t think everyone expects that someone would interact differently with an outdoor site, but clearly the data show that you do.
“For me, the information says you need to understand what the (attention) decay looks like for each platform because it plays a huge role in the success of your ads.”
QMS and Amplified Intelligence will continue to build on their Attention-based research study, adding more markets, more formats and more modes. Zavecz said the research will cover more locations, more markets, more formats, and more modes of transport.
“What we’ve done today is really around the initial phase of discovery and validation. Now it’s about expansion and making it even more practical and usable,” he said.
Nelson-Field said: “The other thing I would like to do, is have some more nuance around brand assets and testing the strength of them across different sites and being able to help customers build better creative relative to site choice.”
Zavecz concurred and said: “We talk about the message, the media, and the moment, and it’s so critical. The more understanding that we can give holistically to the effectiveness of that out of home, the better.”
–
Top image: Greg Kearney, Thad King, John O’Neill and Dr Karen Nelson-Field