2012 was a strong year for the OOH medium. With the exception of online, it exhibited the most significant growth across all media – more than 9% year on year.

The Olympics was a major contributor to this growth, borne out by a 25% year-on-year increase in Q3 revenues. Such exceptional performance

in 2012 will be difficult to match during 2013; indeed we predict a contraction of -3%. Yet there is significant momentum in the OOH market, and the headline figures will still represent strong underlying growth.

2013 promises to be a big year in OOH, with much to look forward to. Our audience is growing, cutting-edge new

audience insight and research is going live, investment in state-of-the-art infrastructure is set to offer unprecedented opportunities - and digital innovation is helping to deliver more flexibility and creativity across the board.

Here, then, are the key things that will shape the months ahead...

The Posterscope View: How OOH will evolve in 2013Overview

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Busy lives mean more time on the move. As each key transport category continues to grow, the audience for OOH advertising is expanding significantly – and the emerging ecosystem of digitally-enabled media, content, and experiences presents a massive range of new opportunities for brands.

In the UK, car traffic rose by 0.4 per cent to 240.7 billion vehicle miles in 2011, while there were 5.2 billion bus passenger journeys (up by 0.6 per cent), and on the rail network, journeys were up by 8 per cent.

London Underground is carrying more people each year. The total in 2011 was 1.1 billion, and it was used by up to 4.4 million people each day during the 2012 Olympic Games. Bus use is increasing in London, which now accounts for half of all bus passenger journeys in England.

Air traffic also grew strongly in 2011. London’s airports passenger numbers increased by 5 per cent, while across all UK airports, the number of passengers was up by 4.1 per cent. Globally, international passenger numbers were up by 6.6 per cent overall last year, with 70 per cent of all airports recording a growth in traffic.

As we go about our daily lives, we’re constantly connected. It’s estimated that global internet usage will more than double by 2015 - and most of those users will be mobile. Adults across the developed world spend more media time on mobile than on newspapers and magazines combined.

Consumers are using their smartphones as a primary device for personal tasks during work hours. Increasingly, the connected consumer is browsing, shopping and sharing in the OOH space.

Mobile works best when it is integrated. Increasingly, we are finding ways to combine traditional, online, and mobile channels to create immersive “360-degree” campaigns.

2013 will see the humanisation of technological innovations in OOH, enabling us to create campaigns that are solely designed around people and not platforms. Three areas of OOH innovation which we think will evolve in this way are Near Field Communications (NFC), live digital OOH (DOOH), and the continuous integration of online with offline experiences.

The number of NFC-enabled consumer devices on the market quadrupled in 2012, several brands launched high-profile advertising campaigns supporting their NFC products, and now more than 140,000 contactless terminals are installed across the UK, most notably in all 8,500 of London’s buses. While last year saw NFC chips trialled in a variety of OOH settings, and even embedded in beer mats, this year will bring scale.

More people, more OOH time

Constantly connected lives

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“Increasingly, the connected consumer

is browsing, shopping and sharing in the

OOH space”.

“Globally, international passenger numbers were up by 6.6 per cent overall last year, with 70 per cent of all airports recording a growth in traffic.”

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2013 marks the moment when digital becomes the industry standard. The overwhelming majority of investment by media owners this year will be in the creation of new DOOH estate – offering a dynamic new environment for advertisers.

While many new sites and upgrades will be concentrated in and around London, cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool are also to see significant DOOH footprint, spearheaded by Ocean, Signature and Mediaco.

At Chiswick in west London, Clear Channel is creating two double-sided digital towers by the side of the A4-M4 link, and plans to expand its 100-strong, city-wide, digital six-sheet estate.

At Waterloo station, JC Decaux is to introduce the world’s largest digital screen, and the company’s Cromwell Road Digital Gateway, also in west London, already consists of eight digital screens.

CBS, meanwhile, is developing a series of landmark sites on the London underground network for digital content, and Primesight is investing in interactive cinema screens.

After successful NFC-enabled campaigns by Sony Mobile (1,200 six-sheets) and Kit Kat (3,000 six-sheets) in 2012, many OOH media owners have already integrated the technology into their existing networks, such as Clear Channel’s deployment of NFC on 10,000 six-sheets across Britain, Eye Corp’s “amplify” platform in airports, and JC Decaux’s Touchpoint product that is deployable across much of its estate.

Not only does digital technology offer new levels of flexibility for the buying, trading and planning of OOH, it also makes OOH the most dynamic and immediate medium available to advertisers, and offers a wealth of opportunities for creativity in public spaces. Nowhere is this more relevant than in airports, which provide the perfect environment and dwell-time for interaction with consumers. In particular, complementary technologies such as touchscreen and NFC enable richer, deeper and more personal connections with air travellers, as well as providing an important new channel for data capture. Examples in 2012 included: Canon, which ran an NFC-enabled digital screen campaign at London Gatwick to promote its E650D digital SLR camera; JP Morgan, which installed large-format

Digital: the new industry standard

A new era of flexibility

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“At Waterloo station, JC Decaux is to

introduce the world’s largest digital screen.”

“Complementary technologies such as touchscreen and NFC enable richer, deeper and more personal connections with air travellers.”

touchscreens in airline business lounges; and Tesco which turned digital screens into interactive fridges, where passengers could order household essentials via the Tesco app, to be delivered to their homes at the end of their trips.

PSI has been a pioneer in this area, from the Total F1 Experience which moves from airport to airport across the globe following the Grand Prix, to the Dell ‘Where Are You Flying Today?’ zone in Heathrow. They have also introduced the Credit Suisse iPad stands at London City Airport, which passengers can use while waiting for their flights.

Through scalability, these types of activity can establish brands as being synonymous with a specific service for air travellers, in the same way as HSBC has achieved with its investment in branded aerobridges.

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The live, real-time digital OOH that came of age in 2012 will evolve and grow in 2013. High-profile campaigns from Eurostar and Channel 4 have emphatically demonstrated the value of live creative, which by its nature is more targeted and relevant to the audience.

The new LIVEPOSTER platform allows for the publication of digital content to multiple digital OOH networks. It has unlocked a wealth of opportunities for digital OOH. Advertisers can now embed their data into broadcast digital content, or create dynamic infographics. Content from any social network can be instantly integrated into digital OOH to form a seamless bridge between the online and offline world.

Already, LIVEPOSTER enabled McDonald’s to serve user-generated content aggregated via Facebook to eight different digital OOH networks (including its own Piccadilly Circus screen) in real-time.

Real-time content

Real-time data

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6Amid all the buzz about “big data”, it’s a revolution of two halves: data enables us to measure effectiveness with more accuracy than ever; and it makes it possible to create and deliver content that’s precisely tailored to the audience, in a real-time context.

2013 will be a year of further progress and evolution; we are moving from a period of trying to understand different technologies, to interpreting the data of how people are actually using them, and acting on these insights.

At Posterscope, our planning process is mining these data sources to create accurate, real-time evaluations about the demographics, geographies and attitudes of our clients’ consumers.

Through the paid-for social monitoring tool Sysomos alone, we have access to more than 1.3 billion documents - including tweets, blogs, new stories and Facebook updates. As more campaigns are analysed, the effect OOH has on social media is becoming increasingly understood.

Postar2 will be launched in February 2013. It’s been a long haul, but creating an integrated measurement mechanism for roadside, transport, and enclosed environments has not been done before.

The entire OOH landscape has been transformed since the original Postar service was created to measure the audience for advertising in the roadside space, and the research behind the new Postar encompasses this.

The Postar2 research is comprehensive, and rich in detail. It moves from measuring 120,000 roadside panels to 360,000 across environments and rising. The average person completes 45 ‘trip stages’ a day across a possible 2.8 million links giving a database of a massive 160 million records. It will yield a new understanding of the relationship between audiences and dynamic frames, whether scrollers or digital, as well as combinations of static frames and moving audiences, through to moving frame and moving audiences, and the effect all of these have in attracting eye movement.

In addition, new techniques were developed to take account of the way people move differently in enclosed environments, such as shopping malls

and railway stations, and the effect of ambient lighting in hours of darkness, e.g. on the visibility of bus sides in city centres.

The level of detail will be unprecedented. The old Postar measurement was presented by ITV region, but the new system can analyse towns & urban populations of all sizes, from 50,000 upwards.

Audience targeting will focus on age, class and gender, as well as lifestyle and media habits. Postar2 launches with a travel survey of 23k GPS carrying respondents, the biggest OOH survey of its type. The use of GPS meters provides a passive measurement of where people go by time of day when out-of-home, and, through motion sensors in the meters, it’s possible to identify the type of transport being used.

The immediate benefit for advertisers from new Postar is the ability to measure the coverage and frequency of a cross-environment and cross-format OOH campaign.

“Content from any social network can be

instantly integrated into digital OOH to

form a seamless bridge between the online and

offline world.”

“As more campaigns are analysed, the effect OOH has

on social media is becoming increasingly

understood.”

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Enabled by the new technology at our disposal, 2013 will be the year experiential advertising takes OOH to a completely new level, offering richer, immersive experiences and unprecedented depth of audience engagement.

Posterscope believes that experiential advertising has massive potential, and is already leading the way with a dedicated experiential offering designed to create content and brand stories that can be merchandised across all channels: bought, owned and earned.

Using experiential activity to generate content for earned media amplification is crucial to measuring success and adding value to bought media: by creating content assets for PR agencies to work with and for social media sharing – content that those consumers taking part in the experiential will want to share with their friendship groups to maximize viral potential.

Immersive experiences7“If DOOH continues to

grow at current rates, then ultimately all OOH will have an

interactive dimension.”

The same content has massive ramifications for owned and bought channels: Canon demonstrated the effectiveness of its IXUS 510 HD camera by deploying user-generated photography to DOOH networks. The content was live within minutes of it being created by consumers as part of experiential activity in UK shopping malls. Similarly, Camelot demonstrated the volume of scratch card winners by filming people as they actually played Lottery Instants within a specially built pop up retail unit. This content was deployed live as it happened to DOOH and to Camelot owned social media channels. Both instances give an insight into how the face of advertising is changing:

If DOOH continues to grow at current rates, then ultimately all OOH will have an interactive dimension. The space between the live world and the digital panel will be joined seamlessly because of the way people increasingly use their devices to interact with advertising, so the notion of OOH communication will be extended to include the live event space.