Billboards Are Sticking Around-With or Without Glue

Billboards are sticking around - with or without glue

Simon Marquis (an advertising industry consultant and a former chairman of Zenith Optimedia)
The Guardian
Monday October 29 2007


One of the curiosities of advertising in our souped-up, interactive, digital age is the enduring popularity of poster advertising.

Even the glue is new. I enjoy hearing broadcasters, media buyers and planners and other advertising professionals gripe about the cost and rates attached to Outdoor. Sold out in many markets (so they claim), well then just sell by Q or even a few weeks for a whisper campaign or product launch....or you know something of that nature. OOH has worked hard and I'll let the professional tell the rest, as he has the knowledge, wisdom, insight, and character that I look up too-even if they are

As the internet devours ever greater chunks of the advertising cake each year, you might have thought that dear old-fashioned billboards would be the first to suffer. Not a bit. Outdoor (or Out of Home, as it has become more properly known to reflect the multiplicity of advertising opportunities) is positively bouncing with health, while other established media are fighting hard just to stand still. A medium characterised by such hi-tech wizardry as blokes on ladders with pots of glue and very large sheets of printed paper still cuts a dash in today's online world.
There are many reasons for this. For one thing, the medium is less and less about blokes on ladders. Many of the media that now qualify for the category Out of Home are themselves digital (escalator panels in some London underground stations for example). Others (taxis, toilets, health centres, trains, boats and planes, supermarkets, the backs of buses, airports - you name it) are modern media operations that don't require an overalled labour force armed with gluey brushes.
And there are brand new techniques of installing advertising images on to poster sites: leading outdoor company JC Decaux has recently launched its "dry-posting" technology in which new ads are posted without glue and in one piece - a palpable efficiency and one that the company believes is the most significant advance in the medium for decades.
Then there are the sites themselves. Long gone are the days when posters were just 10ft by 20ft panels with a simple wooden surround. Travel out of London towards Heathrow airport and you'll see a variety of shapes and sizes of poster site, housed in elaborate architectural constructions that draw the eye. Even St Paul's church in Hammersmith has become a massive poster site thanks to the inventiveness of Ocean Outdoor, one of the smaller, newer outdoor companies.

This investment in quality presentation has kept the medium fresh and attractive to advertisers - and has proved highly effective in justifying the premium rates that can be charged for access to the huge audiences that these sorts of high-traffic locations generate. Innovation in any advertising medium is essential to its continuing popularity with advertisers and agencies.

After calls for outdoor to get its act together, the medium has responded with vigour, creativity - and money - and has reaped the rewards.

I really enjoyed the story that Simon wrote! I am posting this along with a few others sometime after they were released-due to not blogging for a bit. I am going to complain this one time-my computer has been fried-from my own doing (I will take blame, until I know otherwise from the IT folks). Okay, a bit less than three weeks ago, I left my laptop in the car all weekend-the weekend I went to the zoo (for those of you who want to know)....after being warned that heat can damage the HD so that it has to be reformated or worse if things melt....anyways it is in the shop.....for 8 days now, and I am excited to be looking for a new laptop. The simple things in life create an atmosphere for my happiness. (Not that a computer is simple, it has just become part of my daily life. Leaving that perception of a laptop being simple, to me it is, but 10 years ago, the perception was not even including a calculator). All of this to say that the media world is changing, being part of Y and even X (as a witness of sorts) a rapid transformation is taking place-and I lead it all back to advertising-yes the "great" media shift is due to "great" (and I mean that) advertising and marketing ideas, campaigns, giants, thinkers and the like.

"The trusted desktop-which I rarely turn on-gets the job done-and I am enjoying not being pluged-in everywhere I go, although I need to be in some cases...I speak of those 2 days a week, even three or four some weeks" DE

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