Capturing the attention of modern consumers is becoming increasingly harder in this day and age. Tech giants are aware of this and understand that when it comes to advertising, you need to be covering all of your media bases.
Big Brands Still Believe In Billboards
Many of you might wonder why would a tech giant such as Amazon or Facebook still turn to traditional methods of advertising when they are a native digital brand. Isn’t it a bit ironic for tech giants to be spending large amounts of their advertising budgets on a medium that many would consider “old-school”?
The fact of the matter is that these tech giants know how vital it is to engage consumers on all touch points during their daily lives. Big brand names continue to look outside the multitude of digital options and integrate their advertising campaigns with familiar mediums such as OOH advertising.
The effectiveness of these campaigns are hard to ignore, and it only stands as a testament to the power of OOH ads.
The Seamlessness of Digital & OOH Ads
As we talked about in a previous article, omnichannel brand strategies are the norm in today’s society. Including a media mix as part of your advertising strategy only goes to leverage both your brand awareness and credibility.
Millennial consumers like to have an omnichannel experience when engaging with a brand. The advantage of being able to utilise both digital and out-of-home ads for advertising is that it creates a seamless brand experience. The digital side of omnichannel strategies will engage consumers when they are searching online. OOH advertising is effective in inspiring consumers to begin searching online.
Digital advertising and OOH ads now go hand-in-hand as part of the overall advertising experience for many tech brands.
Tech Giants & OOH
The beauty of out-of-home advertising is that it can use the surrounding environment to create a substantial impact and brand statement. Many tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify have used this advertising technique successfully in recent years, and that has made other brands stand up and listen.
Facebook
Outdoor advertising has been a part of Facebook’s brand strategy for many years now. While they have had great success with previous brand awareness campaigns such as their Friends campaign in 2015, one of their most notable product awareness campaigns was for the launch of ‘Facebook Live’.
The ‘Facebook Live’ campaign utilized OOH ads to increase product awareness (Facebook)
This saw the tech giant utilise a mixture of large format and street-level OOH ads to educate individuals on how to use their newest app feature. These digital and static billboards were engaging, informative yet highly effective at capturing the attention of target audiences and promoting app usage.
Amazon
Amazon is no strangers when it comes to experiential and omnichannel advertising campaigns. When this tech company decides to run an advertising campaign, they prefer to ‘go big or go home’. And their brand awareness campaign last year for Amazon Music was no different.
A 79 foot Echo billboard was constructed to promote Amazon Music (Amazon)
Amazon constructed a 79-foot billboard structure of their product, Echo, to promote their online music streaming platform. This advertising campaign proved the creative possibilities that out-of-home advertising offers brands.
Netflix
Netflix’s advertising campaigns have always proven to be striking and a topic of conversation for consumers across the globe. The tech streaming giant has never been shy about the importance of using original marketing and advertising techniques to promote their brand.
Netflix uses OOH ads to promote brand awareness and drive new subscribers (Netflix)
To date, OOH ads have formed a significant part of Netflix’s drive to gain new subscribers. By integrating out-of-home advertising as part of their overall marketing strategy, they have been useful in displaying how OOH ads can result in immediate results.
Spotify
Spotify is another example of a tech giant that knows the creativity benefits of OOH ads and has no plans to stop.
Spotify combines out-of-home advertising with humour to engage users (Spotify)
As another music streaming giant who has paved their own into the hearts of many millennials over the years, their OOH ad campaigns show that a little bit of humour never hurt anyone. In 2017, as part of their annual holiday campaign, Spotify used data-driven OOH advertising based on user activity to create witty and humorous headlines.
The Benefits of OOH for Tech Start-Ups
The benefits of OOH extend beyond the big budgets of tech giants, as they also provide lots of value for tech start-ups. Digital OOH offer these start-ups to enable brand awareness as well as acquire consumer data. This sets these emerging businesses ahead of the curve.
It also emphasizes and leverages the “design thinking” ethos echoed by many tech companies, which emphasizes engaging with audiences and the sharing of thought provoking ideas across different mediums, especially as tech companies thrive on an innovation led engagement with their audience.
In essence, tech companies, both small and large, have realized the power of OOH in the purchasing funnel. Integrating the real world with the digital world, tech companies can get creative, all the while reaping the benefits of their ROI.
Tech Giants Prove OOH Is Here To Stay
There are multiple advertising lessons to be learned from brands who streamline their advertising across both digital and out-of-home mediums. Not only does it offer unlimited creative potential, but it also places brands ahead of the pack.
In a society where consumers are switched continuously ‘on’ even when they are offline, there is an increased need for brands to ensure that their advertising strategy is experimental, engaging and places them ‘outside the box’. Purely advertising on one medium is no longer enough and brands need to get on board with this.
From the campaigns that are listed above, we can see that for tech giants the use of OOH advertising as part of the marketing mix is undoubtedly here to stay.
