‘Measure what matters’, speaker advises the African OOH industry

Speaking at the conference in Cape Town, he advised delegates to “measure what matters”, saying that in markets with little or no credible industry measurement, it is still possible to create the necessary metrics.  

“Many markets have audience data via currencies like ROAD or ROUTE, but the important question is how do we establish the emotional response of out of home. Attribution has always been an issue for OOH and ROI is fundamental to market share,” he said. 

“However, 10 years of original neuroscience-based studies demonstrate how the emotional response to large-format OOH, and full motion in particular, correlates with memory encoding and brand recall. It has also established that not all impacts are the same – and that’s a particularly important message to take to agencies and specialists.” 

Perfect time for OOH in SSA region 

Bleakley outlined the perfect conditions for investment and growth in the DOOH sector in sub-Saharan Africa, fuelled by a 62% growth in urban populations over the last decade. This is double the number of younger audiences (50% are under 25) compared to Europe (25%), and the mass adoption of mobile devices (483-million). 

“Together these three factors not only facilitate sector growth, but create a channel of connectivity and engagement between DOOH and younger audiences, creating the ideal conditions to gather audience and data insights.”   

Bleakley said that while rising OOH audiences and better product was a given, in recent years OOH had been unable to keep pace with the explosion of digital channels. 

But he pointed to “significant headwinds around issues about trust, ad-fraud, audience and environment” which were having an impact on other media, saying too much focus on short-term marketing performance would cost advertisers down the line. 

He suggested it was time to move the discourse away from OOH’s share of the ad market and towards growing total ad revenue. 

“It’s not that surprising that in recent years OOH has failed to grow share, but there are plenty reasons why it should. It’s our belief there will be a reappraisal of OOH in the media mix and that market share will rise accordingly,” Bleakley stated. 

The World Out of Home Organization (WOO) held its inaugural Africa Regional Forum in Cape Town from 11-13 March.