OUT-OF-HOME ADVERTISING

As more workers return to offices, spending on OOH ads is rising

By our News Team | 2022

As professionals and white-collar employees return to their desks in many global cities, brands want to reach them as they commute.

After two years of working from home, business professionals and white-collars workers in many countries are returning to work, which is proving to be a boost for the digital out-of-home advertising industry.

This is according to a recent blog post published by The Trade Desk, an independent media-buying platform operating in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

“We’ve seen a substantial increase in ad spend on digital out-of-home as a result of people going back to the office,” says Natrian Maxwell, The Trade Desk’s General Manager of Emerging Channels, which includes digital out-of-home. 

“The return to offices is real — people are outside more,” Maxwell adds. That means a captive audience for all the billboards, bus-stop placards, train-station posters, fuel-station monitors, taxicab televisions, TV screens in lifts and all other forms of digital signage in the physical world.

The surge in commuters has driven a corresponding increase in ad spend on digital out-of-home.

Photo by Mentatdgt on Pexels

Investment in programmatic digital OOH has grown

“With a growing number of companies returning to offices, the investment in programmatic digital out-of-home has accelerated substantially,” Christopher Allison, a senior executive at Vistar Media, a digital out-of-home ad network in New York, is quoted as saying in the blog.

“Brands are more excited about the increase in transit ridership than the return to office,” he says. “As the New York City subway has reached 60 percent of its pre-pandemic ridership, brands have been willing to spend on subway advertising again.”

Added Brian Rappaport, CEO of Quan Media Group, another New York agency that specialises in OOH advertising: “We’ve already matched our 2021 total billings and we’ve had a bunch of legacy clients come back into the mix,”

Spend is expected to increase even further as the return to pre-pandemic life continues in towns and cities around the world.

“We expect ad spend on digital out-of-home to increase even more in the second half of this year,” Maxwell noted.

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