Out-of-home (OOH) or outdoor advertising is essentially, the only surviving traditional advertising medium in today’s digital world. Still, this medium is lacking in terms of helping marketers to evaluate and improve their campaigns.
This is where Moving Walls, an advertising technology company comes in to fill the void. It is introducing billboard audience data for brands to evaluate and improve their media spends.
Srikanth Ramachandran, the founder and CEO of Moving Walls, believes that outdoor advertising has yet to offer its true potential.
“How many people and whom are your billboards reaching? This is the fundamental question we are helping marketers address. Optimisation has become second nature for marketers in digital advertising. So why can’t they do the same with their physical advertising? This will enable the medium to become more than a backdrop or drum-beating medium,” he says.
When it was launched during the Malaysian CMO Conference on 16th November 2018, Moving Walls saw more than 35 brands signing up for their “Three Billboards” analysis offering. Among the leading brands are McDonald’s, Tune Talk, Konica Minolta, Shopee, UEM Sunrise, Mudah, and Puma.
This initiative was inspired by the Oscar-winning film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where three controversial billboards changed a criminal case. Similarly, marketing leaders are invited to find out the impact of their own three billboards. All they have to do is share three billboard locations.
According to Zenith, global outdoor advertising spend is expected to reach USD38 billion this year, up 3 per cent from 2017 and 35 per cent since 2010. In Malaysia, the medium grew 8% in 2017 based on analysis by Posterscope, the Out-of-Home media specialist.
Using Digital Data to Optimise Physical Advertising
Even as outdoor advertising remains the only growing traditional media channel, it commands just 6.7 per cent of global ad spend according to Zenith’s Advertising Expenditure Forecast 2018. A bulk of media budgets are directed to channels that deliver measurable results.
Moving Walls is working with more than 100 billboard media owners across the region to standardise outdoor advertising measurement. The company aggregates multiple sources of location-based data, including the use of smart IoT sensors to understand audience movement around billboards. They are actively measuring more than 10,000 billboards in Malaysia, Singapore, India, Philippines, and Indonesia.
