Page 18 - AdNews Magazine Jan-Feb 2021

Agenda
“We used our proprietary real-time audience measurement tool DART to provide advertisers with regular updates on weekly traffic numbers across VMO Shop, VMO Active and VMO On-the-Go,” he says.
“We saw an influx in audiences visiting essential service locations such as grocery, pharmacies, and petrol & convenience, which became 2020’s hot new trusted locations for OOH activity.”
Butler believes there’s a lot to be excited about for 2021 and beyond. “The fundamentals of OOH remain strong and we’re looking at a return to growth once the
economy recovers,” he says. “New approaches to automated trading such as programmatic OOH are gathering pace, and as audiences resume normal behav- iour, we will see investment return
to pre-Covid levels. “Programmatic will be the
future of outdoor, with the evolu- tion of supporting technologies like dynamic creative and ad veri- fication providing advertisers with the agility and flexibility they need to reach the right consumers at the right time, in the right place.”
Behaviour changes
Shopping patterns changed with COVID seeing a shift toward peo- ple with desk-orientated roles working from home. This allowed people to have more flexibility as to when they shop
“The fundamentals of OOH remain strong and we’re looking at a return to growth.”
Paul Butler,
Val Morgan Outdoor
Public service messaging
for everyday essentials, with lunchtime busier than the previous after work shop.
“Living Locally has become increasingly important and this trend and this shift in mindset will continue in 2021,” says Ben Walker, CEO of Shopper Media.
“Consumers are continuing to shop at local shopping centres for essential retail and to seek community connection.
“During times of uncertainty and turmoil, Australians want to be reassured and the presence of brand advertising has proven to be important in providing a level of normality and comfort, espe- cially when most Australians harbour concerns about the wellbeing of the economy and their own financial circumstances.
“Certainly, the type of messaging they are exposed to needs to be authentic and sympathetic of environments such as pandemic con- ditions and lockdown restrictions.”
Tim Murphy at oOh!media says the task now is to understand the impact of COVID on audience behaviour.
Key questions: As audiences have shifted their day-to-day rou- tines, what exactly has changed? And how do we reach those audiences now?
“One important way for us to adapt as a business was to utilise our scale,” says Murphy. “As the year progressed it became more important than ever to reach people in areas where they were spending more time than they traditionally would, so network scale became crucial for us, as did multi-format, enabling us to deliver more audience touchpoints.
“It’s no surprise that we saw a big increase in suburban activity, so campaigns became more weighted towards those environments. Using our data, we realised we were uniquely positioned to under- stand these new suburban audience movements and could still reach people who were working at home, for example, at multiple points in and around their neighbourhoods. The same capabilities have also helped us understand a second wave of movements as people have started more recently coming back to their offices.
“Due to all this, Australian suburbs have never been more powerful than in 2021, and we’re excited to see how advertisers engage with Aussies in their local areas, which will definitely be at a higher level than we’ve been used to in the past.”