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Survey finds traditional OOH still vital in digital world

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August 25, 2021

Spot Trender, an advertising testing and consumer insights company, partnered with Bottle Rocket, a consumer experience consultant and Eicoff, an advertising agency, for a research study on customer acquisition and retention, showing how companies must embrace digital ads, but can also leverage traditional OOH such as radio and television as well, according to a press release.

With the shift of focus to digital advertising in the last decade, one of the most interesting findings from the research was that traditional channels still provide great ROI and that savvy marketers know how to measure and optimize those channels in a full-funnel acquisition strategy. The study surveyed 169 marketing leaders to better understand what key performance indicators businesses are tracking, and how they are tracking them.

"It was an absolute pleasure collaborating with the Bottle Rocket and Eicoff teams. Their expertise in key business drivers and metrics added a lot of depth to our research," Rick Nguyen, president and co-founder at Spot Trender.

According to survey participants, many of them are unaware of solutions for tracking and optimizing ads for traditional channels like OOH, radio, and TV. For instance, much fewer of them think that they can accurately measure return on investment for radio/audio than SEO/SEM and email. Modern advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon Advertising provide dashboards and tracking capabilities, which are helpful to calculate return on ad spend.

Radio, on the other hand, requires an extra step. Advertisers who have been successfully tracking radio ROI are using surveys to understand where their customers came from. These surveys are useful not just to track radio, but other traditional advertising channels, like OOH billboards. Instead of just capturing impressions and demographics, advertisers are measuring their ROI and optimizing those creative assets with research firms, according to the release.

"New customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any growing company. The research echoed the importance of measuring the impact of acquisition campaigns across the entire funnel," Rob Schmidt, SVP, management supervisor at Eicoff, said in the release. "Traditional media like TV play a vital role in building awareness and creating demand in the upper funnel, while search, remarketing, and other lower funnel tactics pull these new customers in. Smart marketers know that acquisition campaigns need to be planned, executed, and measured across the full funnel, and they need to mine their data and tap into different resources to measure impact at each stage."

Spot Trender helps brands and agencies predict and optimize the impact of brand messaging, campaigns, and creative, with actionable consumer insights. Spot Trender was founded in 2011 and is based in Mountain View, California.

Eicoff specializes in direct response advertising, fusing television with digital, to help brands drive sales and measure ROI. Eicoff, founded in 1956, is based in Chicago and is a division of Ogilvy.

Bottle Rocket is an experience consultancy that provides strategy, product, design and technology services that drive business results for customers. Bottle Rocket is a part of WPP and the Ogilvy Experience global network. The company, based in Dallas, was founded in 2008.