Also known as out-of-home (OOH) advertising, this is a broad term that describes any type of advertising that reaches the consumer when he or she is outside of the home.
Outdoor advertising is a mass-market medium, just like broadcast. It is better used for broad messages, branding and support campaigns. It cannot do the heavy lifting, and any attempts to do so will usually lead to a very cluttered and confusing message.
The most common forms of outdoor advertising include:
Point of sale displays
Street furniture (bus shelters, kiosks, telephone booths etc)
Transit advertising and wraps (taxis, buses, subways, trains etc)
Mobile billboards
Guerrilla advertising (aka ambient media)
Costs Associated With Outdoor Advertising
As with other forms of mass-market communication, reaching hundreds of thousands of consumers is not cheap. And as competition for billboard spaces increases, so do the associated costs.
To understand the costs involved, it's important to know how they're calculated. It's based on a system called Gross Ratings Points (GRP), which refers to impressions that are delivered by a media schedule for the outdoor location. This is called the DEC, or Daily Effective Circulation, and is also known as a "showing." One rating point is equal to 1% of the market population.
There are many factors involved in this, which is based on traffic, visibility, location, size and so on. This rating gives you a showing score of anything from 1% to 100%. 50% means that at least 50% of the population in the area would see one of your boards at least once a day. You can expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a 50 showing for one month. In a major area like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, expect the price to skyrocket. You really do get what you pay for.
