• by Karl Greenberg , December 9, 2009

Advertisers who spoke on a panel at the Advertising Club of New York's Second Annual Out of Home Advertising Event in New York on Wednesday said they will look for measurability, interactivity and integration with the out-of-home efforts they do next year.

Ironically, the event was held at the old-school New York Athletic Club, where a man cannot gain entry without slacks, jacket and tie, and one can almost smell the cigar smoke of bygone years wafting from dark, oak-paneled salons. So much of the talk was about an impending revolution in a medium that until recently relied on technology and measurement methods that have not changed much since the club was founded in the 1930s.

For Calvin Klein, out-of-home has been central to advertising for years, as anyone who has been on New York's Houston Street in the past decade knows. But Michael Delellis, VP advertising for CK Americas, said the company goes for big ads in low-competition spaces and has been integrating static images with video in places like L.A.'s Sunset Strip and Toronto. The company this month has returned to the site of its first big foray into outdoors, in the late 1980s: New York's Times Square.

"We started with the Times Square Billboard over 20 years ago, but we are always about being forward thinking," he said. The company's new billboard, which wraps around the ESPN Zone on 42nd Street half a block from the site of the original CK billboards, is one of few spots in the square with relatively little clutter. "Times Square is a crowded marketplace so we don't want to be in the heart of Times Square; there isn't much around [the current billboard]."

He said CK has a be-first strategy for out-of-home. "It's [one of] finding up-and-coming neighborhoods. We were one of the first to be on Houston Street." He said that next year the company will have billboards by New York's newest park, the Highline, in the ultra-hip meat-packing district.

Delellis said digital out-of-home allows advertisers to buy daypart units. The company ran a taxi-top campaign this year using digital billboards on taxis, buying only night hours. "It's very powerful media that we are using to reach a night crowd." Calvin Klein bought late-night time slots between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. to reach people hitting nightclubs and late dinners. The company also did a subway domination campaign, buying every poster in the Metropolitan Transit Authority's Union Square station to tout Calvin Klein jeans and underwear.

For Johanna Breman Tzur, SVP and head of brand advertising for HSBC in North America, out-of-home solves only one of the bank's problems. "Worldwide, we have 100 million customers. In the U.S., we have 450 branches. We use out of home for awareness, but our big challenge is to figure out how to drive business conversation; we are trying to find the right media mix to build awareness down to conversion. Out-of-home is good for awareness, but doesn't drive sales."

The bank, which uses outdoor ad media firm Kinetic, said it has been more successful with pedestrian media on buses, airport pedestrian bridges, and the like than drive-by. "When we go upstate to driving-centered places, we are looking for more unique opportunities beyond billboards. We haven't figured it out."

Jane Reiss, who heads marketing for NYC & Company, which markets the city to visitors and residents, noted that the company recently launched a program with AT&T and American Express that involved embedding quick-response codes containing retail offers in outdoor ads to engage consumers with smartphones.