• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, March 4, 2024

The challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic drove rapid innovation and creativity, which led out-of-home media to become one of the fastest-growing channels, said Anna Bager, president and CEO of the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA).

“Creativity has enabled many new ways of anamorphic design such as the Las Vegas Sphere,” she said. “There are tons of very cool creative campaigns supporting this media.”

Technology has helped media develop and evolve in ways such as the ability to use data to update campaigns in real-time.

Bager believes this is on par with other media channels in terms of speed to market. And this one-to-many form of media does not have the same challenges as the deprecation of cookies and new privacy laws.

Consumers tend to see out-of-home more as a service rather than an interruption, she says.

Measurement is an area that is underdeveloped, she says, but the industry has made considerable progress. Within the coming months, she expects a Media Rating Council (MRC) standard to be released, which will lead to greater trust in the media.

Late last year, the MRC announced the release of a draft version of its OOH Measurement Standards for public review and comment.

The 30-day public comment period extends through December 18, 2024.

These standards aim to establish a detailed set of methods and common practices for companies that measure OOH media audiences and related metrics.

Bager acknowledges that OOH traditionally has been difficult to measure, but says that in the future it could develop standards, which would make measurement easier. This would be simple at first, she says -- setting a level of “currency” such as viewability, and in the case of OOH, the currency of “opportunity” or “likelihood” to see.

Accreditation has been in the works for about five years. This would put OOH on par with other media.

The industry has learned a lot about the combination of connected television (CTV) and search, but Bager called CTV and OOH the real “power couple.”

“When you serve a CTV impression, you know it was served in a geographic location, and probably that person will leave the house and go to the store or to work or to a restaurant,” she said. “You can now retarget that consumer with out of home or radio, which are both location-based media.”

Bager spent nine years at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. She founded the Mobile Center of Excellence in 2010, and then moved into video and other initiatives. OOH caught her eye as the idea of moving to the mobile screen to the big display outside became intriguing.

“I got fascinated by the media, because you’re not monetizing a media, you’re monetizing a location,” she said.

Then she started to see “the writing on the wall” with privacy and data regulations that digital advertising would face. OOH does not have those challenges.