• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 7, 2008

A new national survey by Arbitron for Zoom Media and Marketing has confirmed that bars and other nightlife venues are effective platforms for reaching young adults with ad messages--even ad-averse consumers who go out of their way to avoid advertisements in other media.

The Arbitron study, which surveyed 530 bar-goers in eight bars in New York and Los Angeles, is just the latest in a series of studies performed for place-based media companies that maintain video and signage networks in nightlife venues.

According to the Arbitron-Zoom study, 78% of bar visitors said they could recall at least one of four advertisers that ran on billboards near the bar. The bar-based signage also boosted "top of mind" awareness for specific brands, meaning that consumers who saw the ads became more likely to think of the brand as a "category leader." In one example, bar-goers exposed to advertising for the video game "Assassin's Creed" were twice as likely as the general population to name the video game as a prominent new release.

The study also seemed to confirm previous general surveys by Arbitron, not necessarily undertaken on behalf of any company, showing that bar-goers tend to visit their hangouts frequently. In the Arbitron-Zoom study, 40% said they visited bars over 10 times, and Zoom estimates that the average visit lasts 2.5 hours.

Zoom has good reason to tout bar-based media, following its acquisition of Alloy Media + Marketing's Insite Advertising operation, which Zoom says makes it the largest bar and nightlife advertising network in the country. It operates 20,000 billboards in 4,000 venues.

However, Zoom isn't the only player in the proliferating nightlife media marketplace. A 2006 study for digital jukebox operator Ecast by Arbitron found that bar-goers had a 43% recall for advertising delivered via Ecast; Arbitron's study canvassed bar patrons in New York, Seattle and Columbus, Ohio. Another study by Arbitron in 2007 found that 50% of American adults over the age of 21 had visited a bar within the last month--about 105 million people. Moreover, 31%--or 65 million people--had been to a bar in the last week. According to Arbitron, they include a higher percentage of self-described "early adopters" than the population at large.

Another electronic jukebox network, TouchTunes, has highlighted the ability of its interactive displays to gather substantial amounts of consumer data. In recent campaigns, two TouchTunes advertisers--Absolut Vodka and Durex, a condom manufacturer--included mini-surveys along with their ad messages, generating a roughly 9% and 7% response rate, respectively.

Somewhat further afield, Indoor Direct announced this week that it's launching a new place-based video network in various high-volume restaurant chains, with content repurposed from the CBS Outernet, a collection of place-based video networks. Touting the new service, Indoor Direct pointed to research by Arbitron that showed 42% of Americans 18 and up had visited one of the quick-service restaurants in the new network--with 85% noticing the network's screens during its soft launch. What's more, 65% could remember one of the brands advertised on the screens.