Interactive OOH – How Media Can Foster Engagement and Drive Action

Can out of home advertising be interactive? Even if it’s just a static billboard? The answer is yes, but this isn’t really the right question. Interactivity is just another tool. The goal of any marketing is engagement that leads to sales. And from that perspective, OOH can be as interactive as any other advertising media. Take a moment and discover four ways interactive OOH can be used to increase response to your ads.

How Do We Measure Engagement with OOH Advertising?

First, to understand what interactive OOH ads can do, we need to agree on how to measure engagement for out of home ads. As this report on DOOH advertising from Life on Screen explains, there are four components to measuring OOH engagement:

1. Exposure – how many people see the ad. In other words, impressions.
2. Dwell time – how long the average person who sees your ad chooses to look at it
3. Engagement – the percentage of people who respond to your ad in some way
4. Conversion – the percentage of people who complete your desired action

With interactive OOH, you can look to increase exposure, dwell time, and engagement using one or more of six tools:

• Motion graphics, color, light
• Sound
• Video
• Gamification
• Physically interactive elements
• The copy

Four ways to improve engagement through OOH ads

Touch Screens

For digital out of home ads on certain screens and particular locations, you can introduce fully interactive experiences by letting people touch and manipulate what happens on the screen.

For example, you could create a feature where consumers can select and change the colors of certain items in the ad, or swap flavors, sizes, or text. You could allow them to personalize the ad viewing experience with their name or photo.

You could also have them select a product or item and use it in some sort of quick game. Aldi did this in a campaign a few years back with an ad featuring a claw that consumers could use to grab bags of virtual peanuts. Winners were taken to a page with a special offer.

So, the game attracted exposure and increased dwell time, even if you didn’t play it and just watched someone else. But by playing the game, you increase engagement even more, and the winner’s page increased conversions.

Interactive DOOH ads like this work best in places like airports, shopping malls, and subway stations where people have to stand around for a while.

Hands-on interactivity

You can achieve hands-on interactivity with another form of OOH ads known as front door marketing.

Front door marketing consists of door to door media distribution that engages people right on their front porches — the last undistracted location in most people’s lives.

With 21^st century quality door hangers, you can use elements such as scratch-offs, tear-off coupons, scratch-n-sniff scents, and free samples to engage the five senses and increase dwell time. The more time a prospect spends with your ad, the more likely they will remember it, keep it around, and act on it.

And door hangers, such as those created by Power Direct (an OOH Today advertiser) offer the potential for much greater dwell time than any other form of OOH advertising. Prospects will find them on their front porch, the same place where they excitedly welcome packages and deliveries. They will bring them inside, engage with the interactive elements you’ve included, and keep them around while they decide whether to act.

No other form of OOH ads can deliver this level of physical interactivity.

Offline to online tools

Another strategy of interactive OOH ads is to motivate the prospect to engage with your other marketing tools using their phones. Since most OOH ads get encountered away from home, anyone who responds instantly will probably be using their phones.

Using tools such as hashtags, QR codes, and opt-ins for your SMS marketing (like using a CTA telling them to text a word to a particular number), you can increase engagement by sending prospects to specialized landing pages that directly relate to whatever the OOH ad was about.

For example, suppose a toy company places a poster OOH ad at a shopping mall. The ad could include a CTA telling people to scan the QR code or text a phrase to their SMS number. Anyone who scans the code ends up on a landing page with special offers. Anyone using the SMS opt-in will receive text messages sending them to the same landing page.

The same company could also send a door hanger campaign to a targeted list of prospects who are known to have children under a certain age living in the home. And the QR code and SMS offer can be used to even greater effect, because the door hanger has more permanence than a passing ad.

Thus, one ad can offer multiple approaches for engagement to appeal to more people’s preferences for how they like to engage with ads.

And, using multiple forms of OOH ads only increases your ad’s potential exposure.

Dynamic live updates

Digital out of home ads can attract even more attention using dynamic live updates. These DOOH ads change depending on what’s happening. A few examples:

• Countdowns to the deadline of a sale, or a particular holiday or event
• Time of day deadlines
• New instant sales that pop up on an already existing DOOH ad
• New products just released
• Ads that change based on things like weather or traffic
• Current events or sports results

And as with the other strategies, you can add in offline to online response tools to increase engagement and conversion, and track the effectiveness of the DOOH campaign.

Try Running a Front Door OOH Campaign

Want to increase dwell time and engagement? Nothing has more potential for this than a door hanger distribution campaign, especially one that targets a particular set of prospects.

Get in touch with a front door OOH marketing specialist from Power Direct. New potential clients can get a sample campaign that includes ideas for creative, detailed targeting data, as well as distribution strategies. It’s worth your time to see what a project with them might look like for you or your clients!

Power Direct  is an advertiser with OOH Today