MediaPost Publications today reported yet another high-profile acquisition in the out-of-home industry. Private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson purchased Brand Connections (a multi-channel, multi-venue OOH company) for an undisclosed sum from another PE firm, the Cypress Group. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the company reportedly received more than 50 bids — highlighting the considerable interest in the OOH segment these days. Making this particular acquisition even more interesting to me is the fact that Veronis Suhler Stevenson is the same PE firm that partnered with PQ Media on the Communications Industry Forecast 2007 – 2011. That study has been become an industry standard for benchmarking media spending, usage and trends. Obviously the folks at VSS have been closely monitoring the same trends we’re all seeing. OOH and alternative media is a good investment.
Google Embraces Outdoor
Either I’ve become Google-fixated or the search juggernaut is becoming a mainstay in the press lately. Last week, I talked about Google Adword TV ads and now Google itself is going offline with an extensive outdoor campaign in Russia, hoping to cut into the 15-year-old Russian search engine of choice, Yandex.
The reported $250,000 investment includes more than 5,000 outdoor advertisements, including benches and stickers at bus stops and subways. With so much marketing attention being focused on the digital space, it’s great to see that one of the pioneers of online advertising – and a proponent of “the right ad to the right people at the right time” – understands the effectiveness of a well placed ad on a bench.
Is Google the Future of Advertising?
Just ran across an interesting post on TechCrunch profiling the latest addition to Google Analytics…TV ad measurement. This enhancement to their previous offering of Adwords TV Ads promises marketers instant access to key performance indicators:
- impressions delivered
- number of ad plays
- cost
- CPM
Additionally, since all of this information is loaded into the familiar Google Analytics interface, you can view your TV campaign performance right next to your online campaign reports, and even view website traffic and television impressions on the same graph.
Unfortunately, Google’s TV distribution is pretty limited right now, given that their ads can only be fed through Dish Network boxes. However, I have no doubt that this glimpse of what measurement is possible will cause marketers to pressure their other media providers for better data faster. Heck, with an average CMO tenure lasting less than 2 years, they need all the ammunition they can get.
Of course, only time will tell what impact this latest offering has on both the success of Google’s TV Ads product and the industry as a whole, but I think the trend is pretty clear…in the age of ROI, data is king.
Indiana Jones and the Outdoor Campaign
The entertainment industry has long been a staunch proponent of the outdoor advertising industry, creatively incorporating the medium to promote everything from movie premieres to Broadway openings. Hollywood’s “Man with the Midas Touch,” Steven Spielberg, continues the out-of-home legacy, once again calling on alternative out-of-home to promote the long-awaited return of Indiana Jones. Given the successful use of alternative media to promote Spielberg’s Transformers movie last year, Paramount decided to turn it up a notch for Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
According to the article from Reuters, the Indy campaign comprises about 2,000 billboards, wall messages, bus-side promos and other out-of-home messages nationwide. Talk about a glowing testimonial.
And the promoters of Indiana Jones like billboards so much, they’ve decided that two are better than one. In target areas such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, multiple billboards are being used for a single message for the blockbuster. (In fact, several dozen photos of just the billboards are already on Flickr.)
While it’s hard to say exactly what portion of the $126 million opening weekend can be directly attributed to outdoor, there’s no question that the tight integration of all the campaign’s channels helped deliver the hype studio execs were banking on.
Integrated HTC Campaign Sets Your Fingers Free
Flying US Airways back from Boston yesterday, I lowered my flight tray table to reveal an interesting ad for HTC. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera handy (so unprepared for a former Girl Scout…), so I missed a shot of the dancing fingerprints in situ. Fortunately, MediaPost covered my faux pas by including the entire campaign elements in yesterday’s Out to Launch e-newsletter. From what I could tell, each of the three tray tables in my row demonstrated a different dance and featured different products.
Watching the TV effort definitely gives the tray table execution more context, although the in-flight advertising on its own is clever. It certainly made me want to learn more about the company and their products. Not bad, given that I had never heard of the company before.
Kudos to creative agency 180 Amsterdam and Work Tank Seattle (media buy) for giving my fingers something to do in-flight.
