News

"Outdoor really is the last broadcast medium - anyone can go past it," muses Bill Wilson, operations director at the Outdoor Advertising Association (OAA). For print buyers, the ubiquitous nature of outdoor advertising also represents one of its major challenges; the outdoor category is so broad it's staggering. From static posters employing traditional paper and paste, to huge illuminated billboards and 'scrollers', adverts on street furniture such as bus stops and telephone kiosks, to buses, taxis, digital LED displays... the list goes on. Little wonder outdoor scored so highly in the latest TouchPoints survey by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, in which 39% of adults said that outdoor advertising gave them something to look at while travelling.

Roadside and transport account for the lion’s share of a spend that, in 2007, came close to £1bn, with outdoor advertising revenues hitting more than £975m (up 4.6% on 2006) according to the OAA. Roadside accounted for 52.5% of that, transport 37.1%, with the remaining 10.4% made up of point-of-sale, retail and leisure.

Know your market
There has been a boom in the formats available – taxis, escalators… people have realised that outdoor is a bloody good medium, adds Wilson, whose advice when considering an outdoor campaign can be summed up in one word: planning. First, decide what’s the right option. It’s all about audience – ask yourself what is the best outdoor medium to hit that audience?

The other important thing for buyers to be aware of is the nature of outdoor’s requirements. Even an apparently simple poster campaign can have its pitfalls. Outdoor is a very specialist area, warns Paul Shields, managing director of print production and project management specialist Hi Resolution, a division of media agency Kinetic Worldwide. A lot of people think that printing, say, 50 large-format poster skins is simple. In fact, it’s likely to involve different trim sizes, finishing, and precision welding of the cader that allows the poster to be locked into the fixing bracket. So many times we’ve seen a print agent knock out some posters, and they’ve been delivered to the site on time so all seems fine, only to discover that they don’t fit. By that point, it’s a very expensive problem.

So plan ahead, and while you’re at it make sure you’re aware of planning restrictions – local planning authorities manage the Advertisement Control System in England, and they decide whether a particular site or type of advert should be allowed or not. A guideline document on planning regulations is available on the OAA’s website (www.oaa.org.uk).

In short, there are many factors to contend with, and given the welter of planning and production issues, as well as the concentration in outdoor media ownership – 10 firms control the lion’s share of outdoor opportunities, encompassing almost 250,000 panels nationwide – it’s hardly surprising to find that most work is channelled through dedicated outdoor operations. The OAA lists nine poster buying agencies on its website. These in turn use a roster of specialist suppliers.

Changing needs
Bradley Slade, managing director at London’s SMP Group, is one such supplier. He has seen a wholesale shift in production methods over the past decade: 10 years ago it was conventional litho or screen. Now outdoor is a mix of litho and digital – we don’t use screen at all. The break points are changing too. Digital print is breaking into far higher runs than screen ever did, and litho runs are coming down in length. Now, runs of 50-150 can be done economically using litho or digital.

And what of digital displays? Digital screens are not having any effect on our business, says Slade. The numbers are still fairly low, and the capital outlay is huge. I still think a well-printed 48pp poster does more justice to the product.

You can’t just put any advert or design on a digital screen, and the viewing angle also has an effect. It will be interesting to see if the numbers scale up, adds Slade.

Screen printing may be down, but don’t count it out. Screen printing is still very useful for all sorts of things. If, for example, we wanted 1,000 bus sides on vinyl then we’d usually do it screen, says Hi Resolution’s Shields. And Marcus Timson, corporate communications director at screen printing and digital imaging federation Fespa, adds: Screen printing is contracting at nearly 5% per annum, but it still has a place – don’t write it off just yet. The colours are more vivid and it can definitely add value.

As in all business areas, environmental concerns are now a priority for all parties. Unpasted posters can be recycled, but once they’ve been pasted up, the paper isn’t suitable for use in the paper recycling chain so it will generally end up as landfill. PVC is recoverable provided the effort is made to do so; for example, Manchester’s MediaCo has its own on-site waste reprocessing facility where used banners are collected and shredded to form a material that is then used to manufacture traffic cones. CBS Outdoor, which manages the vast majority of bus advertising, has spent three years investigating an alternative to vinyl for bus panel advertising, and is now poised to roll out a solution involving a litho-printable water-resistant board that is made with 80% recycled content and is itself recyclable at the end of the campaign. CBS is also in the process of converting its London Underground poster sites to dry posting (instead of being pasted up, the posters are held in place using a special 3M sticky tape), with more than 50% of sites converted already.

Last but certainly not least comes the ‘no-print’ option of digital LED displays, which are further transforming the opportunities. A recent campaign for luxe watch brand TAG Heuer (see box) harnessed the advantages digital displays can offer in terms of time-sensitive messaging. But this comes at an ultra-premium price, and media owners are unlikely to dilute the value of this niche offering by installing too many digital displays. Print buyers will be buying printed posters for a while yet.