Much has been made recently of Global’s purchase of two leading ‘Out Of Home’ advertising companies, which gives the radio and entertainment giant based at 30 Leicester Square a huge market share of what we used to call ‘billboard’ or ‘poster’ advertising sites.
Various commentators are throwing their opinions around regarding what it all means and what might happen next.
It seems to me that the big race in advertising right now is to be first to create a real-time advertising proposition across EVERY channel (or as many as you can get your hands on).
So, if my company had a message it had to put out, could we go to one company and run real-time ads on radio, television, in newspapers, online and on digital out of home billboards? Could we edit those ads on the fly to take advantage of real-time events (weather, sports scores, pop culture events) and does that system allow for the easy selling of unsold inventory? Is there also an easy ‘creative’ platform which allows me to build those ads, pay for them and put them live?
That’s the end game. It’s putting ‘real-time’ and ‘on the fly’ everywhere. That may never be possible in newspapers and it’s unlikely in television given the level of regulation and restrictions on certain products for certain audiences at certain times of the day.
Everything else? It’s game on and Global are well out in front when it comes to multi-platform, real-time advertising capabilities.
If that’s ‘Out Of Home’, what about ‘in-home’? At the moment, ‘in home’ is taken to mean ads we see on television, hear on radio, read in newspapers, in that, traditionally we consume those ads while we’re inside. But what if we took it literally?
What if ‘in-home’ means adverts on our fridges ad freezers? Ads on the front of our washing machines? Or on the oven door? Ads through the microwave oven, the mirror in the hallway? Ads on the side of our house. Could tech companies muscle in on that space and pay us for the privilege? Or would you resist that…is the space within your household sacrosanct?
As more and more companies come under increasing pressure to target us with their message, and find more innovative methods of doing so, we might have some serious decisions to make about exactly what our ‘space’ is worth.
