The burden of proof: Why Out of Home needs more brands like Domino’s and Tourism Tasmania to help prove effectiveness and ROI

By Scott Jenkins - Group Manager – Research, Strategy & Effectiveness, JCDecaux | Partner Content

Have we become addicted to the instant gratification of proof? Whether it’s time, effort, desire, or something else, everyone wants case studies, data, and proof, but the burden of proof runs deep, says JCDecaux’s research specialist Scott Jenkins, if we want to prove effectiveness that really matters.

Years ago, it was universally accepted that Out-of-Home just worked. Reaching millions of Australians every day, Out-of-Home would be first on the plan to launch new products with a splash, spark interesting conversations, and grow brands.

When we entered the digital age, we became addicted to the numbers and getting them fast. Whether it’s counting the likes received on Instagram or seeing live sales data in real-time - we are desperate to see the immediate impact of our personal and professional marketing efforts.

But as digital metrics matured, Out-of-Home was left out of the conversations and continued to rely on the instinctive understanding of how the channel works, without too many hard metrics to support its business effects.

The pressure is on for marketers, agencies, and media owners to prove the impact of every marketing dollar – and Out-of-Home is no exception. The annual JCDecaux CONSULT survey, completed by hundreds of our advertising partners, consistently tells us that brand building, measurement and ROI are the top three factors for Out-of-Home’s future success. Site cards and a MOVE run no longer cut it.

If there was a brand health survey on media, Out-of-Home would have a pretty average shaped funnel.

I’m just going to say it - Out-of-Home has an awareness problem. While our agency relationships are stronger than ever (as proven by industry-leading Media i NPS scores, year after year), we just aren’t top of mind amongst marketers. The GAFA tech giants dwarf us, and the popularity of TV endures, and we lack the immediate metrics to deliver that sweet dopamine rush.

Since JCDecaux first reached Australian shores in 1997, we have always emphasised effectiveness in our business decisions and establishing JCDecaux PROOF has been an important next step in this journey. JCDecaux PROOF is an effectiveness program that aims to drive awareness of the channel, showcase the role we play in the marketing mix, and deliver more accountable material for agencies and marketers to justify ‘why Out-of-Home’.

We can’t prove effectiveness alone.

One of the great things about working with JCDecaux is we genuinely value real results, not just the illusion of value. If it sounds too good to be true, it often is. Which is why we have worked hard to engage new research and data suppliers, to discover deeper insights into how Out-of-Home works with other channels. We’ve partnered with some brave brands, like Domino’s and Tourism Tasmania, willing to test and learn and explore together.

Because we know instinctively Out-of-Home works. Brands simply wouldn’t advertise with us time and time again if it didn’t. But it can be hard to pin down the true uplift. Just recently, a very experienced CMO of a large global company shared with us an insight into their media mix modelling: Out-of-Home was not delivering. Reluctantly, they switched Out-of-Home off, only to see their campaign results drop significantly. They then quickly reinstated the channel and doubled down on their investment.

We have learned just how difficult it is to find customers willing to go deep and prove effectiveness with us. Whether it’s time, effort, desire, or something else, while everyone says they want case studies, data, and ROI proof, when it comes to the crunch, it often falls over. We need deep collaboration, and for brands to be on this quest for meaningful proof with us.

We’ve thought long and hard about how we get around this conundrum and have come up with a couple of key challenges we think stand between us and getting the proof we all desire. The first being time.

• In the words of Byron Sharp, good advertising today mostly affects sales in years to come, not next week. With the modern addiction to getting numbers fast, unrealistic expectations can be set for advertising to have an immediate impact.

• Media loves a big number too. Slapping results like “50 per cent sales uplift” on a slide looks awesome, but in most cases and for most brands, it’s simply unrealistic to expect results like this in short time frames.

• Turnover is another challenge. We must be willing to start a measurement journey even if we aren’t there to see it conclude. According to the MFA industry census, media agencies had 32.6 per cent turnover in 2022. If one in three people will be gone in a year, it makes it hard to expect commitment to long-term measurement.

• The Out-of-Home market has shortened significantly in recent years, placing pressure on measurement to be set up rapidly. This can compromise the integrity of the measurement itself. As one of my former mentors Chris Crook, Nature’s Managing Partner, wrote in his article ‘Speed vs. Accuracy – There’s no trade-off for work that really matters’, if you are willing to give up accuracy for speed, then perhaps the research is not worth doing at all?

The second challenge is collaboration.

• ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ is an old saying, but still rings true. Good research requires the right inputs to ensure we measure what is important and measure it accurately. The entire research design can’t be left solely on media owners to deliver.

• In a time of regular data breaches, brands are understandably hesitant to share their primary data with agencies or media partners for measurement purposes. However, these same partners often expect to see proof that advertising is having a positive impact on the metrics they won’t share. Something’s got to give.

• Research shouldn’t be used as a negotiation tactic to inflate the value of a response to brief. Insights on campaign performance are genuinely valuable, and the time required to deliver these studies should be respected, not just requested to show ‘value’. 

• We must accept that measurement results won’t always be rosy. Coming from a research agency, I was used to delivering both the good and the ‘bad’ news. After all, you’re paid to be impartial. In media, we need to be brave, embrace trial and error, and tell more great stories of evolution.

Keeping it real and ourselves accountable.

While the JCDecaux PROOF program is here to show how Out-of-Home and JCDecaux drive great results – and deliver case studies to boot – at the end of the day, what we care more about is helping brands create more effective advertising.

You can’t judge the success of a campaign on CTRs and impressions alone. The beauty of Out-of-Home is your brand message is seen in the real world, not just served on to a private screen. We won’t stop trying to prove that it all works together in our omnichannel existence. Marketers want metrics and we want to help deliver.

But the burden of proof is on all of us.