Some Brands are Turning to Out-of-Home to Stand Out During a Noisy Holiday Season

Ivy Liu

With the election quickly approaching, some companies are facing more expensive digital ad rates as political candidates and retailers battle for Americans’ attention. 

In turn, some are trying to break away from the pack by also running analog holiday campaigns through out-of-home, direct mail and print. At the same time, despite OOH being a less noisy channel at this time, some brands are still hesitant to spend their limited ad dollars due to the difficulty of measuring sales conversion. Marketers and agencies, however, say brand marketing is becoming an all-important part of the holiday strategy, with OOH being a popular channel for raising awareness.

That’s not to say that OOH isn’t challenging. Like digital, it’s also currently dominated by political campaign ads. Per the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, during the first half of 2024, U.S. House and Senate OOH spending quadrupled from 2020 and is up 70% from 2022. Yet given the analog nature of out-of-home compared to social and TV ads, some feel that OOH is harder for people to avoid or tune out.

Kevin Bartanian, the CEO of OOH media sales company Kevani, told Modern Retail that ad spend typically increases every year during this time, with key shopping holidays like Halloween, Black Friday-Cyber Monday and Christmas prompting brands to capitalize on consumers’ shopping mindset. 

“But we’re seeing agencies and brands diversify their spend in new ways this year as they look outside digital channels that are pretty busy in the midst of election season,” Bartanian said. For instance, Kevani is seeing an influx of fashion campaigns coming to its OOH displays. “It makes sense because CPMs are extremely expensive during this season, and consumers themselves are also out of home visiting family, traveling for the holidays, shopping and suffering from digital fatigue,” he said.

That’s the approach of sustainable cashmere brand Naadam, which rolled out its “Soft as Hell” out-of-home campaign in September to tee it up for the holidays. Naadam CEO Matt Scanlan said, “I think this particular election cycle is more complicated than any other time in our lives.”

While some e-commerce brands are experiencing higher digital CPMs, Scanlan said the company is still in line with its yearly projections. “I’m not seeing anything in our KPIs that is different from what we saw last year, but we might be an outlier here,” he explained. “In fact, we’re tracking better through October in our business ROI than we were this time last year.” 

To best stand out in the online holiday rush, this year, Naadam is investing in out-of-home for its annual brand marketing campaign, which rolls out around this time of year. 

The idea for the Soft as Hell campaign came up around April. “That’s generally when we start thinking about what our big fall campaigns are going to look like,” Scanlan said. It features a devil with a “soft side” to relay the softness of the brand’s sweaters, with comedian Anthony LeDonne playing the devil doing so-called soft activities like laundry and playing with his kitten. “We’re also doing everything from Facebook, Google, TikTok and CTV to affiliate networks like Rakuten and AppLovin,” he said.

Naadam has a history of running controversial and risqué OOH campaigns, which Scanlan said helps grab attention. “I think our customer kind of expects it from us now, and we knew this year, specifically with the election, we needed to really do something big,” he said. “You have to cut through the noise.” 

Beyond billboards, the in-person version of Soft as Hell includes a mobile truck pop-up, dubbed “Hell on Wheels,” to get in front of a lot of people relatively quickly. The mobile pop-up will visit growing sales hubs for Naadam, said Scanlan. For example, Boston, D.C. Chicago, which are growing cities for the company.

Still, the main challenge with word-of-mouth marketing is trackability, Scanlan said, especially compared to digital ads’ attribution. However, Scanlan said the most definitive KPI to show how successful the campaign’s been since its September rollout is email signups. 

“For context, in 2023, we brought in about 4,000 new emails through our site, and in September, we acquired 29,000 new emails that month alone,” he said. “I think that that’s 100% due to the marketing campaign — we’ve never seen a jump like that year-over-year from a marketing campaign.”

The Soft as Hell OOH campaign will be running indefinitely, with different iterations planned for the coming months. A holiday version of Soft as Hell ads is due to roll out in time for Black Friday. 

These days, OOH advertising’s cost is relatively accessible to smaller brands thanks to more space available on taxis, bus stops and other digital signage areas. According to the Place Exchange Programmatic OOH trends report, on average CPMs for out-of-home advertising in the U.S. were $7.24 in the second half of 2023. By comparison, CPMs for Facebook ads have already hit $10.32 as of September. Still, some brands are hesitant to bet on non-digital advertising in the coming weeks.

Philip Atkins, founder of marketing agency Phidel Digital, said the agency advised its brands to reallocate holiday ad spend to alternative channels like OOH, mail-in catalogs and other print ads to avoid getting drowned out by political social media ads and other brands’ ads.

“In our case, none of our clients pulled the trigger on it, but we proposed it to everyone,” he said. “The challenge is the measurability of OOH,” Atkins said, as it’s difficult to truly assess the impact of these investments compared to digital formats. 

“We like the idea of capturing impressions when a user is off their phone,” Atkins said. “There is so much content pollution digitally, we believe that physical has a different impact because it’s nostalgic and connects in a tactile way.”

But measurability is the barrier, he explained, especially after a very mixed 2024 sales performance. “With many brands seeing a tougher third-quarter performance, they want to concretely see the impact of their investments,” Atkins said.

Going into the new year, out-of-home is expected to pick up as the pressure of performance marketing subsides. “We have some big OOH campaigns planned for 2025, but the general consensus for Q4 was to focus on performance efforts and measured awareness,” he said.

Read the article: Modern Retail