How to run an Out of Home campaign

A step-by-step guide to launching your first advertising campaign, from a marketer who wishes this existed about six months ago.

A step-by-step guide to launching your first advertising campaign, from a marketer who wishes this existed about six months ago.

Why invest in advertising as a startup?

Every marketer goes to bed at night praying for the day they’ll get to launch their own advertising campaign. Marketing nowadays is all numbers and TikTok. What happened to the good old days of Mad Men? I really thought I’d be having more golf meetings at this stage of my career.

So when we get to sink our teeth into something cool like advertising, it’s always exciting. There’s something very satisfying about walking to work and seeing an ad that you came up with. Pointing at it. Nudging strangers. “I did that, you know”. It’s a bit like watching your own Instagram story the next day. “Haha, I’ve still got it.”

Apart from the ego-stroking, OOH can play a big role a startups growth strategy if the right ingredients are there. For Yonder, there were a few things that lead to us wanting to test it out.

Trying out a new credit card is a big ask

Credit cards aren’t commonplace for the typical UK millennial, because for a long time, they haven’t really been designed with their best interest at heart. A big part of our marketing strategy is to rebuild that trust between young people and credit. Above the Line (ATL) advertising was the most effective method for us to share that message with a lot of people at once.

Building our brand was essential

Yonder is what we call a considered purchase — the type of product that consumers spend weeks deliberating before giving it a go. Not everyone wants a credit card right now. In fact, we estimate around 90% of our entire addressable market aren’t in market for a credit card at the moment. For us to succeed, we needed to be top of mind when those potential customers entered the market. Investing heavily into our brand was no longer just a nice to have, but an essential part of our growth strategy.

Positioning against our competitors

This was my favourite part. I’ve tried to build our marketing strategy with a challenger mindset — always going after an incumbent and trying to turn their customers into ours. One of the key goals for this campaign was to position Yonder as a credible alternative to an unnamed competitor. I wanted someone to look at our ads for 2–3 seconds and immediately know how we might fit into their lives.

There’s a much longer version of this I could write.

Why OOH and not TV or something else?

The London underground ad network is the world’s most effective OOH medium. The dwell times are long, you get huge reach for relatively low cost-per-impression and commuters have a real affinity for the advertising they see on their commute.

There’s so much flexibility in the formats, amount of media and campaign duration. It meant we could devise a campaign that spread across four different formats, designed to get the balance right between building credibility and status as a new market entrant and optimising for reach so that we could show our ads to as many people in London as possible.

How to run an Out of Home campaign

Step 1: Find a media broker

If you’re an extremely experienced brand expert with years of negotiating media buys directly with with media owners like Global and JC Decaux then skip this part. Maybe skip the whole article.

Do not go to the media owners directly. A media broker is essential. Their role is to keep you and your brand away from the media owners who have all the leverage and all the power. Media brokers help to level the playing field and make every single pound go as far as possible.

I estimate that we got 5–6x as much media value from our campaign having used an media brokers. Their 8% fee pays for itself over and over again. Don’t skip this step unless you really know what you’re doing.

Step 2: Define your goals and set your strategy

Media brokers are also excellent at helping you distill what it is you really want from your campaign and will help you structure it to be as successful as possible. Your goal with any Out of Home campaign should be to optimise for reach. Regardless of your budget, think about how you can buy as many impressions as possible.

Our goals were, in order:

1. Position Yonder as a premium rewards credit card alternative

2. Increase Share of Voice and brand awareness in London

3. Improve effectiveness and efficiency of other marketing channels

4. Drive top of funnel traffic to our website

5. Help engage new partners and make hiring easier

The ad formats you choose will help to achieve whatever goals you set out. Want to focus more on brand perception and credibility? Go for bigger, more notable ad formats like 48 sheets. Want to optimise purely for as much reach as possible? Go for more tube car panels. Like anything, there’s a trade off and it comes down to what you’re optimising for. If you’re a financial, health or education brand then I’d recommend you include some more notable ad formats in your buy.

When the goal isn’t reach — some brands are starting to use one-off media buys to drive digital content, which is also great and brands like Surreal are doing this well. It gives the impression that you’re bigger and platforms like LinkedIn are just eating up advertising creative at the moment. If that’s your strategy, you’re better off mocking up the billboards in Photoshop. No one will ever know and you get the ‘moment’ for free. I did this a couple months ago and it was so effective that the brand I was taking the piss out of thought it was real.

Having said that, there is no replacement for reach. Reach is the goal. Reach drives Share of Voice. Reach drives Share of Market. Reach drives ubiquity. Reach drives growth. Now read that again.

Step 3: Set a budget

You may want to consider doing this step first, but if your budget is somewhat flexible, I’d recommend finding your media brokers first.

The best way to find your media buying budget is to take the full amount of money you have available to spend on this campaign and then work backward from there.

You’ll have some fixed costs, like creative, so take those out first. If you choose to go to an agency for creative support, I would suggest you aim to spend around £15k plus VAT. These rates will vary depending on your location.

We were being a bit cheeky with our creative so we also spent some of our budget on legal and compliance advice. There’s a good chance you may not need this but if you’re in a heavily regulated industry or you’re taking a pop at your competitors (do it) then I’d recommend it.

If your budget is £100k, start by taking out your fixed costs:

• £15k + VAT in creative costs

• £5k + VAT in legal, compliance and other operational costs

Once you take out your fixed costs, you’ll have around £75k left for media buying. Then you’ll need to break it down by your variable costs:

• Media brokers — 8–10% of your total spend

• Printing costs — around 10% of your total spend

So if your total budget is £100k, you’ll have around £60k to spend on media with 5% wiggle room.

Step 4: Decide on the ad formats and buying your media

We chose a nice balance between ad formats that were everywhere and ad formats that were notable. I know I’ve been banging on about reach, but one of the incredible things about Out of Home is that it will have unexpected benefits across your whole business if you do it well. So while we wanted to cover London in ads, we also wanted to make sure we had some bigger formats in place that would help position us as the premium product we are.

While your media brokers will handle all of this, it’s good to know how it works. You buy your media in two weeks periods, with each period starting on every other Monday. Your ads will start to go live 3–4 days before your campaign start date. It takes them about one week to get all of your ads live, so your start date is actually just an average of the days when your ads will go live. The same will happen when they’re taken down.

Don’t be tempted to go for individual placements at your favourite stations. A few billboards at a few stations is a great way to waste all of your money. If you’re going to do that, just give it to me.

Here are some of the formats you might want to think about:

• 16 Sheets — great for credibility and stature, long dwell time

• 48 Sheets — great for credibility and stature, long dwell time

• Lift and Elevator Panels (LEPs) — low dwell time, but great for frequency

• Buses — great coverage and high chance of over-show

• Tube car panels — lots of coverage and dwell time

Step 5: Developing your creative

Creative is the single biggest driver of advertising success apart from the actual size of the media you buy. So it’s important to see this as a huge opportunity for you to stand out from the rest.

Getting an agency or doing it yourself — you may want to work on the creative in-house, and if you’re a talented creative then that might work for you, but I’d encourage you to work with an agency that has experience in developing creative for the market you’re working in.

In addition to just having better, or at the very least, new ideas, an experienced agency will know the exact format of the ad creative and have experience with all the tiny details you’d never think of. It sounds obvious but I’ve seen some terrible ads around London that suggest they didn’t have the same advice.

Negotiate a flat fee upfront. Make sure they have around 8 weeks to develop the ideas and execute them. Depending on the amount of creative and different ad types, you may want to give yourself even more time.

Creative principles — I could write a whole post on this but in general, go with one really clear, really impactful message. If your product does lots of things, pick the best one and talk about that.

Step 6: Your ads are live

Congrats! Take a photo and send it to your mum. That’s important. Do that bit first.

Then you’ll want to support your big moment with other marketing activity. That may mean having some sort of content strategy alongside it, pitching out the creative as part of your PR strategy or just buying paid ads on Facebook and Google with the same creative. The only really wrong answer here is to do nothing.

You’ve spent a lot of money on this short period of time, so make the most of it. Get photos of your team in front of your ads, ask your customers to send in their favourite ones or reward people for sharing them online. No doubt you’ll come up with something fun. I’ve got more bad ideas if you want them.

We coupled our campaign with a couple really important marketing moments that helped to amplify all of them, all at once. We launched a crowdfund campaign that was then funded in just under 48 hours and then also announced a new Series A fundraise. While the OOH was sort of just ticking over in the background, it created this moment of ubiquity that catapulted our growth and helped us to elevate our brand further than any of those moments would have done on their own.

Step 7: Overshow and the end of your campaign

One of the great things about the London TFL ad network is that there’s a generous amount of overshow — that is, ads that stay up longer than you paid for.

This is quite common with TFL buses, which is why we chose this format. And I’m so glad we did. Our campaign ran in April and we’re still seeing Yonder buses all the time. I estimate there must still be 20–30 of them around London, around 10% of our original buy, some four months later.

Other formats like LEPs are also quite likely to hang around long after your original buy given the amount of them around London. I still see them every time I’m on the tube.

Formats like 48 sheets and 16 sheets are unlikely to have overshow due to their popularity. So it highlights why having a balanced strategy is important. They have an important role to play but will be the first to go down when your campaign is done.

Measuring success

Most forms of above the line advertising are notoriously hard to measure. Focus on executing your creative as best as you can and rely on your strategy. It will work, but you won’t ever be able to measure it down to the pound.

That’s not to say it’s not measurable at all. As soon as our ads went live, we saw an immediate spike in our website traffic. Not a small one, either. Screenshot from our Google Analytics below shows just how immediately clear the impact was. We didn’t include our website on our ads but people know how to use the internet. They’ll be able to find you.

Our branded search terms doubled in a month, and have remained about 50% higher than our pre-campaign levels since. Same goes for our general web traffic, with our weekly average web traffic way above our pre-campaign levels despite only having a few buses kicking around London still.

We supplemented our web data with a How Did You Hear About Us survey that was shown to every new customer. It’s allowed us to show some level of short term uplift to support our longer term brand building goals and provided some really interesting data around where people were seeing the ads and what areas were driving the most direct response growth.

You can, of course, invest in some tools or services to help with your measurement. You can do brand uplift surveys and pay a lot of money to track your brand awareness month over month. There are absolutely smarter ways to determine the actual efficiency of your OOH spend, and if I had more time and a data scientist around then I probably would have been interested in what we could learn there. A quick look at Google Trends and measuring our brand search traffic told us a very clear story and we got that insight for free.

Marketing buffs are going to hate this one, so keep it between us, but there was also just the immeasurable feeling that Yonder was everywhere. Everyone seemed to know about us overnight, and more importantly, they knew exactly what we were just from our creative.

My biggest learnings from our campaign

These aren’t necessarily mistakes we made along the way. Some are, but a lot of these are just things I didn’t realise coming into it that I learnt about along the way.

Buy for reach, not for placement

I don’t have time to explain the basic concepts of marketing efficiency, but there’s enough research out there from people much smarter than me that will tell you that you should be as broad in your targeting as possible. Optimise for reach and penetration. Buying a few billboards where you think your customers are will have no impact on anything and you’ll be wasting your money.

Give yourself more time on creative

Our final creative production was incredibly rushed, down to the hour, before our deadline and it was a nightmare. If your ad creative is sent to the media owner too late, you can miss printing windows and ultimately lose out on thousands of pounds of media.

While everyone involved can share some of the responsibility for that, it all could have been avoided if I got the ball rolling sooner.

Plan for at least 2–3 weeks of just tweaking and final design time for your creative. I was incredibly happy with our creative direction but not our creative execution. More time would have meant more polish.

Leave some budget for Paid Social

In hindsight, I’d have liked to run some broad reach Meta ads at the same time with the same creative. We could have done it really easily but I was too busy and stressed to even think about it. If we do another campaign, I’ll definitely do this.

If that was helpful…

You can find me on LinkedIn if you have any follow up questions.