As Americans leave major cities, will outdoor ads follow?
By Kenneth Hein, The Drum
Buying out-of-home ads used to be so simple. Buy the top-10 markets and you were covered. Now, as a significant part of the US population has scattered across the country like dandelion seeds in the wind, marketers must be more thoughtful about their approach. While media buyers say brands may be slow to make the shift to buying secondary markets, the much-anticipated rise of digital out-of-home just might prove rewarding for early adopters who are following the trend.
Every other license plate in Florida is from New York, remarked a media buyer recently. This observation is part of an undeniable trend: many US consumers have migrated to secondary cities. Many may not return.
This adds a new and significant level of consideration to any marketer looking to make an out-of-home (OOH) buy as the US continues to open up. While purchasing OOH ads in the top-10 markets (like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and a handful of other key metro areas) used to be the only box a marketer needed to check, things have changed – even if clients haven’t recognized it yet.
Today, cities like Austin, Santa Barbara, Nashville, Indianapolis and Denver must be considered, per Ubimo, a Quotient Brand. Each of these cities saw the largest increase in movement, around 340,000+ OOH properties nationwide for the week ended April 4 compared to pre-Covid.
Other cities that saw increased movement include Charleston, South Carolina, Boise, Idaho, Columbus, Ohio and Cheyenne, Wyoming – all of which are also experiencing a population influx due to relocations.
And then there’s Florida. The Sunshine State’s real estate market has been described as a circus. Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of House, says there is going to be a ‘big migration’ from New York to Florida and Texas thanks to lower taxes outside the Big Apple. Jacksonville, Florida, also saw great gains, according to Ubimo data. Gas Station TV (GSTV), which offers ads at the pump, ranked Jacksonville as the third-largest gainer in transaction volume.
The most popular spot per GSTV: Bozeman, Montana, where apparently the locals can’t find a place to live anymore because of all the Californians moving in. Bangor, Maine stole the second-place spot.
Suffice to say, many people aren’t just in the top-10 market demographics anymore. (Further proof of this fact in the Ubimo chart below.) So, what are marketers and media buyers going to do now that OOH ad spend is coming back?
An inflection point for outdoor advertising
There is no shortage of bullish research indicating that OOH ad spend will rebound. Group M, for example, predicts outdoor will grow 22.4% this year, 19.7% in 2022 and see single-digit growth in 2023.
When Angela Zepeda, chief marketer at Hyundai Motor America, worked out her launch plans for the new Tucson, OOH found its way back into the marketing mix. “Car buying is up. People are antsy and want to get out ... we are dipping our toe back into some of these OOH channels and formats where we couldn’t spend in last year. Now we’ve got these important launches to do, and we just need to be everywhere.”
Zepeda stuck with the major metros with a key focus on Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, Texas – all of which are big markets for Hyundai.
The return to OOH spending, in any market, is good news for a category that was crushed by lockdown. “Advertisers are gearing up coming out of a relatively soft Q1. I think it’s going to be a big Q2,” says Norm Chait, group director of OOH sales for Quotient, which owns Ubimo. “We are seeing re-emergence in larger markets and movement in lots of secondary cities.”
But given the migration at hand, will marketers’ media plans begin to reflect the new realities? Media buyers say it’s possible, but it won’t happen quickly. Martin Porter, head of OOH at Dentsu, says, “It depends on client and vertical. For automotive there could be bigger changes. If you move out of cities, you’re more likely to buy a car.”
Still, there are questions about the current patterns and whether the dispersion of urban dwellers is permanent, says Porter. “Once is a blip, twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend. We are in a blip or a coincidence moment, so clients are not shifting big chunks of New York or Los Angeles dollars to secondary markets yet. It will be an inflection point this summer. Will migration paths change?”
Digital OOH gains ground
While marketers may still be sold on major markets, at least for the time being, they are also becoming more receptive to digital out-of-home ads (DOOH). Digital signage options at gas stations, supermarkets, electric vehicle charging stations, malls and commuter hubs had been gaining steam until everyone was stuck on their sofas for more than a year. The allure is simple: marketers can swap out creative based on location, the weather or any of a number of other different factors. They can also measure, test and learn.
Hyundai’s Zepeda says: "Digital boards and programmatic buying just allows for a lot more flexibility. It allows us to change messages more rapidly or tailor those messages to that particular market. Anything you can do to be more relevant that speaks to a customer and their mindset or their voice, the better off you are. It feels like your brand understands them.”
It also allows marketers to reach secondary cities more easily. “There is more flexibility to be reactive, to optimize and be efficient,” says Helen Miall, chief marketer at Viooh, global programmatic digital out-of-home marketplace. “You have the ability to change as audiences move around. You’re no longer fixed to a specific location and you can use the data to make decisions as the audiences are changing.”
Barry Frey, chief executive of the DPAA, the global digital out-of-home trade and marketing association, says being able to ‘follow the audience’ is essential because of two key factors. “The trend is people want to be outside. You can’t hold people back. That trend is our friend. Also, we aren’t impacted by the disappearance of the cookie. We have our own good data. For us, if there’s no cookie, no problem.”
The dawn of the national outdoor ad buy
Marketers will always be drawn to the big, shiny vanity play buys like Times Square and Sunset Boulevard, but as DOOH advances, so does the opportunity to be much more pervasive. In fact, making national buys, which had previously been difficult, is now likely to accelerate.
Over the past couple of years, there has been a ‘connecting of the pipes’ that allows DOOH buyers to offer a national footprint. “You will see an increased share in other markets as we start pushing forward with more of a national offering,” says Michael Lieberman, US chief executive at Kinetic Worldwide. For marketers looking to broaden their reach, it’s less about adding cities and more about “thinking about what we can do on a networked basis. That’s the massive change we need to undergo as an industry – getting people to look outside of top-10, -15 or even -20 markets and thinking nationally”.
Keith Kaplan, global chief executive at Kinetic Worldwide, adds that the buying nationally also gives brands the chance to be always on. “You can always be there when they are ready to buy. You can be in front of them for the first mile and the last mile. It’s going to sound ridiculous, but this is a completely different shift in what OOH can be used for.”
Indeed, there is a lot to be optimistic about, says Dentsu’s Porter. “We are definitely seeing clients not just coming back and saying, ‘I will buy what I bought before.’ They are fully aware that people are moving around in different ways. Programmatic helps marketers target and optimize so much easier. This an inflection point in that channel ... OOH is on an upward trajectory.”
GSTV and WAVE.tv Launch Partnership To Bring Unique Sports Content To National Video Network
With New Partnership Across GSTV Network, Popular Sports Media Company Expands Audience Reach And Distribution Outside Of Owned Platforms For First Time
DETROIT (January 11, 2021) – GSTV, the national video network entertaining targeted audiences at scale across tens of thousands of fuel retailers, today announced a new content partnership with WAVE.tv, the sports media company for today’s fan that reaches over 200 million viewers and receives 3.9 billion views monthly across its portfolio of media brands.
The partnership will include the distribution of unique and non-traditional sports highlights and user-generated content from six of WAVE.tv’s most popular media brands; “Benchmob”, “Buckets”, “Rage Quit”, “FTBL”, “Haymakers”, and “Jukes”. WAVE.tv will provide GSTV with dedicated content segments to air across the national video network’s 25,000 stations. With WAVE.tv’s Rage Quit, e-sports content will appear regularly on GSTV for the first time. The partnership also opens up new opportunities for GSTV and WAVE.tv to work with brands looking to connect with a Gen Z and Millennial audience through sponsored content partnerships.
“While our programming can be discovered across the core and emerging digital platforms where today's modern sports fans spend the most time, we are constantly looking for ways to grow the awareness of the WAVE.tv brand outside of social and digital,” said Brian Verne, Co-Founder and CEO, WAVE.tv. “This is the first time WAVE.tv content will be visible to a wide audience outside of our platforms. We are thrilled to be partnering with GSTV, who is the perfect fit for our short-form sports content, and cannot wait to highlight a variety of sports fandoms with their national network.”
“WAVE.tv has mastered entertaining its viewers with captivating short form content, which is perfect for GSTV viewers who give us a few of their undivided moments of their attention while on the go,” said Sean McCaffrey, President & CEO, GSTV. “We know our audience responds enthusiastically to sports, e-sports and UGC, and we’re delighted to share WAVE.tv’s content with them as well as provide new sponsorship opportunities to advertisers looking to reach a Gen Z audience that natively loves and regularly consumes non-traditional sports content.”
WAVE.tv joins GSTV’s growing line-up of premiere content partners, including Cheddar, Live Nation, Better Together With Maria Menounos, La Liga, Loop Media, First Media (So Yummy, Blossom), What’s Trending, CNET, Stadium, NFL and MLB, among others. The GSTV network reaches 92 million unique viewers a month.
WAVE.tv’s content segments can be seen on GSTV screens starting Monday, January 11. For more information about GSTV, visit gstv.com. For more information about WAVE.tv, visit wave.tv.
About GSTV
GSTV is a data-driven, national video network delivering targeted audiences at scale across tens of thousands of fuel retailers. Reaching 1 in 3 American adults monthly, GSTV engages viewers with full sight, sound, and motion video at an essential waypoint on their consumer journey. Analysis of billions of consumer purchases demonstrates that GSTV viewers spend significantly more across retailers, services, consumer goods and other sectors, following a fuel transaction. While offering consumers entertaining and informative content, GSTV drives immediate action and creates lasting brand impressions, delivering measurable results for the world’s largest advertisers. Visit gstv.com for more information and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
About WAVE.tv
WAVE.tv is a sports media company for today's fan. Through a portfolio of media brands, covering a wide array of fandoms and genres, WAVE.tv entertains modern day sports fans with the programming they love, produced for the digital platforms where they spend the most time.
Their programming can be discovered across Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and other core and emerging platforms. Each month, WAVE.tv's entire portfolio reaches 65 million followers and subscribers (largely Gen-Z and Millennials) with a unique reach of 200 million and generating over 3.9 billion video views.
Adweek: Deepfakes At The Gas Pump Scares Up Data Privacy Awareness
The video is part of a follow-up campaign to viral 2011 stunt 'Take This Lollipop'
By Patrick Kulp | Adweek
GSTV host Maria Menounos' face is replaced with deepfake technology. Take This Lollipop
Tens of millions of Americans filling their gas tanks this week may be in for a fright at the pump this season. No, it’s not about gas prices. Rather, it’s what is expected to happen from viewing a creepy campaign about privacy issues being shown on screens at the 24,000 Gas Station TV (GSTV) locations across the country.
The scene shows the friendly face of the TV anchor at the pump transforming into the villainous visage of a man with a sinisterly voiced warning about digital data collection.
The stunt, which involved using deepfake technology to replace the face of GSTV host Maria Menounos, is part of a new online privacy campaign that also includes a hair-raising Zoom video experience putting viewers in the center of a horror movie-like plot via their webcam.
The entire project is a belated follow-up to a 2011 viral stunt called “Take This Lollipop,” a Facebook app that captivated a more innocent generation of social media user with videos of the same ominous character reciting data about each viewer collected through Facebook’s data-sharing practices.
Creators Jason Zada, a film director, and Jason Nickel, a developer, said they hoped to reprise the success of that effort and the awareness it brought to Facebook’s data policies, but were waiting for the right cause.
“We took our time only because it really felt like we needed to find the right idea with the right piece of technology at the right time,” Zada said.
“It just so happened that a pandemic made that possible with this massive shift in technology and social communication–everybody started using Zoom,” he continued. “So the question was, ‘How can we use this current time in society in technology to our advantage and take something that we all rely upon, and and sort of twist it and turn it around a bit?'”
The result is an approximately 4-minute long Zoom video experience that detects your face and places the viewer in a Zoom call with three actors, two of whom—spoilers ahead—are spirited away by some unknown entity in suspenseful fashion before an augmented reality figure appears in the background of the viewer’s own room. The remaining participant then reveals herself to be the campaign’s trademark villain.
Zada and Nickel said the original goal had been to deepfake each viewer in real-time, but they couldn’t pull off the the technology in time for the launch. Instead, they decided to incorporate the deepfake element into a deal with GSTV and Menounos to hijack her regular segment with an ominous message.
“The general idea was that Halloween has been cancelled for the most part for a lot of people. Even brands have been shifting away from doing anything Halloween-related this year. And it seemed like the perfect opportunity,” Zada said.
“But you mix that with an election year in which there are these deep fakes that exist, there is AI, there is the hacking of the election, there’s the hacking of just general politics,” he added. “It was kind of interesting to look at how we could use deepfake in a more consumer-friendly way and show people that like, ‘I could access you–not your data anymore—but I could access you, I could recreate you, I could become you.'”
A recent survey of researchers ranked deepfakes as the number-one cyber-criminal threat posed by AI. Its nefarious potential extends beyond the creation of fake news footage of public figures–an oft-discussed threat that has yet to materialize in any significant way beyond YouTube gags, per deepfake tracking platform Sensity. Other areas of concern include identity theft, video call scam extortion and its most prevalent use as of a source of non-consensual pornography.
Despite those fears, advertisers have been latching onto the tech as a way to circumvent production constraints brought on by the pandemic or spread political messages.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal has made the issue tackled by the first “Take This Lollipop” campaign a critical national political issue that played a role in the 2016 election. Could they end up being as prescient this time around?
“We’ve always been a fan of just exploring future business models around content, entertainment and technology that I think we’re going to rely upon it more and more,” Zada said. “It’s a great time to be a storyteller, in terms of being able to use technology to power and enable original entertainment that breaks new ground.”
AdAge: 'Take This Lollipop' Returns To Teach A Creepy Lesson About Deepfakes
Jason Zada's viral Facebook app gets a follow-up featuring new tech scares
By I-Hsien Sherwood | AdAge
In 2011, a creepy Facebook app called Take This Lollipop went viral. It used private data captured by the platform to send viewers on a customized horror adventure, stalked by a tech-savvy villain who pinpointed the locations of their actual houses.
Now, nine years later, creator Jason Zada is back with a sequel that taps into the danger of a new type of digital technology: deepfakes. While advertisers and satirists have used the tech to fake words from world leaders, it isn’t only celebrities who can end up in seemingly compromising positions or appear to say things they didn’t. Consumer-level apps have been banned for faking nudes of women and underage girls.
In “Take This Lollipop 2,” Bill Oberst Jr. returns as the stalker, only this time he steals viewers' faces, showing how far the tech has come from its early days, when algorithms needed hours of footage of a person to emulate their features. "Take This Lollipop" is now a dedicated site that uses webcam footage to put viewers in the film, which looks like a video chat service, complete with an AI-powered interactive chat window. One-by-one, the other viewers meet a terrible fate
Zada directed the interactive short, which was built by Imposium and enlisted the skills of deepfake artist birbfakes. Promos feature Maria Menunous of GSTV.