Tom Goddard is President of the World Out of Home Organization, a not-for-profit trade body, which promotes the OOH sector internationally, encourages best practices and provides an unrivalled networking platform for the sector. He has spent most of his working life in what he calls the Great Outdoors, on the media owner side, most notably running the international division of CBS Outdoor from 2000 to 2007 and later, at Ocean Outdoor in Northern Europe, until he stepped down, a couple of years ago, to set-up a global OOH advisory business called OOH Capital, whose role is to help businesses across the whole OOH spectrum. Goddard gave the keynote speech on Day 1 of MAD STARS 2023, Innovation in Out of Home Advertising.
The Stable: I’m guessing that the pandemic was devastating to OOH worldwide?
Tom Goddard: Yes, the leaders of most countries saying “stay at home” was devastating for an industry called out of home. We were the joint worst hit beside cinema and everybody’s confidence was rocked. In some markets, they lost 95% of their revenue overnight. And in a business that has fixed costs, that’s a very scary situation to be in. The global average dropped in spend from 2019 to 2020 by 25% but in some countries, it was much steeper. The variances were because in some countries like Sweden, they took a policy decision to stay open.
The Stable: When people were “let out again”, they did so with gusto. Was that reflected in the recovery of OOH?
Tom Goddard: Yes, lo and behold, in 2021, the recovery started. Obviously, we didn’t get back to 2019 levels but we got halfway back, and then in 2022, the global industry recovered back up to US$36 billion and is expected to reach US$40 billion next year according to our latest forecast. So yes, very strong recovery.
The Stable: Apart from the obvious, what else has helped the recovery?
Tom Goddard: Well, there are two factors. Internally, I think we continue to invest heavily in digital transformation. We continue to invest heavily in ad tech. We are also developing our machine-to-machine technology through programmatic trading. That’s opening up a lot of the online markets that were not really accessible before because of a lack of technological capability.
We’re also investing more and more in robust audience measurement. About half of the world has a very high level of audience measurement, certainly Western Europe, North America. Australia has one of the gold bars through its OMA organisation. But then there are big areas that have either weak audience measurements that haven’t been approved by the Joint Industry Committee or none. If you take Latin America, practically none; big parts of Asia also, which is surprising, and Eastern Europe. So, in the World Out of Home Organization, we’ve launched a program called Measure the World to accelerate measurement rapidly. All those things – automation, programmatic, audience measurement and digital transformation are driving that growth.
There are also external factors. Big tech is having some problems for example. Problems with brand safety. Problems with privacy. Problems with fraud. The efficacy of their audience measurement is being challenged. And also, a lot of the big tech media channels are facing declining subscriptions. So, we never look a gift horse in the mouth if the medium that’s been taking a lot of our revenues is having some trouble. We are finding that advertisers are now reconsidering the balance of their media spend. That is helped by the facts that out of home is a very trusted medium and there’s a lot of online fatigue, particularly after COVID. People are out and about. They want to be out and they want to see good news being broadcast.
The Stable: You said in your presentation that OOH can broadcast up-to-date sports?
Tom Goddard: Yes, it’s dynamic, like a news channel. Here in the UK, we’re really pioneering real-time dynamic broadcasting. We broadcast the Wimbledon and the Grand National. A lot of the big sporting events get broadcast live, even summaries and news items for when people are going to work, especially if there was a big sporting occasion the night before. But it’s not just sports. It’s lots of things – news, weather, political, political issues. Because of technology now, we can bring broadcast to OOH screens in real time.
The Stable: Sustainability is a massive issue for advertising right now.
Tom Goddard: It’s a huge issue and, in fact, the MAD STARS organisers and I were just talking about that here. I’m happy to say that the World Out of Home Organization has set up a sustainability task force. One of our board members is leading it and it’s very, very active. We are taking it very seriously because our customers are saying that we want to have an advertising media landscape that’s at net zero by 2030. Networks such as Group M, Dentsu and Omnicom are all saying that they are moving towards AdNet Zero and they are expecting their media suppliers to be able to demonstrate they are on the same course to the extent that they will not support media channels that can’t clearly demonstrate that they are taking this very seriously. They know greenwashing from 100 yards. Companies like Clear Channel and JCDecaux are doing great work. Clear Channel has moved to all its servicing vehicles to electric. JCDecaux uses only renewable energy for driving its digital inventories, and in Scandinavia instead of having plastic PVC displays on plastic media, they’re now producing material that’s 100% biodegradable. Then the big LED manufacturers, and Daktronics is one from the United States, are producing LED equipment that is 94% recyclable.
We really are all taking this very seriously in the industry. I was at the World Federation of Advertisers Congress in Istanbul two months ago and 90% of the presentations from the CFOs were on sustainability. And of course, we want to do it because we’re citizens as well. We should be doing it.
The Stable: What can you do to entice creatives to use you more?
Tom Goddard: Creatives have fallen back in love with out of home already and for a number of reasons. In fact, we’re finding now that in a lot of cases it’s not the media director who chooses the medium, it’s the creative director. There was a period where they were dazzled by the online world and the fame that a lot of that brought them. But, for instance, in digital OOH, the kind of things they can do now with three-dimensional anamorphic displays is infinite. I’m dazzled every day by what I see. And creators are only human; they want to create something that’s going to win awards and win clients, so they’re piling in to do really, really interesting stuff now on our digital inventories, such as anamorphic.
The other thing is that scale is important. In Australia, for example, they’ve done some terrific search on memory encoding through neuroscience that shows when you see something large like Piccadilly Lights or some of the big, big, big scale displays in city centres like Sydney, it has a much deeper impact than when you see a little banner ad. And then in classic media, they’re finding that a lot of brands were putting too much of their budgets into activation and losing brand presence, losing brand awareness. The two best media for brand awareness are TV and out of home. So they’re switching budgets back in and encouraging more creatives to design specifically for the medium instead of adapting from other media, which dilutes it a bit and doesn’t engage audiences as effectively.
We also do a lot of creative awards to recognise the work that the creatives do and support it.
