The oldest advertising medium in the world is being remade.
William Eccleshare, chief executive of Clear Channel International, believes that outoor advertising – be it billboards or bus shelters – will be overwhelmingly a technology business by 2020.
“In key markets, I can see 90 per cent of out-of-home advertising being delivered digitally by the end of the decade,” says Mr Eccleshare, who is appearing on Thursday at the FT’s digital media conference in London. “That compares to about 10 per cent today in a developed market such as the UK.”
In large part that means putting screens in place of posters, particularly on bus stops, airports and stations where people loiter – what the industry calls “dwell time”.
But it also means embracing mobile technology. Near-field communication, which uses similar “wave and pay” technology to the Oyster card on London Underground, is starting to make headway in mobile phones, already appearing in the latest Android device, Samsung’s Galaxy S, and rumoured to be coming in the next iPhone.
“As mobiles become payment devices, the ability to buy off a poster in a bus shelter or a shopping mall is going to be transformative,” Mr Eccleshare says. “We will see a shrinkage in the total number of outdoor fixtures and panels but an increase in quality in the way in which consumers interact with those panels.”
Although he dismisses recent stories about billboards recognising facial expressions as a “little gimmicky”, Clear Channel is already offering free WiFi on buses in Hong Kong and even putting wireless in bus stops in other regions.
New eye-tracking technology – involving paying people to wear special glasses as they walk around a city – is also helping to measure the impact of outdoor ads, which Clear Channel argues is less interruptive and annoying than online pop-ups or TV commercials.
“I get the sense it is all coming together,” Mr Eccleshare says. “Convergence is starting to happen and this year we are going to start seeing some real breakthroughs in that, in terms of providing real revenue and a real business model. Technology is transforming our rather old-fashioned business and I can now see – which I couldn’t a year ago – how over the next five to seven years, it’s going to become really significant.”
Although the business of pasting posters to billboards may not seem particularly complex, outdoor advertising has become an innovation-driven business. Clear Channel introduced a much-imitated bike-rental system in Rennes in 2001, and now runs 14 schemes around the world. In exchange for installing and operating the system, Clear Channel gets exclusive rights to advertising nearby.
But the challenges associated with the transition to digital are not purely technical. Advertisers must be taught how to take advantage of new possibilities in buying ads by the time of day, as well as by location; Magners, for instance, only advertises its cider on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings at one of Clear Channel’s Piccadilly Circus locations.
“The worst thing that can happen to you as a media owner is for people to misuse the medium,” says Mr Eccleshare, who joined Clear Channel after years in the creative agency world.
“It’s particularly true in digital – how advertisers use digital outdoor is a big challenge. Some still think you can put a 30-second commercial on a poster site… What we like is gently animating a still image.”
