Based on the Outdoor Auditor’s latest report of the outdoor landscape, we are seeing some of the highest numbers of outdoor sites in the country, with a total of 12 900 billboards across all nine provinces.

This equates to a 1.5% increase in inventory versus August 2017, and this growth has happened mostly in Gauteng (which accounts for 50% of all billboards in South Africa) and KwaZulu-Natal.

The other provinces have declined slightly and are receiving very negligible increases in inventory.

It is not illogical to question why there are more sites being put in the ground year-on-year in a struggling economy. In an article titled Rethinking out of home: Why digitally native brands are flocking to the medium, Adweek senior editor Kristina Monllos says digital brands are moving towards OOH, as awareness level marketing has increasingly become more important.

While the media landscape continues to fragment and consumers become increasingly more difficult to reach, OOH remains one of the guardians of awareness level marketing.

New bylaws to be promulgated by the City of Johannesburg

What will the new bylaws mean for the OOH landscape of Johannesburg? Well first of all, it is important to note that traditionally, it was media owners who would identify the spots where they would like to place billboards and apply to the council for approval.

However, since the Corridors of Freedom project, a spatial plan based on corridor transit oriented development, the city has taken a more proactive approach to city planning and urbanisation with its investments in infrastructure in the form of Gautrain, the Rapid Bus Transit and so forth.

With this lens, it sees OOH as a medium that ought to be contributing to the overall development of the city. This means that there will be a massive declutter coming.

This will also open up bigger opportunities for media owners to create advertising opportunities that will combine spatial planning and awareness level marketing to the next level.

Trends in OOH

Digital OOH is fast becoming as ubiquitous as static formats, especially in the most traffic-congested parts of Gauteng, with close to 16 500 panels nationwide and counting.

It is no longer the next big thing: it already is. What we are starting to see is a more intelligent use of DOOH networks, and they are no longer a TVC copy and paste job.

We are seeing creatives being tailored to each environment, which, as research shows us, increases noteworthiness and recall.

Size does matter. We are seeing bigger and more impactful formats than ever but, more than that, we are also seeing more experiential formats.

With brands wanting more ROI, they are also looking for talkability around their campaigns, which is opening doors to more experientially driven OOH campaigns.

Last, but certainly not least, is mobile OOH underpinned by location strategies. At Posterscope, globally, we have been talking about location as the heart of marketing and, therefore, we have built tools that make sense of digital consumer data in the real physical world.

The inclusion of the mobile device in the OOH space will continue to be the most critical tool in driving results visa vie awareness, engagement and measurability.

Successful brands are ones that integrate mobile, underpinned by location and creative messaging tailored for the consumer journey from the time they leave home, to the time they are at the point of purchase.

For more information, visit www.posterscope.com.