Outdoor Attracts. DM Connects

01/01/2009

National yet local, fleeting yet memorable, unobtrusive yet unavoidable – outdoor provides the perfect foil for direct mail as part of an integrated marketing campaign, argues Pat Mannion, Commercial Director of JCDecaux.

This article at a glance

Contrary to appearances, outdoor and direct mail are highly complementary. This has primarily to do with the fact that one is outdoor, the other indoor. Outdoor advertising helps builds trust in and awareness of a brand so that when a consumer receives a piece of related direct mail he or she is more receptive to the offer – and more likely to respond positively. What’s more, both DM and outdoor are flexible media that can be tailored with ease to particular regions, or even neighbourhoods, allowing marketers to run tightly focused and highly targeted integrated campaigns.

Three seconds.

That’s the average length of time people spend looking at a poster. They see it. They take in the clever visuals, the sharp message, and move on.

You wouldn’t think three seconds would, on its own, be enough to ensure the success of an outdoor campaign. In fact, there are plenty of case studies of successful campaigns that ran purely with outdoor.

But there are also numerous examples of outdoor working fantastically well with other media. Other media can mean TV. It can mean mobile. Increasingly, it can also mean direct mail.

Indoor-outdoor dichotomy

On the face of it, these two media – outdoor and direct mail – could not be more different. You have those couple of seconds to take in a billboard, whereas you can spend minutes on end reading a piece of direct mail, poring over the contents, absorbing every detail.

And direct mail, like most types of communication, is consumed indoors – in the office, in the home, in the college. By contrast, and by definition, outdoor is the only medium, apart from radio on the move I suppose, that is there when you go outside.

This indoor-outdoor dichotomy goes a long way, I think, to explaining why outdoor and direct mail work so well together. The out-of-home element – the poster – conveys the message and reinforces the brand. The in-the-home part – direct mail – provides all the detail I need to act.

Relevant & engaging

I’m a big believer that, with advertising, the message is either for you or it’s not. That goes for direct mail as much as outdoor, despite the different nature of the two media. As a nation we love to read. But we will very quickly decide whether or not to interact with a piece of direct mail. We work with what is relevant and discard what’s not. That’s all that any advertiser or client can ask.

However, a direct mail campaign is much less effective, less likely to succeed, if it doesn’t engage the recipient. How do you engage the recipient? Great creative will do it, obviously. But that’s not always easy or even sufficient. What you must do is prime your audience for the DM by first building awareness and trust in your brand. This is where outdoor comes in. As a broadcast medium, it can get the message out to a lot of people at once. Also, it’s unavoidable: you can’t switch it off like you can do with other types of advertising. (As soon as you switch it off, you’ve already seen it.)

If you’ve picked up on the outdoor advertising (and, remember, sometimes you won’t) you’re already positive about the brand, so when you receive the piece of direct mail you’re more ready to engage with it.

A good example is a bank that offers 5pc interest on my savings. I see this on a billboard and it appeals to me. If I then get more detail through my door, I’ll certainly engage with it.

Or again, you might have a supermarket doing a big price promo. Tesco recently opened a store in Bettystown, near Dublin. Tesco bought all the local outdoor sites and combined that with direct mail, highlighting particular money-off deals. People living locally saw the billboards and knew the opening was imminent; then they got direct mail telling them they could buy pears for that amount, beef for that price and so on. Happy days!

That’s how it can and should work.

Another, slightly more unusual, example

Every year a huge number of Trocaire boxes are brought into the home through schools and personal requests. Trocaire always runs major outdoor campaigns around Lent. These highlight the plight of poor people in the Third World. The collection boxes in the home allow us to respond to this need in a very practical and convenient way – by dropping some money into the box. Again, the outdoor primes us for action; the direct mail gives us the means to engage. So there is a very natural symmetry between the two.

But that’s not all this particular pairing has got going for it. Think about it this way: direct mail works because it can target a hundred homes or a thousand. It can reach homes in a single area or dozens of different areas. It is flexible, in other words, and can be tailored geographically to meet a particular marketing need.

Outdoor, too, delivers in terms of ‘place’.

You can buy a national campaign. Equally you can limit it to just a small area of a city. You can decide where you want to go and get your message out there. Opening a shop in Drogheda? You can run a local campaign telling people about that fact. Doing a special deal on Fords in Galway? Use poster sites close to Ford dealers in that county to get your message out.

You can be very local with outdoor or you can be national – it’s your call.

So outdoor and direct mail can work together on a couple of key levels – place of consumption (indoor/outdoor) and geography (local/national).

Only for the big players?

Mind you, some people have funny ideas about when to use each, and even whether they can be used together. For instance, one of the concerns of smaller advertisers in the past was that outdoor was the preserve of the big guys. That there was no point buying outdoor unless it was a mega-campaign, unless you were a Guinness or a Vodafone. While it is true that the top 10 advertisers spend between 20pc and 30pc of their budgets on outdoor, compared to an average of 10pc for all advertisers, this merely tells us that big advertisers see something exceptionally attractive about outdoor, and not that it is irrelevant to smaller advertisers.

In fact, the opposite is true. The small guy who wants to do something very local can merge outdoor with direct mail very comfortably and saturate the (local) market. It’s very cost effective and it works.

So you don’t have to be a giant to use outdoor. Anyone can use it, big or small. And you can absolutely tie it in with direct mail and make a very effective campaign, be it a national campaign or a local one. You just need to remember: outdoor, out-of-home; direct mail, in the home – it’s a natural synergy.

Pat Mannion is commercial director of JC Decaux.

This article is part of a series commissioned by An Post in partnership with Marketing Magazine.