Opinion The last mass medium

By Chris Staples

If you were a media director a hundred years ago (assuming there was any such fancy title), your job would have been so easy. For every client, for every budget, your advice would have been the same: Buy outdoor.

Sure, there were magazines and newspapers, but they were for the relatively affluent. If you wanted to reach everyone, everywhere, as efficiently as possible, outdoor was the only game in town. Just look at any photo from that era. Every nook and cranny was plastered in ads— festooned with banners, signs, sandwich boards and painted murals. It was the First Golden Age of Outdoor Advertising.

We’re about to witness the Second 

As media has become more and more fragmented, it’s becoming harder for mass brands to reach mass audiences. Television is still by far the most powerful emotional selling tool available— but TV buys now consist of 20 channels instead of five. It’s like fishing with a bunch of separate poles instead of a big net.

Outdoor, by contrast, works the way it has since the days of graffiti in Rome: Pick a prime location, and you can’t help but catch every fish that swims by.

Times Square, everywhere

Ironically, one of the last great vestiges of the First Golden Age is creating a blueprint for the coming renaissance. In the first half of this century the most innovative ads in the world found their home in Times Square in New York. Giant coffee cups with real steam! Neon Coke bottles 12 stories high! It was an advertising wonderland.

By the ’70s, Times Square was a corridor of broken neon, reaching mostly pimps and johns. Today, not only has the area regained its former glory; it’s added all sorts of interactive tricks. Buy a shirt at American Eagle and your face goes on a billboard within 15 minutes!

More and more cities are creating their own versions of the fabled original (no doubt convinced partly by the juicy deals they can demand from outdoor companies). Toronto has its Dundas Square. And Vancouver is being primed for its own version beside the old Eaton’s on Granville, which will soon be home to giant projected images.

Not everyone loves outdoor

Not every city is as amenable to outdoor as New York. Of Canadian cities, Toronto is the most outdoor friendly (although that seems to be changing with the recent introduction of a controversial tax on billboards). Montreal’s language laws make outdoor a challenge there. But Vancouver has the most noticeable love/hate relationship with the outdoor medium.

On the one hand, the City realizes there’s money to be had from advertisers. It extracted amazing concessions from Viacom-Decaux, handing them an exclusive contract for transit shelters in return for state-of-the art bus shelters and street furniture. On the other hand, billboards are virtually extinct in many places in the Lower Mainland. Recent attempts by local Aboriginal bands to place giant billboards next to key bridge crossings have been met with howls of outrage and calls for boycotts.

In the long run, it seems that outdoor will continue to flourish even in places like Lotusland— although within strict parameters. Paris is a great example— in exchange for more outdoor ads, JCDecaux paid for the city’s innovative free bike system. More outdoor, however, doesn’t mean more effective advertising. Simply plastering a bad ad everywhere is no guarantee of results.

Creativity counts more than ever

Terry O’Reilly makes a great point about outdoor in his latest book, The Age of Persuasion. Over the years, he writes, consumers have come to see advertising as a form of barter: I’ll watch your ad, if you provide me with free shows. Outdoor is the exception— because it doesn’t subsidize entertainment. Which is why it’s so vital that every outdoor ad be entertaining and engaging.

If you’re going to take the time to read our billboard, you should get something back in the form of a smile, or a chuckle, or the satisfaction of having solved a puzzle. The best outdoor ads become like outdoor art— tourists take photos, the press writes articles, locals rave.

But what do you think? Is outdoor the last great mass medium? Or visual pollution that’s a blight on our landscape? Can you build a brand on outdoor? And what are some examples of your best— and worst— outdoor campaigns?

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Chris Staples, partner and co-creative director of Rethink Communications in Vancouver.

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