Not Your Father’s Billboards – Bing Maps Brings The Out-Of-Home Industry Into the Digital Age

When you hear the words “Outdoor Advertising” you might think of dusty highway billboards and smiling realtors on bus stop benches.  20 years ago, that was probably pretty close to accurate.  Today, it’s a different story.

A Thriving Industry

Last year the out-of-home (OOH) industry raked in $602 million according to the Outdoor Media Association (OMA).  And while it’s still a small slice of the overall media spend at 4.5%, the tide is turning.  OOH revenues were up last quarter by 3.8% while other media spend areas, like TV ads, fell.

Why the shift?  Like so many other industries, technology is driving the change.  Bing Maps is one of those technologies.  Bing’s customer Kinetic is one of the companies using mapping technology to better serve their customers and increase revenue.

Making A Good Thing Better

As you can imagine, location-based information is incredibly important for an OOH provider.  Kinetic, a New York City based advertising agency that specializes in OOH, had developed a proprietary software tool called Aureus to help their customers choose the right media placements.  They precisely filtered a huge amount of information like where the target audience lives, how and when they commute to work, and where they are at different points in the day.

But they wanted to go a step further. And that’s why they went to Bing Maps. By integrating Bing Maps into Aureus, Kinetic can take all of that precise data, overlay a map of target audience locations and ad placements.  This provides an accurate heat map that delivers a visualization of where all of the client’s ads will be placed.  In this manner, the heat maps go beyond just pins on a map.  They show the location of the ad within the context that’s most important to advertisers – their target audience.

The Benefits

Kinetic also likes the scalability of the Bing Maps technology.  The map can provide a birds-eye-view of thousands of OOH placements or can zoom in on one particular area of interest.  The maps take just minutes to generate, and, because they are cloud-based, can be sent via email to clients as a link.

Finding Your Target Audience

Mapping technology is changing the OOH industry by pinpointing the perfect ad placements.  The remainder of the media and advertising industry can’t be far behind.  The fact is all ads are targeted at people and almost all people have a geo-location profile that can be used for specific targeting.