Outdoor advertising is any message people see outside the house. Pittsburgh is home base, and we bring the work to your location. Billboards are the familiar example. The category is wider than that: a car wrapped with a logo, a poster in a bus shelter, a park bench, a spot before the movie starts. A banner towed behind an airplane is a louder version of the same idea.
Why the outdoors still has room
On a phone, ads sit under free apps and above search results. Social feeds also serve ads that feel oddly specific, which is unsettling and easy to tune out. Those messages get ignored, and sometimes they get in the way. While advertisers fight for a sliver of a screen, a public place is a less crowded surface for a single idea.
What counts as an outdoor ad
If you are still sorting the term, think of an ad you see while you are not at home. People use their phones outdoors too. Outdoor advertising cares more about the medium than about the device.
The better examples use the place they sit in. A billboard high on a building might sell window washing by looking as if the washers are hanging from the board itself. Done well, outdoor work is among the most creative advertising there is. The pieces that work are thought through. They earn attention by being specific, inventive, and willing to change how someone sees that corner of the street.
The usual categories
Almost anything can carry a message, so a complete list would be endless. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America groups the common forms this way:
- Billboards, including traditional bulletins, digital boards, and mobile boards.
- Transit, on buses, trains, subways, cabs, and other vehicles.
- Street furniture, on shelters, kiosks, benches, parking garages, and similar spots.
- Cinema, the spots before a film and the other advertising around a theater.
Some work sits outside those four, including guerrilla campaigns such as OctoGoat, which get attention by being bold and unexpected. Outdoor and digital also get tied together: a QR code that opens a site, a Bluetooth signal that pings a nearby phone, or a kiosk with a touch screen. Those hybrids have been getting more common.
Why it belongs in the plan
A day splits roughly into time away from home, time at home, and sleep. A lot of outdoor messages catch people in the first of those, at a red light or a bus stop, when they are already looking around. It also reaches people in the hours when they are not sitting in front of a television. And it does not have to interrupt a personal device to do it.
A few practical reasons to consider it
Outdoor placements are often bought on CPM, the cost of a thousand impressions, and they are often a modest way to reach a crowd. A fleet of work trucks painted in the same color, with the same mark on the door, is a simple version: the public learns to recognize the company by seeing it pass. Public placement talks to people in a shared place, which is a different kind of reach than a message aimed at one account. The part we like best is that the work can be enjoyable. If you want the ad remembered, make it something people are glad they noticed.
When outdoor work needs to sit inside a larger plan, our marketing practice is where that plan gets made.
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Where to go from here
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