My background is in TV advertising, having managed the sales staff for a major network affiliate for a number of years. Several years ago I switched sides of the fence and went to work as the Marketing Director for a growing transportation company. In my new position part of my responsibility was management and placement of marketing dollars. Initially I thought I’d stick with the medium I knew best, limiting any learning curve that might result in wasted ad spending. But as the person responsible for the marketing budget, the deficiencies of this medium became more acute, namely the rapid and consistent fragmentation of audience. In simple terms, this means that as the choices of what to read, watch and listen to increase, the number of people reading, watching or listening to a specific paper, magazine or show decreases. This wouldn’t be terrible if the price of advertising decreased in direct proportion to the decline of audience, but the opposite is true. You see, just as consumers are offered more and more choices, advertisers are also faced with an unprecedented number of options for spending their advertising dollars – and the result is an increase in advertising rates. It works like this: advertising companies need to grow their profit but they have fewer advertisers. The only way to accomplish the needed growth is to increase advertising rates. In other words, the audience size is decreasing but the cost of advertising to a given audience is higher than ever! This is the case with all forms of traditional advertising… with one exception.

As I began to investigate the most cost effective way to advertise our company I hit upon one medium that I knew little about – Outdoor – but seemed to be trending the opposite direction of TV, Radio, and Print. In most communities there are a fixed number of billboards and transit structures. The only time more are built is when the community’s government requests more – which is not often. However, the population of most communities is increasing, meaning that the audience is actually growing. In communities like mine, the population growth is roughly equal to the annual rate increase in Outdoor advertising meaning that, when adjusted for inflation, the cost of reaching a person with an advertising message often decreases on an annualized basis.

The next step in my exploration of Outdoor was to determine what the actual cost of an advertising campaign would be. In TV I was used to the cost of a single ad ranging from hundreds of dollars to over a thousand dollars. An effective campaign would often exceed $10,000 per month. With Outdoor, on the other hand, I found I was able to purchase a premium billboard for several thousand per month yet our message would be up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Needless to say, I put our advertising dollars into Outdoor …and the response was tremendous!

As fate would have it, things have come full circle and I now work in the Outdoor industry. I’m thrilled to be able to share my experiences with businesses of all sizes, showing them how effective billboard and transit advertising can be for them. If you’ve never done any Outdoor advertising, do yourself a favor and take a look at it. You’ll be surprised how far it will stretch your marketing budget. We all know any advertising can work when it’s done right but dollar for dollar, there is no more effective or efficient way to reach a large audience with a tremendous frequency. I’ve experienced its impact first-hand, so should you.

-Trevin Bensko-Wecks, Sales Manager, NextMedia Outdoor