Aaron Poole, Marketing Insights Manager, PML Group, with this week’s Out \ Look on Out of Home
Christmas might still be a few weeks away, but the competition for festive attention is already beginning. Shops are filling with seasonal stock, gift ranges are appearing and brands are starting to turn their focus towards one of the busiest spending periods of the year.
Consumers are beginning to make their own plans too. TGI data shows that 85% of Christmas present purchasers begin planning their festive spend between September and December, with 40% doing so in September or October. For advertisers, that makes the weeks ahead an important period to think about who they want to reach, where those audiences will be and how OOH can work across the different stages of the season.
Planning effectively means looking beyond Christmas as a single retail moment. Everyday routines continue through the season, but more gets added to them as gift shopping and grocery trips sit alongside Black Friday, work parties, meals out, concerts, pantos and family visits. The audience changes as Christmas approaches, as do the places people are going and the reasons for being there.
Physical retail remains an important part of the picture. Some 71% of Christmas present purchasers shop mainly in-store or combine physical and online shopping, and those trips create audiences around shopping centres, supermarkets, retail parks and high streets, as well as on the roads and public transport routes that connect them. Even where part of the final purchase takes place online, the Christmas period continues to generate movement through physical retail environments.
Three quarters of Christmas present purchasers in Dublin are OOH consumers, with audiences extending across roadside, retail and public transport environments. The breadth of those environments gives planners room to change emphasis as the season develops rather than relying on one approach from October through to Christmas Eve.
Broad reach can establish presence while people are beginning to plan and spend. Through November and into December, the pattern of movement changes. Morning activity still brings the commute, while lunchtime shopping becomes more prominent and evenings increasingly include dining, entertainment and Christmas parties. Weekends can combine several of those behaviours, with concerts, pantos and festive attractions creating their own periods of concentrated footfall.
Digital OOH can respond to those shifts through time of day, location or weather, while countdowns become more useful as key dates approach. Programmatic activity can place greater weight behind particular audiences or periods where the context supports it.
The aim is not to squeeze every available capability into the plan. A campaign building familiarity earlier in the season has a different task from activity around Black Friday, party season or the final few days of Christmas shopping, and the formats used should reflect that.
PML Group’s recent Reminder Effect research gives some useful context for those busier weeks. Some 77% agree OOH reminds them of advertising they have seen elsewhere, while 74% say it can remind them of a brand close to where they can buy or use it.
Christmas puts plenty of demands on people’s attention. Gifts and bookings compete with social plans, travel arrangements and everyday life, while the volume of seasonal advertising increases at the same time. OOH does not always need to introduce something new in that environment. Bringing an existing campaign back to mind when somebody is closer to a shop, venue or relevant journey can do useful work.
The physical qualities of the medium offer another consideration when planning the season. Streets and retail environments change noticeably as Christmas approaches, giving large formats, lighting, takeovers, special builds and experiential activity an opportunity to work with the atmosphere around them. Those ideas benefit from being considered early enough to develop the creative properly and make the most of the environment around them.
A strong Christmas OOH plan should reflect how the season develops rather than simply placing festive creative against a December schedule. Decisions made now can build early visibility, leave room for more contextual activity later and preserve the option to do something more ambitious where it makes sense.
The weeks ahead will bring more shopping trips, more nights out and more movement through towns and cities. Christmas is planned in advance, but much of it is lived on the move.
For more information on how to optimise your Christmas OOH planning contact info@pmlgroup.ie.
