Outdoor advertising

Position is the product

Two boards can carry identical impression counts and perform nothing alike. What separates them is which direction the traffic is travelling, how long the sightline is, what speed the road runs at, and whether the board is read by people heading toward your business or away from it.

The Twin Cities is a good outdoor market precisely because the geography concentrates traffic: I-494 and I-694 ring the metro, 35W and 35E split it north to south, and 94 carries the through traffic between the two downtowns. A service business with a defined radius can own its corner of that grid for a modest monthly figure.

What outdoor is good at

• Making a local business feel established. Presence on a commuter route reads as permanence in a way no amount of digital impressions does.
• Proximity. A board two miles from the showroom, pointed at the traffic heading toward it, is doing something no other channel can.
• Constant, cheap frequency. The same commuter passes it twice a day, every working day, for the length of the contract.

What it cannot do

Carry a message. Six or seven words, a recognisable name, and one idea — that is the whole budget. Anything requiring explanation belongs somewhere else on the plan, and an outdoor board asked to explain an offer will fail and take the blame for it.

It is also the hardest line on the plan to measure directly. We buy it as a reach and familiarity layer under the channels that can be measured, and we say so up front rather than inventing an attribution model for it.

Digital boards change the arithmetic somewhat — day-parting becomes possible, and copy can rotate against weather or a countdown — but the six-word rule still applies.