With all of the cars on the road, the people who are driving those cars have no choice but to look out their windscreen at their surrounds. Part of those surroundings are the marketing campaigns utilising advertising outdoors. With the popularity of holiday ventures to rural areas as well as camper trailers, not to mention urban driving becoming more and more common, there are avenues for any marketing campaign that will get seen by thousands or hundreds of thousands of people a day. The advertisements outdoors make big statements and cannot be ignored, unlike other advertising mediums, such as a reader skipping advertising pages in a magazine.

On top of guaranteed views of an advertising campaign, there is a high level of repetitive exposure to the same advertisements. The typical commuter drives the same route five days a week so that means that any given outdoor advertisement will be viewed by that driver repeatedly during the week. Repetition in advertising is difficult to obtain in most mediums but while advertising outdoors, it is one of the most cited reasons for choosing this medium for advertising.

With any marketing campaign, timing is everything. A bold advertisement is lost if there is a large amount of time, from the advertising impression, to the decision to make a purchase. Outdoor advertising minimises that time, sometimes dramatically. Advertising a product utilising an outdoor ad in front of the store where that product is sold is the most striking example of this. However, even having a product featured on the expressway will still leave an favourable advertising impression when a person stops at their local market before heading home after a long day at work.

The initial cost for an outdoor advertising campaign is fairly low as well, depending on the location and size of the advertisement. As with other marketing outlets, size and the variety of colours affects cost. However, compared to most other marketing mediums, the initial cost is most often lower and the monthly cost after the first month is more of a rental agreement and maintenance fee agreement, rather than a reoccurring fixed cost.

Outdoor advertising is a necessity for many businesses. If you only advertise in your store, you won’t be able to advertise to local prospects and those driving or walking by. You can get a lot of business from passersby who stop in to your store on impulse. Of course, people get those impulses from seeing your outdoor advertising, usually in the form of a poster printing piece like a huge sign or billboard.

Advantages of outdoor advertising posters You can’t switch off an outdoor advertisement. People can turn off the TV or radio, they can’t turn off billboards and other outdoor posters. When people drive by billboards or walk by posters on the side of a building, they can choose not to look, but they often do look. Even if they don’t want to, curiosity gets the best of them and by the time they’ve decided they don’t really need to read the poster, they’ve already read it. That leads to the next advantage.

Posters are easy to digest. By their very nature, posters are graphic elements with little text. People process images much faster than they process words, which means posters can be quickly and easily understood. People spend a lot of time in their vehicles. The average commuter spends 25 minutes on her drive to work which is nearly an hour a day spent driving past billboards and signs. When you factor in traffic, that’s probably is an hour spent sitting on highways and city streets, bored. When people are bored they like to look at interesting things. That’s where your outdoor advertising comes in.

Posters aren’t as expensive as other forms of advertising. Outdoor advertising, which pertains mostly to billboards, are priced as CPM, or cost per thousand. CPM is the cost of reaching 1,000 potential viewers through an outdoor advertising display. You can find the CPM of a billboard by dividing the monthly cost by the monthly circulation in thousands. The billboard company that rents the space can tell you what the monthly circulation is of each billboard. Circulation is the number of people who see the billboard each month. So, if you pay $2,000 to rent a billboard for one month and the billboard has a monthly circulation of 2,000 viewers, you’ve just paid $1 per view. If the monthly circulation is 10,000 for that same $2,000 billboard, you’ll only pay 20 cents per view. That’s cheaper than postcard marketing.