Best
practices.

Start from the objective, not from the site

Driving people to a store, launching a product, building a brand in the region and promoting a date are four different campaigns. They call for different locations, different formats and different periods. The right site is a consequence of the objective, never the other way round.

In practice: before choosing where, write in one sentence what the campaign needs to solve.

Choose the location by your audience’s route

Being in the city and being in the routine are different things. Someone who leaves home at seven and comes back at seven travels predictable corridors, and that is where the brand needs to appear. Spreading faces across the whole city without looking at routes costs more and is remembered less.

In practice: list the three routes your customer takes on an ordinary day. The location comes from there.

Format is not size, it is function

Each format solves a different problem. There is no better format, there is the right format for what the campaign needs to do, and that is why the conversation starts at the objective and not at the catalogue.

In practice: use the table just below to cross objective and format before the first conversation.

Repetition is what builds recall

Outdoor media does not work by interruption, it works by accumulation. The same person passes the same site several times a week, and it is that sum that turns into brand memory. With the same budget, a longer period across fewer sites usually pays off more than many faces over a short time.

The artwork has to be read in seconds

People in traffic have few seconds and no intention of reading. An outdoor piece works with one idea, a visible brand and a single point of contact. Copy written for a magazine ad, applied to a panel, is not read, it is ignored.

In practice: print the artwork on an A4 sheet, pin it to the wall and look at it from three metres away. If in two seconds you cannot tell whose brand it is and what is being said, the piece is not ready yet.

Where the brand appears also communicates

The surroundings become part of how the piece is read. A panel shared with other brands also splits attention. That is what Single Face exists for: the whole face, with no visual competition in the same field of view. For anyone selling positioning before price, the chosen asset is part of the message.

In practice: when comparing proposals from different media owners, check whether the face is dedicated to a single brand. In our operation, it is.

Ask which data you receive, before and after

Outdoor media is no longer the channel without numbers, but what each media owner delivers varies. Before closing, ask what information you receive about the site and about who moves through it. After the campaign runs, ask how the display is evidenced. If you need to defend the plan internally, ask both questions in the very first conversation.

In practice: take the reading of the site into the internal meeting, not just a photo of it.

Lead time changes what is available

The busiest sites are also the most contested, and commercial dates concentrate demand on the same assets. Some products have their own lead time: panels built on demand along highways work on a long contracting cycle and are not resolved in weeks. The earlier the conversation starts, the more options are on the table.

In practice: take the campaign calendar to the first conversation, not just the budget.