5 Out-of-Home Advertising Ideas for the Holiday Shopping Season that are not Billboards

This holiday shopping season, you'll want to think outside the box, or billboard, and come up with innovative ways to market your products. 

One missing piece to your omnichannel marketing approach may be out-of-home advertising (OOH). DTC and B2C brands might think OOH is little more than promoting products on highway billboard ads.

With OOH, you can choose from various offline options, including street furniture, bus and train ads, and interactive displays that showcase real-time information. 

Here are five of the best out-of-home holiday advertising ideas, that are not billboards, your DTC brand should consider adding to your omnichannel marketing approach.

Combine these techniques with your existing digital advertising efforts for maximum exposure at this lucrative time of the year. 

1. LED Billboard Trucks

LED billboard trucks allow your brand to advertise in high-traffic locations, such as downtown neighborhoods, congested shopping centers, and outside airports, throughout the holiday season. These vehicles contain an LED screen displaying rotatable ads promoting your product with call-to-action options, grabbing the attention of drivers and people traveling on foot.

A benefit of LED billboard trucks is that they can stay stationary or travel around different areas. For example, a DTC healthy snack brand could place a truck outside a football stadium on game day to tie into sports fans tailgating and, later that day, have the same truck advertise their snacks in a targeted neighborhood shopping center highly populated with the demographic that typically purchases the product. According to current data, around 80% of shoppers are expected to make in-person purchases in 2024, so while most DTC brands convert sales online directly, exposure to customers in real life is vital to provide enough omnichannel advertising impressions. 

2. QR Code-enabled Digital Displays

Digital displays with QR code capabilities let your brand interact with consumers this holiday advertising season where shoppers spend a great deal of time: on their mobile device. In 2023, retail Mcommerce (mobile ecommerce) sales made up 43.4% of overall retail Ecommerce sales, showing an increase from 41.8% in 2022. Shoppers can scan codes with their smartphones to get more product information and purchase your offerings in real-time. They can also access discounts and other promotions. In a 2021 study, 45% of people used a QR code to get marketing offers. 

The sky's the limit regarding QR codes on digital signage. For example, you can create point-of-sale displays that allow consumers to scan a code when in line at a physical store. Alternatively, you can place larger digital displays like transit ads with QR functionality in public squares and other high-traffic locations. Standout creative can create a buzz around your brand this holiday season and deliver trackable engagement with your ad placements. 

3. Street Teams

Usually considered a PR play, one effective OOH campaign execution involves using teams of trained marketers to advertise your brand in public areas. They can do this by:

• Walking around busy locations with sandwich board ads that promote your brand
• Handing out hot drinks to shoppers from a cart covered in your brand logo and colors
• Giving out promotional items while standing next to digital displays and other OOH assets

This type of word-of-mouth marketing could be highly beneficial as it can surprise and delight shoppers while creating a captive audience to have time to talk directly about products. Street teams can establish human connections with your audience and encourage them to learn more about your brand using QR codes or geofencing the locations where street teams interact to know who engaged and how to retarget to them later. More to come on that below. 

4. Street Furniture

Ads on street furniture like benches, kiosks, and phone booths could be an added exposure in high-density locations during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and general holiday shopping activity.

You can opt for traditional OOH or digital out-of-home (DOOH) signage like on LinkNYC placements in New York City when advertising on street furniture. The latter could prove more lucrative, especially if it contains moving images that draw attention to your ads. Research shows that 73% of consumers view DOOH ads favorably, and 76% have taken action after seeing one of these marketing messages. 

5. Public Transportation Ads

Advertising on buses, trains, and other public transit can help you reach audiences in the real world, especially when using precision targeting to match your target audience with where they typically commute for work and play. Transit advertising has an incredible reach and may generate an ROI through increased brand awareness and conversions from organic search after ad exposure. For example, we’ve seen campaigns deliver a 15% organic search conversion lift in areas where transit ads are running versus control groups who were not exposed to ads.

For the best results, transit ads need to command attention. Standout creative designs help catch the eyes of prospective customers, such as high-impact images and bold fonts. 

Measuring Your OOH Holiday Ad Campaigns

Another misconception among B2C and DTC brands is that measuring OOH campaigns is just too difficult. 

The good news is However, this is no longer the case. With the right measurement platform, you can track sales, brand lift, engagement, and other metrics easily and learn whether your campaigns generate a return on your investment. 

Some of the best ways to measure OOH campaigns this holiday season and beyond include:

• Anonymous Mobile IDs

Mobile IDs, or MAIDs, are anonymous identifiers assigned to different mobile devices that belong to your target audience. They allow you to track users who engage with your digital OOH billboards and other interactive assets using geofenced technology to have confidence in segments of your target market who were exposed to your OOH ads. You can learn whether an online ad encouraged someone to take a conversion action like measuring direct sales with pixelated landing pages on your website, measuring direct sales in a similar manner that you are used to with digital ad channels.

• Tracked Landing Pages

By using tracking pixels, this helps you measure direct sales that originated from OOH campaigns revealing your offline ads' effectiveness and which assets generate the highest return. You can use this information to fine-tune your advertising team's creative Black Friday ideas and holiday promos. 

• Conversion Lift

For DTC brands used to measuring everything in their marketing funnels, OOH helps to show specific conversion lift for direct sales or website activity by using MAIDs, tracked landing pages and control groups for those now exposed to ads versus those who are to show incremental lift attributable to OOH campaigns.

Despite what some people think, OOH can be just as easy to monitor as digital ads, as seen above. 

The Bottom Line

Effective OOH doesn't have to be only include billboards. During the holidays, you can promote your brand to customers in real-world locations on various OOH physical assets, including LED billboard trucks and street furniture.

Whether planning Black Friday advertising, Cyber Monday promotions, or something else, the techniques above complement your current digital advertising strategies by adding OOH into a wider, more well-rounded omnichannel advertising strategy.

Whatever type of OOH advertising you choose, you'll want to measure your campaigns effectively. That's where OneScreen comes in.

Our team helps you grow your brand with data-driven precision, meaning you can target the right people in the right places and measure its effectiveness. Contact us for the best out-of-home advertising ideas this holiday season.