My friend and brilliant brand communications consultant Dan Walker Smith recently published a photograph of a B2B ad placed on London Transport. I’d taken exactly the same photograph on my phone some weeks before.
As a keen follower of Dan, I can tell you that his post on B2B ads ‘out in the wild’ is well worth a read. His analysis on the Vanta ad is brief enough to be a convenient bitesize addition to your media diet today but smart enough to leave you things to think about after.
It shouldn’t really be newsworthy when a B2B product or service buys and places outdoor ads but it is. Still.
First time I saw B2B advertisers behaving like their B2C cousins was in 2015, waiting for an Uber on a street corner in a part of NYC I didn’t know well. I was with my boss. We were locked in that very particular silence following a pitch that hadn’t gone as planned.
The ads on the taxi tops of every second or third of the yellow cabs we were letting go by were for the same B2B product. I remember being impressed enough to test the silence with my boss by pointing it out.
A quiet grunt of acknowledgement was all I got in response. But I was impressed by how audacious it felt; such a confident move. I remember looking around and saying out loud - as much to myself as anything - that we weren’t even in a particularly businessy part of town. It just felt really ballsy.
It’s still a rare occurrence though - seeing B2B outdoors - so I notice.
Again, I’ll recommend Dan Walker Smith’s Linkedin post referenced above if you want to read some cool analysis of why the Vanta ad works but also how it could have been improved.
I take three main lessons away from seeing these ads among others on The Tube every morning.
These advertisers are reaping the benefits of the rest of us being way too slow in deploying out of home as a serious B2B channel. The rarity value of their efforts mean they take a ‘double whammy’ gain. They profit once from being seen and read by their target commuters in some natural and controlled downtime; and then they benefit again from enjoying solus media placing in their markets simply because their competitors likely still consider out of home to be too much wastage.
As counter-intuitive as it will feel to most B2B marketing bosses (and certainly their CFOs), this is a pure go-to-market win. “Advertising is one of the fastest ways to build your brand’s fame,” Dan writes, “and the commercial benefits that come with that.” You know this already. The 95:5 ‘out of market:in market’ ratio; the imperative to achieve ‘mental availability’; the ‘Long And Short’; it’s all the stuff we’ve learned from the likes of System1, the IPA and Binet and Field in recent years. It’s the best practice we all showboat celebrate on Linkedin but way too many of us are still reluctant to put into practice.
If you’re brand new to the notion of outdoor ads, I’d assume one of the big fears is that it’s going to rinse your budget. Some simple experimentation with a relatively small chunk of your cash however, will soon reveal it’s really not as expensive as you might expect. I live in north London and travel into the city maybe twice a week. Even before speaking to a media specialist I reckon I could name at least half a dozen ‘dead-cert’ sites in which I could successfully target my ICP during the working week.
If asked for prime B2B outdoor locations in London right now I’d probably cite Canary Wharf or The City for the finance giants or corporate audiences; Old Street roundabout for the startups; the A4 Corridor between Heathrow Airport and London for business travel types and of course the London Underground network.
Roadside 48-sheet billboards go for somewhere between £1,000 and £3,000. Digital billboards can cost up to £5,000.
At the moment I’m helping a small charity based in London find £6,000 to repeat its most successful ever campaign from a couple of years ago - some well placed billboards and the back of a couple of buses on a couple of targeted routes, all for a campaign that would run for a couple of weeks.The last time the charity ran the same campaign, those two weeks of spend delivered their biggest year in terms of income - sustained success over many more months than any sponsorship, events or digital activity since.
I think about how I consume outdoor ads. I see them. I read them. I consciously consider them. I absolutely judge them: I properly look out for the ones that leave me annoyed or perplexed, just to get annoyed with them all over again.
If you never considered the outdoor advertising opportunity for your brand because it’s simply not ‘a B2B thing’ - go and explore it. Think about how you might use it to target your own prospects; where, how, with what? Your future customers are far more likely to re-read a big idea on the arse-end of the bus they’re stuck behind in traffic, or on the wall halfway up an elevator, than they are a digital banner.
Get your product or service out into the real world. The change of scenery will do them good.
