What is Out of Home Media?
Well…..Billboards right? There… that was easy. Hold up, not so fast …
When we talk to advertisers that are new to the Out of Home advertising category, that is frequently the answer we get – and with good reason. Billboards are the largest, most prominent, most widely recognized part of the Out of Home media landscape, and it’s natural for people to focus on them.

What’s a little bit surprising is how often we get that answer from people who work in advertising. But, when we stop to consider that OOH frequently accounts for only 4-7 percent of an advertiser’s media budget it’s not that surprising to find that people haven’t committed the 200+ varied media formats to memory. It can be an overwhelming task, and takes up a lot of mental bandwidth.

So, if you’re new to advertising, or you’d just like to brush up on OOH choices so you can sound really smart to your client, we’d like to provide a little bit of assistance. And to help make sense of all the possibilities, this primer, the first in a 3-part series, should give you an overview of the main types of media choices that fall under the big umbrella of Out of Home.

Out of Home Media Defined (or at least categorized so we can have a conversation)
So what is the definition of Out of Home Media? OOH is such a broad swath of media, that it is often defined by what it is not. So, if we’re going to be technical, Out of Home media is anything that’s outside the home, so it’s not TV, radio, print, or online. We’ll start by breaking OOH up into three main buckets, and then take a look at what’s in those buckets.
Now, if you were to sit down with 10 different people and ask them to categorize Out of Home you would get 10 different answers. Sure, they would all agree that billboards are “traditional”, and pop-up stores and brand ambassadors would be “experiential” (or any of several other terms). But there is a lot of grey area in the middle. The important thing here is not to focus on the names of the buckets, but to get a general overview of the types of media that are available.

Traditional Out of Home:
Traditional Out of Home includes all the media formats that people are the most familiar with. Most of them have been around for a long time – long enough to become fairly standardized, and ubiquitous in markets across the US.

Traditional media excels at creating broad reach and high frequency across an entire market, but can also be used to target very specific …