What is this ad trying to say?

Note: I originally posted this article on LinkedIn on Dec. 19th, 2019.

I took the photo above this post just this morning. It’s an ad on the side of a New York City bus. And I daresay it’s incomprehensible to the average person.

But that’s OK, because it’s not aimed at the average person.

The ad is for Outfront Media (you see their name at the bottom right corner of the ad), and they’re trying to send a message, not to ordinary consumers, but to “media buyers”, i.e. brands and ad agencies.

The message they’re sending here is that Outfront Media’s ads will reach a specific kind of audience, namely, people who ride skateboards. To the extent that this is credible, it’s because Outfront sells ads on what’s known as “out of home” (“OOH”) media: namely, billboards and other signage. And skaters do most of their skateboarding outside, right? 

So this ad is telling us that if you’re a brand that caters to skaters (Zumiez or Vans, perhaps?), then you’ll want to buy ads from Outfront in order to reach those people.

Incidentally, this particular ad is probably a “house ad”. I suspect Outfront has leased a number of “ad slots” on the sides of buses from the New York MTA, but they didn’t manage to (re)sell all of them to advertisers. So, rather than letting the space go to waste by staying blank, or keeping up a previous advertiser’s ad and giving that advertiser “impressions” for free (a “value add”), Outfront is instead running an ad for themselves in the “remnant” of their “inventory”. (Lots of ad jargon there, but hopefully you get the gist.)

Whether they have a lease on NYC’s public transit’s ad space or not, they definitely own billboards, and that’s what they’re advertising (to advertisers) here. It’s all very meta, isn’t it?

At the end of the day, “publishers” (owners of billboards, newspapers, TV stations, websites, apps, etc.) have only three choices for monetization:

1) Charge their audiences a fee for accessing their content, typically through a recurring subscription. (Though not always. In print media, can you buy a single issue of a magazine at a newsstand, for example. I wish I could buy a single article from, say, Business Insider, for even as much as two dollars a piece. I refuse to pay them $99 for an annual subscription, when I know I will read two articles a month from them, tops.)

2) Run ads alongside their content.

3) Do both.

When it comes to running ads, you have to find advertisers willing to buy the ad space in your content. How do you convince them to do that?

Answer: by telling advertisers you have access to a unique and desirable audience.

Of course, a publisher would love to be all things to all people, and claim that every type of person ever consumes their content, but that’s not credible for most of them. Few publishers have the reach of, say, Facebook (who has an audience that consists of a third of the planet’s population). So, instead, a publisher will talk up the audiences they do have. And Outfront is claiming that skaters look at their ads. They are probably not claiming to have CEOs as an audience, the way “The Economist” might.

Skeptical? So are advertisers, which is why media companies commission studies from third-party research firms, who will, among other things, conduct interviews and surveys with skaters, or CEOs, or moms, or whoever the audience in question is, to validate that the publisher really is reaching those people. Nielsen remains the most famous provider of this sort of verification, though there are others.

Or maybe Outfront will claim to have CEOs as an audience! I’ll never forget, back when I lived in Washington D.C., long before I ever knew anything about ad tech, I would notice ads from defense contractors like Lockheed Martin for fighter planes and combat helicopters in the cars of the Metro lines that served the Pentagon, as well as in the Pentagon station. It struck me as funny that these ads were being put in front of thousands of riders every day who would never come within a million miles of deciding how the US military’s budget for aircraft should be spent. Less than 1% of the people seeing those ads could make a decision influenced by those ads. What a waste of ad dollars!

But look at it through an advertiser’s eyes. It doesn’t matter how much “waste” there is in reaching an irrelevant audience, as long as you’re also reaching your target audience, for the right price. A single combat helicopter probably costs a few million dollars. Even if an ad in entryway of the Pentagon’s Metro station costs $500,000 a year, it could still make economic sense, in order to stay top of mind with the military’s decision makers, when it comes time for them to order a hundred helicopters. That’s great “ROI”, as we say in the biz.

It’s a fascinating industry. To steal Dr. Johnson’s quote about London: when a man is tired of advertising, he is tired of life; for there is in advertising all that life can afford…