OOH 'drives uplift in both instore and ecommerce sales'

Retail and FMCG brands are being urged to wake up to how out of home advertising can drive sales across both physical and virtual stores with new figures showing for every £3 spent in-store due to OOH exposure, £2 is spent online.

The study, which saw GroupM OOH join forces with the Centre for Economics & Business Research (CEBR), in partnership with media owners Clear Channel, JCDecaux and Global, claims to provide the first detailed analysis of the impact of OOH advertising on ecommerce sales in the UK.

With over 60% of all online spend made while out and about, researchers set out to develop a new methodology to effectively measure OOH advertising’s impact on driving online sales.

Existing OOH measurement has historically only looked at in-store sales. But for this study, GroupM took product level sales data; data on which store sales are made, aggregated to a postcode level; then overlayed its own geolocation data about where the audience was located.

It then matched test and control stores on retailer, region and base sales to ensure any sales uplift was driven by exposure to OOH.

However, this methodology cannot be applied to online sales where retailers often aggregate product data and deliver from centralised warehouses.

To bridge this gap, researchers collected a nationally representative sample of 2,000 UK adults. Those with a smartphone or tablet completed an online survey to collect data on the spending habits for both in-store and online purchases across a range of FMCG categories. Using this data on purchasing habits, an online sales multiplier was created, predicting the additional online sales made when in-store sales are known.

The results revealed an online sales multiplier of 1.7, meaning for every £3 spent in-store due to OOH, £2 is spent online. Cosmetics (1.83), personal care (1.75), health and wellbeing (1.76), and clothes categories (1.76) had the highest online multiplier. Younger audiences had a higher online multiplier, averaging 1.81 among 18- to 34-year-olds compared to 1.66 for those over 35.

GroupM OOH research executive Tom Jameson, who was of the team that carried out the study, said: “Online sales make up over 40% of FMCG spend. We know that OOH drives ecommerce, so only reporting in-store sales is underestimating the true return of OOH.

“However we wanted to go beyond simply illustrating OOH’s effectiveness. For retail and FMCG brands, this research highlights how understanding your category’s multiplier can help shape your marketing strategy, enabling you to optimise OOH environments and creative messaging to boost sales – whether that’s through clicks or in bricks and mortar stores.”