The Billboard Mnemonic Strategy

Another fine post from out intrepid Entertainment Editor in H-Wood, Steve Peace. Many thanks, Steve.

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What’s the last billboard you remember seeing? Two crop up in my mind. One is a billboard for a wedding shop that I see every day on Santa Monica Blvd. right around the 405. The other is a billboard for “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” They have more in common than you might think. The wedding shop billboard shows a smarmy guy in a tux shirt dancing with a woman, presumably his new wife, with her back to the camera. She’s bare-backed and a sliver of chest sideage reveals that she’s also bare-chested. Classy stuff. I’m hoping they’re at their hotel room and not in their first dance at the reception.

You’re probably seen the Zack and Miri billboard if you live in a relatively large city. It’s got hand drawn stick-figure versions of Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks along with some text about the film. It’s very not salacious, even though you might expect the content of the film to be. Just the opposite of the sleazy billboard about marriage, traditionally a respectable subject. In the case of the wedding shop, the company seems to be betting that the arresting image will stick in the viewer’s mind (as it has in my case – bad brain!). Because it’s a retail business, out of home makes a lot of sense, being geographically situated close to the store. But, one might strongly question the amount of media waste (you can’t expect that any more than 5%, the U.S. average, of the commuters that pass by are in the market for a wedding dress – maybe even less for a hoochy momma wedding dress).

How good a deal is using out of home for Zack and Miri or for other movies, in general?



The Zack and Miri billboard doesn’t tell you much about the film. It’s got the names of the stars, the title of the movie, and the stick figures. How effective could that be? Arguably, not all that valuable as an isolated component of media, given that sight, sound, and motion provide more rich opportunities to sell a film. But, as a way to reference other components of the media plan, it is my theory that out of home is an incredibly good deal for movie marketers. The real value of a billboard is as a mnemonic device. In a well crafted movie marketing plan television will be flighted in advance of the out of home buy (unless the OOH is a teaser campaign, like, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) so that when the billboard is viewed – it reminds the viewer of the television spot. OOH then becomes a way to amplify the television buy, on the cheap.

And OOH is quite cheap. On average (according to Intermedia Dimensions) the CPM for OOH is $3.40. In comparison, an average CPM for Television across all viewers is $15.49. A conservative estimate of the time spent by consumers in proximity to OOH advertising is 6%, which represents the % of media time the average American spends on their daily commute. 12-24 year olds spend more time walking, riding bikes, and taking public transportation, making the % of time spent in front of OOH far higher than 6%, and those are the people in the U.S. that have the highest index against regular movie watching.

Based on how good a deal OOH is, and taking into account the average % of time spent in front of it, a movie marketer could make a rationale case for spending as much as 9-10% of their ad budget on OOH for large releases. Zack and Miri definitely got my attention and I only saw the trailer once.

Steve

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Post script. The Zack and Miri website offers a Pornstar ID maker that I availed myself of.



Not sure it worked out all that well for me, but give it a whirl yourself.