Summer is here. It’s time to get Outdoor. Colum Harmon, marketing director PML Group shares new research from the location marketing agency.
School’s out, the weather is improving, and holidays are coming. It’s time to dust off the BBQ and get gig-ready, because summer is well and truly here. Out of Home is a medium for all seasons but for obvious reasons Outdoor has a lot to shout about at this time of year. Especially at this time of this year. The summers of 2020 and 2021 were muted under the shadow of a pandemic. The summer of 2022 has a different vibe completely, a sense of freedom and excitement that was in short supply in recent years.
The difference is palpable. The live music sector is a great example. As a Northsider, it has struck me as to the number of quality outdoor gigs that are happening across the summer in venues including St. Anne’s Park, Malahide Castle, and Fairview Park. Large scale events such as these are moving people around our towns and cities in massive numbers. And that’s just the start of it.
To get an understanding of the mindset of the consumer and their feelings and intentions for the summer ahead, PML Group has partnered with Ipsos to produce All Out Summer, an in-depth study showing how and why OOH has such a rich role to play for your brand in the vibrant summer ahead. Across this week and next, we’ll publish some of the key findings here on Adworld.
Firstly though, if we look back to our Media Impact Study, which was published here in recent weeks, we can see that OOH was among the top media chosen by all demographics when it came to assessing types of media that would be most effective at grabbing their attention in the coming months. This speaks to the fact that the respondents were cognisant of the fact that they would be out and about more and socialising outdoors more in the summer. Next week we’ll publish much more on summer intentions.
There are a lot of factors combining to make OOH an essential medium for brands in summer 2022. Our research on public transport usage last month found that almost 1/3 Dubliners intended to use public transport more because of the recent fare reductions. That same study found that almost half of respondents use public transport for getting to entertainment venues and more than half would use it for high street shopping trips. In addition, the CSO’s June transport bulletin shows significant increases across all forms of transport compared to same period 2021 and compared to the beginning of 2022.
Google’s latest mobility report shows that In April and May, the volume of people in retail and hospitality returned to pre-pandemic levels, however, there is also a continued growth and interest in the great outdoors, such as park visits.
So, the mood music around OOH is positive, we’ve heard it from those pieces of research. With All Out Summer, we wanted to focus in more on the summer mindset of real world consumers. We chose to do this via an open approach, letting respondents tell us what this summer means to them. Their responses point to an overwhelmingly positive and optimistic outlook. A real sense of a summer of freedom. Some of those responses are shared below.
Combining all the 300 respondents’ inputs produced the word cloud below, a representation of Dubliners’ ambition for the next couple of months.
What is clear is that, along with going on holiday, people will be spending a lot of time outside. Words such as outdoors, beach, weather, swimming, relaxing are all very prominent. None of this will be happening in isolation either. People will seize the opportunity to connect and reconnect with friends and family and spending valuable time with loved ones is a major priority.
The graphic below shows the top six responses when we asked the respondents for words they associate with summer.
So, whether its verbatim responses or word associations the message from Dublin consumers is clear. They are up for a summer spent outdoors, in a positive mindset, having fun and engaging with friends and family. Next week we will get into the detail of where and how that will manifest itself, and we’ll offer insights into how your OOH media choices and content can help maximise the huge opportunity these present for advertisers.
