Every month, OAAA’s editorial team sits down with an industry leader to discuss the latest insights, trends, and best practices for the OOH industry. This month, we sat down with Intersection‘s CEO, Chris Grosso, who discussed what excites him about OOH right now, his message for brands that haven’t bought OOH before, and what’s the next big thing for OOH.
Read Chris’ Q&A in The Drum.
What excites you about OOH right now?
OOH is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the IRL boom. There’s no substitute for real life, and that’s why you are seeing huge growth in live events – sports, concerts, museum exhibitions, and public art. Cities are really thriving. I visit all our markets and places like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia are packed and people are out at restaurants and shows. OOH lets you reach these big audiences in a high impact way. In fact, it is increasingly the only way to build mass reach, cost effectively, in a major American city.
What message do you have for brands that haven’t bought OOH before?
I came to OOH advertising later in my career. Previous to Intersection, I worked for online, TV, and print media companies. I also worked at McKinsey and helped lead the Marketing and Media practices. In terms of reach, frequency, and measurable business impact, OOH gives you the best bang for the buck – full stop. We can measure the medium, and every time I’ve looked at foot traffic studies, digital events, or brand impact, the research shows OOH’s effectiveness at driving lift. It is especially notable that the biggest tech brands like Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Google are among the biggest spenders in OOH – and they have a ton of first party data.
What’s the next big thing for OOH?
Getting scalable and consistent measurement and attribution. We already have the technology, so it is really just a question of getting the standards right. As a relatively small piece of the greater media ecosystem, we need a simple and consistent set of metrics to tell our story. The awesome creativity we are seeing across formats is great – but to get its fair share of the overall advertising pie, OOH needs to be easier to measure on a consistent basis to other media. I expect massive progress on OOH measurement in 2025.
What role do you see OOH playing in empowering influencers and creators to engage with communities and transform cities into platforms for storytelling?
Creators like to go where the audiences are – and audiences are in cities. OOH screens are the best way to reach those audiences during daily life. For example, LinkNYC offers 4,000 screens across New York City, reaching six million people each week — there’s NO bigger platform in NYC for creators to connect with their audience. And we want them on our screens and in our cities. So to enable creators to reach their audiences, we launched the LinkNYC Creator Network which provides opportunities for talented creators like @BoyWithNoJob and @TheCarboholic to bring their incredible original content to New Yorkers. Check out this video that dives deeper into our newly launched program.
Published: December 9, 2024