While other forms of advertising are struggling, out-of-home advertising rose by 40.5% in the first quarter compared to the same period in 2021, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America. That comes after the category expanded by 37% in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Why? We spoke with Dan Dillon, CMO of Reveal Mobile, which provides geofencing marketing and location intelligence for marketers. Below are excerpts of the conversation, edited for clarity.

Marketing Daily: How do you define out-of-home advertising?

Dan Dillon: There are really sort of four flavors.

Traditional out of home is the billboard that you and I might think of as we take a road trip. It’s a static, paper on substrate kind of board that doesn’t change, and it’s highly visible by all kinds of traffic: human motorized and pedestrian traffic.

There is also place-based out of home, which would be bus stops, subways and bus stations.

There is moving out of home, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s ads on the sides of cars and buses. It’s ads inside the subway car itself, as opposed to in the station.

And then there’s sort of a horizontal category that you might think of as just programmatic or digital out of home, which is a method of programmatic ad buying.

And those are really the four flavors, the three being format and then the fourth one being effectively a buying channel.

Marketing Daily: Why has the performance of OOH ads increased recently?

Dillon: I don’t know that performance has improved, but I can tell you that it has one of the highest favorability rating across demographics.

Marketing Daily: Who are the biggest OOH advertisers?

Dillon: I can tell you that we consider out of home to be last-touch attribution — or sorry, sort of the last-touch channel for in-store shopping and in-store dining. Consumer behavior that’s out on the street that might drive you into a Panera as an example, or a pizza place.

The American Academy of Advertising  has data on the largest advertisers by ad spend in terms of brand names. McDonald’s, AT&T and Verizon are some of the biggest vendors. And then Netflix is increasingly in that too.

Marketing Daily: What do you predict for the future of OOH advertising?

Dillon: Really the cool thing about home is that it drives three kinds of behaviors. It drives foot traffic into stores. It drives people to take action on a website and purchase whatever they download. And the third one is that it drives people into mobile apps to buy something and to update their information, to fill out a survey or any number of other actions.

So out of home isn’t just for getting people to buy the turkey sandwich on a Saturday. It’s actually to drive people into all kinds of consumer behaviors. So aside from the conversion environment is the programmatic buying.

And OneScreen.ai, which is a big player in the category, just released a totally free ungated directory of all out-of-home players in the U.S market. So you can go into OneScreen’s directory and look up all kinds of owners and operators, measurement companies and effectively buy programmatically through a platform like that.

So, I would say out-of-home ad buying is the next kind of frontier, and measurement remains a steady requirement across any number of those variables.

“Out-of-home ad buying is the next kind of frontier,” says Dan Dillon, CMO of Reveal Mobile.