Clear Channel Outdoor Powers Business Rebuilding During COVID with Market-Ready Solutions
Clear Channel Outdoor Americas (CCOA) (NYSE: CCO) continues to bolster its customers’ COVID-19 recovery by offering proven market-ready solutions, grounded in data insights, and designed to help businesses nationwide reopen, rally and recover. As part of its ongoing commitment to local and national business owners, CCOA is sharing these resources with marketers and media buyers via a new dynamic hub of solutions: The COVID-19 Recovery Resource Center. These partner resources will support local and national brands as they reconnect with their consumers in a changing world where the business environment is rapidly evolving.
“Our customers are the lifeblood of our communities,” said Dan Levi, CMO, CCOA. “Their success powers the economic engine that drives cities, towns and villages nationwide, and we believe it’s our responsibility to use our solutions in ways that help them, and all of our neighbors, succeed. As a recovery resource partner, we’re giving local and national advertisers access to curated portals of industry-leading data and insights, creative approaches, digital solutions and other strategies that can reignite their businesses on the heels of the pandemic.”
CCOA brings its Recovery Resource Center to market at a pivotal moment of unprecedented change as new consumer travel patterns and behaviors emerge as a result of COVID-19. This online resource gives business owners and brand marketers access to curated solutions, including: incisive reports on COVID-influenced behavioral changes; strategic marketing and creative ideas to engage with consumers and tell brand stories in a post-pandemic environment; and the latest research and case studies on CCOA’s proven ability to drive in-store visits and impact consumer behavior even during a crisis. This includes access to CCOA’s curated creative galleries that share how advertisers have responded to the crisis, providing proactive ideas for messaging and design.
Moreover, these resources include an analysis of COVID-impacted changes to audience travel patterns and behaviors identified through the company’s proprietary suite of data-driven solutions for planning, amplifiying and measuring the impact of Out-of-Home advertising: CCO RADAR.
For example, through its RADARView® solution, CCOA identified groups of “lapsed shoppers”: those previously seen at a range of retail locations, and other points of interest, who haven’t visited since shelter-in-place orders were issued. By identifying audience groups who previously visited these locations, but stopped during the crisis, CCOA is helping advertisers efficiently and effectively deliver their reopening messages to these lapsed consumers with an understanding of their newly charted journeys.
With RADARView, CCOA also identified groups of consumers who have been shopping during the crisis but primarily at locations close to their homes, as well as audience segments of people in essential work roles, helping advertisers recruit new employees as their businesses reopen. As the pandemic has impacted consumers’ journeys, and the areas where they travel, RADARView gives advertisers visibility into the neighborhoods and roadways most effective for reaching a wide range of consumer segments today, while understanding how these behaviors have evolved when compared with pre-pandemic data.
As part of this new resource, the company also applied its CCO RADAR solutions to help customers understand the effectiveness of Out-of-Home (OOH) ads as travel patterns and consumer behavior continue changing.
Using RADARProof®, CCO’s attribution solution, the company evaluated visitation rates to certain essential businesses that maintained their outdoor advertising with CCOA during COVID-19 and then compared those findings to the pre-pandemic time period. The study showed average visitation rates to quick-service restaurants, grocery stores and convenience stores during the pandemic were significantly higher from people who were exposed to outdoor ads on Clear Channel’s displays, and, in some cases, higher than pre-COVID visitation rates*.
Throughout the pandemic, CCOA continued evolving and applying its solutions to power recovery in other critical industry sectors, like automotive. And in one campaign conducted for a major auto brand throughout the spring and summer, CCOA drove a triple digit percentage lift in sales of the advertised car model on the company’s displays. These findings, and those from aforementioned study, are available on the Recovery Resource Center.
“This research offers some of the best evidence that outdoor advertising remains an effective resource for local businesses and national brands to reach their target audiences, and even more so during these challenging times,” said Levi. “This new data reveal how the pandemic altered consumer travel behavior and how ads on our displays continued delivering for advertisers who maintained, or launched, campaigns during this time.”
While the Recovery Resource Center is the company’s latest recovery resource, CCOA began its initial economic and community rebuilding partnership months ago, launching its #OpenForBusiness initiative to shine a light on essential businesses that remained open during the pandemic. CCOA will continue adding marketing and advertising resources to the Recovery Resource Center as the country continues to reopen, as businesses rebuild, and as new consumer insights become available through the company’s robust ecosystem of partnerships and industry-leading technologies.
*The “Visit Rate Lift” for the OOH campaign is determined from the variation between the exposed visitation rate (those who have seen the OOH) and the control visitation rate (those who have not seen the OOH). This research study analyzed activity in key markets such as: San Francisco/Oakland, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and NYC.
SOURCE Clear Channel Outdoor