If your audience lives in a high-rise apartment building or condominium, you have a unique opportunity to engage them where they feel most comfortable: home. Here's how elevator advertising can help you reach your ideal customers at home.
November 19, 2020
Digital out-of-home advertising — aka DOOH — is one of the most exciting opportunities for digital media placements.
Why? Because DOOH advertising lets advertisers create immersive, memorable, and sometimes even interactive campaigns that reach audiences where they already spend their time throughout the day.
In fact, DOOH accounted for 28.3% of all OOH ads in 2019 and is predicted to reach 38.3% by 2023. Plus, DOOH was the main driver of growth in OOH advertising worldwide in 2019.
And if you're running ads on other channels, DOOH can boost your results across the media mix. A study by the IPA suggests that digital-out-of-home improves the performance of online advertising by 31%, paid social by 56%, and search by 80%.
Elevator advertising helps combine the reach of traditional OOH advertising with the targeting and technology of digital advertising, letting brands reach audiences in a unique space that sees a lot of traffic.
These media placements can be especially useful if you want to reach your audience where they feel most at ease, first thing in the morning or right before they turn in for the night. Read on to learn how elevator advertising can help you engage with your ideal customers at home.
Media planners and buyers know the importance of a well-placed message to reach the right audience at the right time. That's why coffee shops put up billboards a block away from the store and restaurants run evening rush-hour radio ads — to catch people on their way to work or heading home.
Elevator advertising gives you the chance to connect with your ideal customers right outside their door. It's the closest you can get to OOH advertising in their homes.
Here are the top benefits of residential elevator advertising.
When your customers are riding in an elevator, they're (literally) a captive audience, and the elevator is the first out-of-home advertising placement people see when they leave their apartment condo units.
The average elevator rider takes four trips in an elevator daily. Think about what messages you’d like your audience to see when they first leave their homes in the morning and right before they step in for the evening.
If they live in an apartment tower, they're almost always going to be taking the elevator to return home. This final journey is characterized by a unique mental state. Elevator riders are starting to relax, and they're looking for a positive experience.
Maybe they're tired from a long day or simply happy to be home. And given that the feeling of “home” starts the moment they enter the apartment complex doors, marketers have a unique opportunity to connect with audiences at a highly suggestible time.
Marketing channels that align with consumer habits — daily elevator rides, for example — are extremely valuable because they can guarantee repeat engagement.
Residents already regularly check the screens in their buildings' elevators because they display important daily info, like:
Aligning your ads with that useful and desirable content can help you build awareness and create a more positive brand experience for elevator riders (and future customers).
When you place your ads in residential elevators, you don't have to worry about the weekend dips in traffic that come with advertising in an office building, commercial centre, or other traffic hubs.
At-home elevator ads are a high-frequency, 24/7 medium, meaning that they're always on. And with at least four rides per resident per day, your message is more likely to be remembered.
Plus, people are spending a lot more time at home since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, making residential elevator advertising a better DOOH investment than ads in city centres and other highly populated areas.
Our data shows that residential tower elevator traffic is at 91% of its pre-COVID levels in Calgary and Edmonton and 80-78% in Vancouver and Toronto. In comparison, commercial traffic throughout the country remains at only 20-25% of historical levels.
With so many people now working from home full-time (42% of the U.S. labor force, for example), at-home elevator ads are a better investment than placements in office building elevators.
At-home elevator advertising can also help you target a more specific group of potential customers based on factors like:
While not all apartment and condominium communities are homogenous, knowing the info above can help you choose which buildings you buy elevator ads in. You can then segment, target, and reach customers near your business and drive them through your door (or to your website) at the right moment.
This level of targeting is especially useful if your goal is to increase foot traffic and impressions. When you advertise to people who live nearby, you can keep your business top-of-mind when they start and end their days, making them more likely to stop by your store next time they go out.
Plus, you control exactly where your message is placed, and you don’t have to worry about competing ads, ad blockers, or negative comments. You have a real opportunity to reach an uninterrupted audience as the only form of "distraction" in an intimate space.
Last but not least, elevator advertising is more measurable than other OOH placements. And measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns is critical — otherwise, how do you know if you've made the right investment?
Here's how we measure elevator ad campaigns for our clients: Unlike other OOH mediums, the Visual Impression platform lets you measure, track, and optimize your campaign performance at a level similar to digital ads. You also have access to audience demographics and engagement levels for your campaign.
Our anonymous audience analytics technology lets companies serve ads in real-time and target based on age, gender, and more without collecting personally identifiable info about elevator riders. Safety and privacy is top of our minds and our technology holds Privacy by Design certification. Standard industry impressions are estimated based on the number of plays that each ad gets in the elevator, regardless of if anyone is actually looking. Those numbers end up widely inflated, whereas our impressions are verified by our AI-powered audience measurement platform — and are backed up by a solid ROI for advertisers.
Overall, at-home elevator advertising offers a real opportunity for businesses to:
Vertical Impression offers advertisers unique digital ad placements through a network of elevator screens across Canada.
Our platform was built to deliver truly exceptional DOOH leveraging AI and machine learning to target ads in a way that is often only achievable through online ad placements. Learn more about Vertical Impression and start turning elevator riders into customers.
