The challenges facing advertisers in reaching consumers are aplenty.  Ad blockers, fraud, cord-cutting, the demise of print…brands and media owners alike have their work cut out for them.  But marketers are increasingly turning to a medium that was once the beneficiary of leftover budgets to be a saving grace: out-of-home (OOH) and more specifically, digital out-of-home (DOOH). 

We at Lightbox have extolled the virtues of our unskippable, unblockable and bot-free video-with-sound proposition to anyone who’ll listen.  And data backs us up.  While OOH overall is effective at reaching consumers, our specific video ads in malls is ranked as the top ad medium of interest among key audience demos. Adults 18-49, Women 18-34, moms, as well as both the highly valuable Millennial and Gen Z targets, all agree that video ads in malls are of higher “considerable interest” than traditional channels such as TV or online.

Perhaps the most elusive of all consumer segments, Gen Z, indexed the highest for interest in video ads in malls with 181, far above mobile at 130.  With nearly half of this demo not watching linear TV and 82% skipping online video ads, this medium is breaking through in an environment that also attracts them in troves.  95% of all U.S. teens visited a mall within a three-month period, and 75% prefer brick-and-mortar shopping over online.

Outranking mobile, online, radio, TV and print, video ads in malls are poised to have the greatest impact on both ends of the marketing funnel.  With our screens reaching a mass audience mere feet from retailers, advertisers would be hard pressed to ignore the potential influence that our place-based digital video could have on awareness all the way through purchase.

Source: MRI Doublebase (Nielsen) 2018; Global WebIndex Millennials Report, 2018; Kantar Millward Brown; Ocean Neuroscience; ICSC