The Tradigital Era Begins

This is shaping up to be a new golden age for outdoor advertising.

As the outdoor sites around Australian replace their paper and paste with LED pixels, the strategic, creative and economic opportunities of this form of advertising grow exponentially. In super-high pedestrian traffic areas like Queen Street Mall in Brisbane or Martin Place in Sydney, the advent of digital outdoor enables a single site to present four, five and even six distinct panels to the assembled masses and the transition between these panels increases their likelihood of being noticed. This increase in the number of panels generates more dollars per site for outdoor media companies and also makes outdoor advertising, traditionally the province of big brand advertisers, much more accessible to companies with smaller marketing budgets.

And then there are the impressive creative ramifications of evolving from eight weeks of paper to eight seconds of pixels. So far most advertisers have rather disappointingly replicated the standard, inanimate creative of 20th-century outdoor advertising despite the creative possibilities that digitisation now confers.

But it’s changing, fast. ANZ’s outstanding use of large-format digital billboards around the nation’s freeways this month for its “business ready” campaign to showcase, in real time and with local emphasis, every new business that opens with the help of ANZ funding, shows how to get it right. As is the award-winning Porsche Recognition Campaign at Melbourne Airport in which a smart digital billboard recognised Porsches that drove past it and flashed appreciative copy in response. The tactical possibilities and faster lead times from idea to street of digital billboards ensure outdoor advertising has many more double-digit months of growth ahead.

There is, however, something of a problem with this dizzying resurgence in outdoor advertising. For cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking critics of the wishy-washy metrics of digital media it sticks in the craw to acknowledge that outdoor advertising is set for growth because of the dreaded D-word. Similarly, the sockless, bearded wonders who populate the world of digital marketing are bemused by outdoor advertising because it’s meant to be a dying medium.

This dilemma is not just reserved for outdoor either. The well-worn bifurcation of media into digital and traditional is starting to blur and fade in almost every corner of the media world. If you head to New York’s Columbus Circle this month you will notice some major retail construction. You’ll see signs proclaiming the construction of Amazon’s new upcoming 370sq m bookstore. When outdoor companies go digital and e-tailers build stores with actual bricks, selling books, what do we call that?

Well I’d like to suggest a word for it. In fact, I’d like to invent* a word for it: tradigital.

Amazon is a tradigital company these days. Outdoor is a tradigital medium. In fact, when you think about it, almost every medium is tradigital. A significant number of Australians now listen to digital radio. Both Facebook and Google spend significantly more of their own marketing budgets on traditional media to promote their various products and services than on digital.

My invention of the word tradigital might strike you as completely inane but is it any more absurd than the existing binary categorisation that we have created between digital and traditional media? 

*Apparently, as has been made clear to me via the glories of social media, the word "tradigital" has been mentioned before and the people using it were being serious so I acknowledge that although a) I did not know this when I wrote this column and b) I am clearly taking the piss out of the word tradigital to take the piss out of the digital/traditional dichotomoy - I wholeheartedly accept that I did not invent this word. I actually can't believe anyone seriously did invent it but clearly I now realise I did not.

You can read more at: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/tradigital-now-a-digital-blur/news-story/044ccaf58dc2b37f0e158a5c2fb152bf