Out-of-Home Innovation Is Driving Results in Healthcare Advertising

One of the things I love most about Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising is how, like no other medium, it combines the strengths of the past with modern technological breakthroughs. 

More and more marketers are experiencing how this unique combination of time-tested, scaled impact and innovative modern technology can help them solve real business challenges, transforming those “old school” billboards into engines of measurable impact.

Not long ago, Clear Channel Outdoor (CCO) set out to help an established business sector – the pharmaceutical industry – solve a fundamental problem faced by many modern marketers: how to drive measurable business results when the ad medium they had relied upon for years – TV – was no longer delivering the results pharmaceutical advertisers needed to see. And how to do this the way modern marketers require: leveraging complex data to demonstrate the impact and value of their advertising investments. 

To blaze this new trail, CCO worked with a major pharmaceutical brand, in tandem with their agency partners, to build a scalable media solution that did more than just deliver impressions at scale. It provided proof that this innovative combination of the oldest of old school media with cutting edge application of data analytics, could move exposed audiences through the complicated journey from awareness to physician visits to prescriptions written.

Looking at OOH through a new lens

For too long, healthcare marketers thought of OOH as a top-of-funnel awareness tool. It was viewed as a big canvas for brand names and images, but not necessarily as a lever you could pull to drive conversions, especially for an industry where legal compliance and data privacy are non-negotiable.

For nearly 10 years now, we’ve been building tools at Clear Channel Outdoor to change that perception. With our CCO RADAR suite of data analytics solutions, we leverage a wealth of aggregated and/or anonymous data to understand where people go, how they move through the world, and, most importantly, how OOH media influences their behavior. And as the leader in bringing innovative data solutions to the OOH industry, we built RADAR as a flexible data platform that can work with a wide range of diverse data sources and measurement partners, allowing us to develop a custom solution specifically to crack the pharmaceutical advertising code.

When we shared our capabilities and proposed solutions with this pharmaceutical marketing team, you could see the lightbulb go off. They understood how OOH could be more than a broad reach vehicle; it could be used responsibly, effectively and measurably as a medium that drives business results and performance, helping to close that performance gap that TV left behind.

A breakthrough approach

We developed direct relationships with the leading healthcare data companies, including Veeva Crossix and IQVIA Digital. We evaluated these data solutions to ensure that they complied with the highly regulated environment that surrounds healthcare data. We integrated the RADAR data platform with data on-boarders to allow us to analyze the data from our partners to provide insights and solutions in a statistically significant and scalable approach.

For this specific client, we integrated a highly-targeted audience segment from Crossix into the RADAR data platform and mapped that audience against our OOH inventory to identify the OOH media placements most likely to make an impact. Unlike the traditional approach of selecting each OOH display based on its location or format, this process provided a roadmap to the best displays regardless of location or format. We identified billboards along highways, transit shelters in urban areas, and posters on surface roads. Some were digital OOH displays, some were traditional printed formats. The goal was to help this innovative marketer best leverage the OOH medium to find their audience, wherever they were.

This wasn’t about buying more media; it was about buying smarter media.

Then we paired OOH with mobile retargeting. Think about the experience: you see a bold, memorable brand message on your commute, and later, you encounter a more detailed, differentiating digital message on your device. The two touchpoints reinforce one another, creating a path that is highly likely to move people closer to action. 

And finally, we worked with the team at Crossix, as well as our partners at Kantar, to measure everything. By comparing the behaviors of audiences exposed to the campaign with those who weren’t, we could understand the influence this campaign had on the target audience: from consideration intent, to physician visits, to prescriptions filled.

Results that changed the conversation

The numbers spoke for themselves:

A Veeva Crossix analysis revealed two key findings:

For the brand, this wasn’t just a successful campaign. It was proof that OOH could play a central role in their marketing strategy, which was something many had once thought impossible in the healthcare space.

What this means for marketers

To me, the real story isn’t just about healthcare or pharma. It’s about what happens when we start thinking of OOH as an established, proven channel that’s embracing innovation and modern technology with the same sophistication, accountability and creativity as digital.

Healthcare and pharma marketers aren’t the only ones facing complexity. Every industry is navigating fragmented media environments, stricter privacy standards and rising expectations for measurable impact. OOH is meeting that moment at scale, in the real world and with proven results.

Time and again, I’ve seen the “legacy” medium of OOH do more than turn heads. I’ve seen it drive action, influence behavior and unlock growth in places where brands thought they had run out of options.

That’s not just innovation. That’s the power of OOH. And it’s not the future; it’s happening right now.

_{^{Source: OAAA, Harris Poll, 2024; Kantar, Veeva Crossix; 2022}}