Every available space is now an advertising platform, it seems. Over the past decade, ambient advertising has become ubiquitous. It covers lavatory walls and fashion-store changing cubicles, adorns petrol pump nozzles and book-marks, and livens up coffee cup holders and pizza boxes.
Brands have jumped at the chance to experiment with these novel media as fresh ways of promoting their messages to specific groups in appropriate environments.
However, the worst advertising down-turn in decades has cut a swathe through the ambient media sector, forcing some media owners out of business and driving revenues down.
One media owner to have collapsed this year was i-vu. It operated digital ad screens in hair salons, and herein lay its problem. Such niche digital media are saddled with high fixed costs, and struggle to survive when revenues dry up.
By contrast, it costs nothing to leave a poster site in a leisure centre empty until an advertiser can be found. The question is which of the off-beat media opportunities that have proliferated in the downturn will survive it. Broadly speaking, it will be those that offer the most effective means of targeting audiences.
On the positive side, wrap-around ads on London taxi cabs, posters in changing rooms at clothes stores, ads on ticket barriers at Tube and railway stations and panels in schools, hospitals and leisure centres all seem to be delivering on marketers' goals.
Other areas are struggling. Advertising in pub lavatories has suffered this year, although washroom media still gets an airing in motorway service stations, leisure centres and clubs. Lloyd Keisner, managing direct-or of Table Talk Media and Bag Media, Â claims more brands are turning to ambient media as it allows them to hone their focus. 'They have less money to work with, so it is vital that money works harder,' he says.
However, according to outdoor media agency Kinetic, spending on the 'ambient' sector, which includes some 25 niche media opportunities, has slumped by 40% this year. Brands are expected to spend £40m across the sector in 2009, down from £57m last year and a severe drop from the high of £61m achieved in 2007.
Gideon Adey, Kinetic's business development director, says the boom years before 2008 created an explosion of creativity in media ideas, though many of them were poorly conceived. 'Every week we were getting three or four new bits of media that were never going to succeed. You just know when an idea is not going to work out,' he adds. He points to ads on escalator risers as being self-defeating, as they are visible only when there are few people on the escalator.
Adey identifies three main routes to success for an ambient medium. Timing is vital; a medium that can reach someone just before they are about to do something else will often prove successful. For exam-ple, credit card brand Visa advertises on petrol pump nozzles to encourage people to use its cards rather than cash when paying (see case study, above right).
Another important consideration is the mindset of the consumer when they receive the message. Changing room ads target their audience when in a personal environment. Ads about weight loss, beauty products or sexual health, which may be embarrassing in a wider social location, are therefore more appropriate there.
It is also important to match the environment to the brand message. Brahma lager, the Brazilian beer, ran a graffiti campaign on shop-front shutters around London's Brick Lane to target urban drinkers after dark. 'This was not to be cost-efficient, but because it associates the brand with urban art, which could be a great fit,' says Adey.
Likewise, Paramount Pictures promo-ted the release of the film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen by installing a giant Bumblebee Transformer in London's Westfield shopping centre.
Some niche media owners, though, have been going through a difficult time. Carl Pickford, founder of washroom media business CPA, says that ambient media has 'died' in the past few months. He claims to have invented the channel, by running ads in pub toilets in the mid-90s.
'We haven't stopped trading, but no one is buying any advertising,' says Pick-ford. He claims that CPA has sold £25m of wash-room advertising since the 90s, but adds: 'I've got 12,000 washroom boards in pubs, and 90% of [the boards] are empty. It's sad, really.'
However, rival washroom ad promoter Admedia predicts that its revenues will be up this year. 'We have to fight hard for revenues like everyone else, but year on year it looks pretty much up for us,' says managing director Adam Mills.
The company has 25,000 panels in lavatories in 1300 locations and the rights to carry ads in 93 motorway service stations, including 6-sheet poster sites in car parks. The cost of a four-week run of a single poster ad in a washroom ranges from £40 to £50, says Mills.
Other media owners that claim to be doing well in the downturn include Fitting Exposure, which owns panels in fashion store changing rooms, offering 22,500 panels sites across 14 retail chains in the UK. The advantage of such campaigns is that they are tightly targeted. For example, Sony Ericsson promoted a fashionable mobile phone through ads in chan-ging rooms in Miss Selfridge, knowing the campaign would almost exclusi-vely reach 16- to 25-year-old women.
Ads on the move
Another opportunity is advertising on taxis. Taxi Media has relationships with 4800 cabs within the M25. Brands can run a full livery ad on taxi doors for £230 a month or a full wrap ad for £3500 a year.
Chief executive Asher Moses, whose company Taxi Promotions bought Taxi Media from outdoor advertiser ClearChannel this spring, says the company can even arrange for a taxi driver to promote specific products, such as holidays in Thailand, to passengers.
'There has been a reduction in taxi advertising in the past couple of years, but with the downturn, that is changing. Brands are moving back on to taxis,' he adds.
Ads carried by niche media can still be effective when they surprise, excite and engage. However, by the same token advertising can easily reach saturation point and lose effectiveness through overexposure. The downturn is clipping the wings of ambient media and doing away with many of the weaker formats. This should, however, leave the field clear for brands to take advantage of more effective niche opportunities.