Why companies happily pay for billboards and flinch at software

The stand, the billboard and the flinch

Every autumn the exhibition calendar fills up, and every autumn I watch the same thing happen. Large companies spend fortunes on exhibitions, on participations, on travel for the team, on the stand itself and on the dozen giant expenses that come with it. They spend on digital out-of-home, on billboards, on radio, even on television. All the tangible things.

Then the conversation turns to digital marketing, to software, to anything you cannot hold in your hand — and the same companies hesitate over amounts that are a fraction of what they just approved for the stand. The budget is not the problem. Something else is.

I have asked myself an honest question about my own behaviour here. When I see my company's advert printed on a board that I drive past every morning, does that mean I did not waste the money? Or does it just mean that I, personally, saw it every day? The advert did not become effective because it became visible to me. But it certainly became easier to defend.

That is the first clue. A billboard is a receipt you can photograph. A software subscription is an invoice you have to trust.

When the manager becomes the marketing department

The second thing I keep noticing is how many managers interfere in marketing decisions — in companies that have a marketing department, and even more so in companies that do not. The interference follows a script. “This brings image.” “This brings brand strength.” “This one brings awareness.” “This is good, this is bad.”

None of it is based on facts. It is based on what a friend said at dinner, on something heard second-hand, on personal taste. Almost never on KPIs, and almost never on a tool that measures what each channel actually produced. The manager is not being malicious. He simply has opinions about the tangible things because he can see them, and no opinions about the intangible things because nobody has shown him a number.

So I am left with two questions I do not fully know how to answer. What drives companies to gamble so generously on the tangible and to neglect experimentation in media, settling for the least effort? And what drives managers to step into marketing at all — if a marketing department even exists?

I posted both questions during a large technology exhibition in Riyadh this month. The replies were mostly stories of the same thing happening somewhere else.

The bottom-of-the-tank trend

There is a related habit I want to name, because it comes from the same place. When a company finally does spend on digital, the instruction is often “ride the trend”. Whatever is loud this week, copy it. Whatever the audience is laughing at, laugh with it, even if it is beneath the brand.

Must marketing descend to the lowest level of its audience and chase every trend regardless of standard? For me, no. A brand that has spent twenty years building a reputation should not spend it in a fortnight for a spike in views that nobody will remember by Ramadan.

The interesting thing is that “ride the trend” is also a symptom of not measuring. If you cannot tell which content produced enquiries, the only signal left is applause, and applause rewards the loudest thing in the room. Once a team can see which message produced which result, the trend loses its grip very quickly. Our creative and branding team spends a surprising amount of time arguing clients out of the bottom of the tank — and the argument always works better with a dashboard than with taste.

Why touch feels like proof

Here is my working theory, offered without a study to back it. A physical channel satisfies three needs at once. It is visible to the manager, so he feels he is getting something. It is visible to the manager's manager, so the decision is easy to defend. And it is visible to competitors, which feels like winning.

Software satisfies none of those needs on the day you sign. It sits in a browser tab. It produces its value over months, and the value arrives as a report rather than as a sensation. Everything about the human brain says “that is the risky one”, even when the billboard is the bigger gamble by a factor of ten.

The digital channels also carry a burden the physical ones never had to carry: they can be measured, so they are asked to prove themselves. Nobody has ever asked a billboard to show its conversion rate. The channel that offers evidence is punished for offering it, and the channel that offers a photograph is rewarded for the photograph.

I do not think this is fixed by lecturing managers. I think it is fixed by giving them channels that are physical enough to photograph and digital enough to report.

Holograms and signage: physical enough to photograph, digital enough to report

This is, honestly, how Nplay ended up where it is. We did not set out to solve a psychology problem. We set out to put holograms on exhibition stands and screens in shops, and we noticed that the clients who flinched at software did not flinch at a Halo Box. It is a two-metre cabinet. The chairman can stand next to it. It photographs beautifully. It is as tangible as any billboard.

But behind the glass it is software. The content is scheduled from Nplay Beam, the same cloud signage platform that runs screens in a national hypermarket chain across 32 branches and in a specialist clinic hub in Amman. Every screen reports what it played and when. Nothing is left to “I think people saw it”.

The Halo Ads network takes the same idea into malls and transit spaces: an advertiser buys holographic spots the way they buy digital inventory, by the ten-second slot, with delivery reported per location. The manager gets his photograph. The marketing team gets its numbers. For once, both sides of the table leave the meeting satisfied.

I have started calling this the middle path, because it does not ask a company to abandon the tangible. It asks the tangible to start reporting.

Three questions I would ask before signing anything

If you are approving a marketing spend this season — a stand, a screen, a campaign, a subscription — here are the three questions I have learned to ask, in order.

• What will this channel report to me next month? Not what it will “bring”. What it will show. If the honest answer is “nothing”, price that in.
• Who decided this, and on what basis? If the basis is a friend's opinion, the decision deserves the same weight as the friend's opinion.
• What is the experiment budget? Not the campaign budget — the small amount set aside to test two channels against each other and let the numbers decide the following year.

None of this is new. Every marketing textbook says it. What is new, at least in our market, is that the tools to answer the questions are now cheaper than the stand — and available in Arabic, from a team in Amman and Riyadh that can also build the stand. You can read how we approach it on our marketing services page, or see what a hologram campaign costs in our MENA cost guide.

I still do not have the full answer to my two questions. If you have one, I would like to hear it.