The outdoor advertising sector is unique. Unlike other media, it is not surrounded by content to hook the consumer in. The "medium" is the environment where the poster sits, such as the side of a busy road, a Tube station or railway platform.
Tim Bleakley, CBS Outdoor's UK managing director of sales and marketing, has even cheekily claimed this as a unique selling point, because outdoor is not cluttered up by all that "negative editorial", like newspapers, for example.
As our feature this week highlights, outdoor is also traded differently to other media, with poster specialists acting as intermediaries between outdoor media owners and media agencies and their clients. The specialists emerged to deal with the complex and fragmented nature of outdoor advertising, to help agencies liaise with multiple suppliers, sort out logistics and facilitate national, integrated campaigns.
The specialists' role is entirely logical, but introduced another layer to the agency/media owner commission process that has, over the years, led to much nudge-nudge wink-wink speculation about hidden payments and murky goings on in the world of outdoor.
That impression wasn't allayed when one of the biggest players in the outdoor specialist market - the part WPP-owned Kinetic - refused to take part in our feature. Frankly, this smacks of a paranoia that does nothing to alleviate some people's belief that outdoor specialists have something to hide. Thankfully, the other big player in the market - Posterscope - did contribute.
In fact, the Aegis-owned specialist's chief executive, Annie Rickard, freely admits the industry's trading model is out
of date and outdoor media needs to find a better way of demonstrating value.
This is especially true given the exciting developments taking place in outdoor, such as mobile interactivity, digital screens and integration with search.
In this context, trading on a cost-per-panel basis no longer makes sense. A more robust and comparable system needs to be put in place to cope with modern multimedia outdoor advertising environments if clients are to be able to continue to achieve value from their out-of-home campaigns.
