Airport zone exclusivity impacts high flyers

Besides clean architectural lines, high structures, wide spaces and long corridors airports are a throughfare for a highly desirable audience. Consisting of business and leisure travellers that typically have more disposable income, not to mention considerable time to see an advertiser's message before flights, this audience can be highly receptive to brand messaging if given the chance to interact with it in a way that is befitting to them.

In mid-2010, Provantage Out of Home Media, via a tender process, was awarded exclusive advertising rights to highly visible zones at King Shaka International Airport in KwaZulu-Natal. The partnership is the first of its kind when it comes to ACSA and concessionaires.

Given the nature of airports, where travellers are either in a hurry or they have a long period of time before a flight or a transfer, zonal advertising offers the opportunity for every person passing the area to interact with one or many advertising platforms. With the aim of capturing the attention of passengers at a number of steps in the airport experience, Provantage Media's airport advertising offering is available in many forms.

With the target audience and high dwell time in mind zonal advertising, especially where a zone is exclusively owned by one advertiser, offers a multitude of media platforms to interact with including billboards, activations and touch screens. Messages can be designed to attract attention to a company, a product or a service, or elicit a direct response and encourage point-of-sale purchases.

"We view airport zones as a blank canvas in which we can be innovative and exciting. The sheer nature of airports makes them novel, adventurous and international, so why shouldn't advertising be executed in the same vein? In airports, we can experiment with new, different and innovative technologies in a zone. This allows for an advertiser to achieve both above the line and below the line strategies in one location, made up of static advertising, sampling, digital or any combination of marketing elements," says Shamendran Naidu, Product Manager for Outdoor at Provantage.

The primary advantage of airport advertising is that the space can be taken by a single advertiser, creating mass exposure and mass reach and reduce clutter by having just one brand in a single zone. Moreover, advertising structures, substrates and executions can be standardised in a single zone, without the threat of clutter from other advertisers.

"We've done our homework and we know that more than three million passengers move through Cape Town, Oliver Tambo and King Shaka InternationalAirports every month and most of them are LSM 10+ which makes these advertising opportunities extremely attractive for advertisers. Airports are excellent spaces for advertising upmarket and lifestyle brands and the sites on offer are well situated in high exposure areas," concludes Naidu.

For more information on airport advertising call Shamendran Naidu on 0861 776 826 or email him at az.oc.egatnavorp@ymahs.