1. Overall, how are you addressing this year after the lockdown and post-pandemic period?

All of the advertising industry has suffered very much due to the pandemic, but if there is one medium that has felt the Covid-19 crisis most severely, it is that of Outdoor. The lack of audiences in the streets for months has been a hard blow for all industry players. Fortunately, the improvements we have been experiencing in recent months, relaxation of measures, consumption recovery and leisure activities as well as the bouncing back of national tourism, mean a resurfacing of our Outdoor audiences, with a boom in the use of our formats.

Although there is still some way to go before we return to pre-pandemic levels, we are witnessing a sound and robust recovery. This, together with the great talent and team we have at Global, helps us approach this recovery with a lot of enthusiasm.

2. You have just been awarded the contract to manage advertising for EMT Madrid, what does this agreement mean for Global?

EMT Madrid is an essential pillar for Global Spain’s strategic plan, and a partner with whom we share key values, such as a strong commitment to quality and innovation. Given our national and international experience and our leadership in the Transit segment, we are certain that we will again fulfil this contract efficiently.

Our leadership provides us with the stability necessary to continue diversifying our product portfolio, with a special emphasis on the convergence of outdoor advertising and digital formats, which provides endless possibilities and opportunities.  This is how we are shaping an ever-stronger structure, focused on business growth and development.

3. What would you highlight about the work done by your company for EMT Madrid?

It has been five years already since EMT Madrid trusted Global to manage advertising for their buses. And throughout this time, our priority has always been to position buses as the Premium advertising medium it is: a moving Large Format, non-intrusive, fully integrated in cities and ensuring maximum audience reach.

All of this has meant that, over these years, a great many new advertisers have continued trusting us and including buses within their media planning. As a result, we have optimised revenue and product quality on EMT buses, leading to an exponential growth of advertising investments since we began working together in 2016.

4. Are advertisers investing in this type of format? What benefits would you highlight about this specific medium?

As mentioned earlier, more and more advertisers are trusting bus formats to implement their communications and marketing strategies. Another success indicator is the percentage of repeating advertisers who include this format in their planning once again.

Our objective and responsibility have always been to get the most out of this format, to develop high-impact campaigns through a non-intrusive medium, that is fully integrated in the life of cities and audiences and enjoys a high recall rate.  For some time now we have also been working on providing buses with strong metrics (coverage and notoriety), to have key data for monitoring campaigns and return on investment.

5. What other concessions do you have in this area?

Global is the absolute leader in the Transit segment in Spain. Together with Madrid, we already have the concessions of the main cities in the country.

This leadership in the Spanish market is very strategic, as it allows us to offer nationwide coverage in urban areas with formats with the highest audience.

6. Outdoor digitisation is here to stay. Measuring, segmentation, notoriety…what innovations are you implementing and what are we going to see in the future?

Our Strategic Plan includes a series of assets that will allow us to plunge into digitisation. We continue learning and experimenting a lot to massively include digital formats in our portfolio.

We are currently already selling joint outdoor and mobile advertising campaigns, broadening their extent beyond outdoor and fine-tuning audience segmentation. Internet is one of the fastest growing media and we are obtaining excellent results with this type of campaigns.

Moreover, in 2019 we set up a pioneering measuring system to calculate bus advertising audiences. This has enabled us to professionalise bus marketing as an advertising medium, broaden our audited portfolio of Outdoor formats, increase market trust in the medium, facilitate campaign planning and audience segmentation. 

This last point is particularly important, as advertisers are increasingly demanding more accurate segmentation to optimise their investment. The impact needs to be ever more precise and targeted. That is what we are working on. Digitisation is here to stay and, in my opinion, it will develop very rapidly in our industry.