Dive Brief:

• The Outdoor Association Advertising Association of America (OAAA) is taking on digital advertising with a new report that cites digital’s shortcomings, including fraud, viewability issues and ad blocking.
• The report, titled “This is what reality looks like,” is part of a broader campaign, called "Feel the real," that touts out-of-home advertising and questions the effectiveness of digital. The campaign has been running since fall 2015. 
• In the report, the OAAA cited stats on viewability, bot traffic, and ad fraud to make the case against digital, including the estimate that "as few as 8% of digital impressions are ever seen by a real person."

Dive Insight:

Is digital advertising vulnerable? In the report, the OAAA directly attacks digital advertising as not living up to its billing or deserving of its rapid growth. Ad blocking has become a particularly hot button issue for the industry in the last year, with estimates from OAAA's report suggesting a whopping 40% of the world's consumers are using the technology. 

“What was once hailed as the most accountable medium has become complex, opaque, intrusive and ultimately uncertain," according to the report. "This has prompted some to conclude that as few as 8% of digital impressions are ever seen by a real person. The true size of this reality gap – the gap between what advertisers buy and what real people see – is a matter of debate, but what is certain is that this gap is undermining the transparency of media markets at a significant cost to advertisers.”

Interestingly, the campaign from the OAAA comes at a time when out-of-home advertising and digital channels – particularly mobile – are increasingly coming together through deals such as a recent partnership between Placed, a location analytics firm, and Clear Channel Media, a supplier of out-of-home ad inventory. The companies use mobile phone tracking data to offer attribution between billboards and in-store traffic for advertisers.