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Sometimes, particularly walking around shopping centres and sitting in restaurants, I can’t help thinking how short our collective memory is. Like goldfish really. Or not, because it turns out that whole ‘four seconds’ thing is a myth: goldfish actually have excellent recall that has been measured at weeks, and even months. Remember that next time you make funny faces at a fishtank. But I digress, let’s get back to Covid and its lingering aftermath …

We don’t talk much about it anymore, but remember, the extreme lockdown conditions we endured were only lifted at the end of 2021. That means we’ve been free for just two and a half years. What on earth has all this got to do with OOH media? I’ll get there, I promise! The work we do in understanding consumer behaviour is arguably most insightful through a longitudinal lens, which is just a fancy way of saying ‘observing trends over time’. And you won’t believe some of the shifts we’ve seen in recent times, particularly how, when and where people consume media and are exposed to marketing messages.

Unpacking those shifts blow-by-blow would require a book rather than a web post, but suffice it to say there are many powerful stories to be told for anyone willing to dig around in data. And the one that’s on my mind right now is the rapid recovery of passenger air travel in South Africa and what it means for the tens of thousands of square meters of signage in and around the skyports of our country.

The work we do in BrandMapp measures the behaviour of the top 30% of SA adults by income. That’s the personal taxbase, i.e. the 13 million people most likely to be doing things like buying cars, investing disposable income, drinking fancy liquor, and flying through life, literally. And one thing we know about them is that they love to travel, and always have. If you go back to 2019, 60% of these people said they had flown in the past year, 17% of them internationally. Those are pretty big numbers, and it explains the quality and quantity of OOH messaging associated with all things airport.

I live in the little Visdorp at the tip of Africa and even down here, where strict bylaws have protected our view in a very different way to the Big Smoke up north, it feels like you’re swimming into a concentrated soup bowl of visual messaging from the time you swing off the N2 onto the airport approach, all the way to your departure gate. And ORT makes CTI look like a rank amateur in this regard.

Now it’s no secret that the business of flying was devastated by Covid, and as a new normal’s evolved, we’ve seen all sorts of weird and wonderful things happen.  Some airlines died, the national carrier went onto life support (again!!) and Flysafair emerged as the capo di tutti capi of the skies. On board most airlines, ‘complimentary’ has done a disappearing act. Even on long haul flights, you may be allowed one alcoholic drink with dinner, but after that, expect to cough up, in foreign currency. Any semblance of romance has been flushed away with the complimentary. I’d go so far as to say that any semblance of romance associated with flying is now a thing of the past: cattle-class air travel is barely distinguishable from a long-haul Greyhound bus trip.

But, and it’s a big BUT, however uncomfortable, the collective obsession with travel that used to exist in the taxpayer segment of society has never, ever, wavered. It remains our single biggest passion. After a year of home-imprisonment, in BrandMapp 2021, when we asked people what sort of flights they thought they would take in the next near, we measured extraordinarily high levels of wanderlust.

Where 60% of adults had flown in 2019,  77% said they expected to do so once lockdown was over. In reality, they weren’t able to satisfy those needs in the recovery year: only 45% managed to do so and international travel was less than half what it was pre Covid. But what’s happened in the past year?

Well, that’s where the story gets really interesting because if you look at the trended data for the past four years, you’ll see that in 2023, we very nearly got back to the same levels of flight that we last saw in 2019. In fact, 52% of all adults surveyed said they had flown in the past year with international travel for business and leisure far, far closer to what was normal back in 2019.  Those number, by the way, are very much in line with global data that showed that by the end of the 2023, air traffic by volume was at 98% of the levels measured in 2019. It looks like we blinked and the skies were once again full of vapor trails.

As we get ready to go back into field for BrandMapp 2024, there’s a very good chance the needle will have nudged even closer. Actually, if we keep following global trends, we should fly higher than ever before. It’s one little story that could have massive impact. And if you own anything resembling OOH media anywhere on, at, or in the general vicinity of anything resembling an airport, I’d highly recommend you watch this space. Imagine how powerful it would be to start every sales meeting with something like, “Did you know that middle-class and wealthy South African’s are flying more than ever?’