Advancing technology, increased scale, and steadily growing OOH audiences, all point to a rosy future for DOOH. The last 12 months have been no exception. Bigger budgets and a growing appetite to be more active in OOH, has seen a number of killer campaigns hit the ground – a fact highlighted at last month’s MediaPost DOOH Awards. Brands and their agencies are really starting to look at the medium afresh.
From this renewed focus, we can see four types of DOOH creative activity emerging. This activity can be broadly grouped under the headings; Linear, Dynamic, Interactive and Experiential. Across the industry these are accepted categories and even if the exact description or terminology varies there is a way to quickly establish what the campaign profile is.
Linear
Not so long ago DOOH was simply broadcasting linear ads. And in the main part it continues to do so and this has been working well for clients. We know from our own research that DOOH delivers more views and holds consumer attention for longer than its static counterpart. However, as a digital platform, there is a nagging sense that the medium could be doing more….
Dynamic, Real-Time Creative
Digital has effectively made out of home agile. Messages no longer need to be static and unchanging. Now they can be dynamic, data-driven and contextual, reflecting real-world events in real-life environments. Nationwide and even global DOOH campaigns can now easily communicate of-the-moment messages, invite interaction via social channels and be updated in real time, making the media and creative budget work harder.
Although the technology and software is now in place to serve dynamic, real-time campaigns, this is still a relatively nascent creative trend in the US market. However, with recent moves to enable programmatic DOOH media buying, we hope this trend will really start to gain traction in 2016. Early adopters who have been making the most of DOOH’s new agility include retail chain Target which used real-time checkout data to promote popular products across their network of in-store screens. Coca-Cola ran a campaign which allowed users to share photos via the campaign hashtag, #ShareaCoke, and gave them the chance to be featured on Coca-Cola digital billboards in their local area, and FanDuel, the sports gaming company, used city-specific messages with a live countdown to enter fantasy football leagues, and heroed each city’s biggest winners ‘on the big screen’.
Interactive Creative
The digital OOH medium offers a host of interactive functionalities like touch, gesture, face and gender detection, image capture, AR and NFC. Combine this with the development of smartphone technology, social networks and the emergence of the tech-savvy consumer, DOOH can sit comfortably at the heart of an integrated, cross-platform ad strategy.
By using their handsets, once-passive viewers can immediately interact with an ad. A good example of this was MediaPost’s ‘Best in Show’ winner ‘Androidify,’ a Google takeover of the biggest digital billboard in Times Square. The campaign invited users to play with Android characters in a multi-player game or craft their own. The campaign went viral with over 500K characters being created from across 150 countries and generating significant social reach.
Digital Experiential
High impact, standalone executions that create a real buzz amongst users are certainly one of the major trends we’ve seen sweeping the US DOOH landscape this year. Brilliantly disruptive outdoor ideas allow consumers to become part of the campaign in the course of their everyday lives, blurring the lines between the physical and digital world.
Genuinely immersive experiences can be used as a spring board to drive content and discussions online, making DOOH the active component in a multi-layered campaign. Disney Parks provided a great example of this with “Show Your Disney Side,” which took MediaPost’s ‘Best AR’ and ‘Best Mall’ award categories. A storefront façade used to project the shadows of passing shoppers – only those shadows took on the form of Disney mainstays Mickey Mouse, Goofy and others. Footage capturing the reaction of shoppers was shared online where it went on to become the second most shared ad of 2015.
The pace of technological change across the OOH landscape has been phenomenal. Huge investment in the medium has provided creatives with a rich palette of potential. As an industry we now need to ensure that we keep up with the human investment required to make the most of this ever-changing, massively creative medium. The industry needs more “digital” people in order to facilitate the growing ambition of a channel that is flexing its muscles.
Looking ahead to 2016, creative agencies need to take up the gambit and help advertisers to exploit the medium to its full creative potential. To do that we must challenge every brief response with smart digital enhancement and make, smart, dynamic and interactive campaigns an everyday reality. This is an exciting space to be in and we are looking forward to seeing how DOOH creativity evolves over the next 12 months.
www.grandvisual.com
