What makes an unforgettable OOH campaign?
By Glen Wilson | The first job, as with any advertising, is to be noticeable and then to live long in the memory so that the long-term brand building effects will be maximised and therefore so will its effectiveness.
It’s arguably easier to be unforgettable in OOH than it is in in other channels; it can’t be skipped or ignored and isn’t competing with thousands of other ad placements…or making a cup of tea!
Creative has been consistently shown to be the most important factor in driving ROI in any channel, by up to 47% according to a study by Analytic partners. This is probably truer in OOH than most, where there is no editorial or programming context.
That said, creativity, with a small c, has many dimensions and the most unforgettable campaigns will usually get the majority of these right.
Let’s unpack these further.
Design & Messaging
Beyond the creative ‘idea’ and how this connects emotionally with the audience, great OOH ads need to cut through on a very practical level. The average duration of view for an average OOH location is around 2 seconds, and within this time frame, there are some best practices that just make an ad more noticeable.
A lot of these are common sense and intuitively known to us however, recent work by System 1, Lumen and JC Decaux has more specifically codified these and their relative importance to effective OOH communications:
Keep it simple – no more than 3 sections as people can’t take in more within the average viewing window.
Brand position – ensure the brand is prominent – logos at the top deliver +32% brand recall.
Drive familiarity – consistent and distinct brand colours help brand recall e.g. the purple of Cadbury.
Fluent devices – or distinctive brand assets e.g. characters, can make an ad 1/3rd more effective but could equally be familiar packaging or typography.
Human faces – human nature is that we tend to notice faces more. Animals are also good and dogs are even better!
Product images – make them bigger; product shots that take up >50% of the space deliver 38% more attention.
Short copy – more than 10 words means people are 30% less likely to remember who you are.
Call to action – the bigger the better; doubling the CTA doubles the dwell.
Audience understanding
OOH is THE broadcast medium with a long-standing ability to reach significant proportions of a population. With fragmentation of other classically broadcast channels, such as TV, in many markets the reach of OOH now surpasses every other channel. The now industry enshrined work of Binet & Field and Byron Sharp shows that reach is also a significant contributor to effectiveness; the higher the reach, the more effective.
This conclusion was somewhat of a counter argument to many years of industry obsession with hyper targeting and personalisation. OOH has never been a one-to-one medium but advances in the availability and application of geographical behavioural data have enabled planners to identify macro-geographies where the influence of particular messaging is likely to be more effective.
The ability of, more often mobile derived, data to describe a ‘mass of niches’ is now commonplace in OOH planning. This behavioural data, where a planner can append audience data with a rich understanding of over indexing propensity, reveals the hidden power of location. In the past it would have just been inferred by physical proximity e.g. close to retail = more relevant for FMCG.
Technological Innovation
Digitisation in OOH has vastly improved the creative pallet of techniques that can be used to make ads more noticeable and memorable. Some of these include:
Localised creative - ads tend to be more noticeable if they feature some element that relates to where they are seen e.g. the town or city. With digital OOH multiple creatives are entirely feasible with little incremental production cost.
Full motion - possible in many locations but often under-utilised.
Anthropomorphic - 3D techniques that have a surprise and delight factor that, in particular, drives amplification on social channels.
Dynamic Creative - content that responds to triggers such as weather, traffic, pollen counts etc. etc. Again, under-utilised but has been shown to drive up to a 17% uplift in ROI, according to the Posterscope/JC Decaux Moments of Truth study.
OOH Locations
Sometimes individual locations themselves are so noticeable, and even famous, that it confers some of those qualities on the brands that show up there.
There are many famous OOH locations around the world, such as Piccadilly Circus in London and Times Square in New York. Research on the Piccadilly Lights iconic digital screen showed how this fame translates to social amplification, in that there was an 87% increase in ‘lean-in’ for social posts which had been primed by appearing here.
These types of locations are scarce and difficult to access for anyone but incumbent media owners, due to very long-term agreements.
Plan B is one of the largest publicly listed OOH media company in Southeast Asia based in Thailand with a market leading inventory of large-scale digital LED advertising screens.
Plan B approached OOH Capital to help them secure advertising assets in Times Square, New York, a seemingly impossible task.
We brokered a unique and groundbreaking deal with both OUTFRONT Media and New Tradition, both leading USA OOH business, providing Plan B with share-of-voice access to the screens on both Times Square Tower 1 and Times Square Tower 2.