To inspire and excite the ad industry about the power of OOH, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) and its members have initiated a national OOH campaign, to prove its value and significance in today’s digital world. Running across more than 50,000 OOH sites, #GetOutOfHome includes 27 digital screen networks, in 30 major US markets, over the coming weeks.

Touting the value of OOH as a great media amplifier, the campaign, created by Publicis New York, features ad industry icons, young creative thinkers and social media influencers. To encourage attendees of Advertising Week NY (October 1-4) to engage in the conversation, a real-time digital OOH campaign will run as part of the activity using the hashtag #GetOutOfHome.

Produced by Grand Visual, the dynamic creative will include live commentary, tweets, and Instagram posts published direct to digital screens across New York City. OpenLoop, the real-time campaign management and distribution platform from ad tech provider, QDOT, will deliver the live commentary and buzz from Advertising Week’s online social engagement to screens across NYC in a showcase that highlights the medium’s flexibility and relevance.

“Today’s advertising creatives and media planners grew up with the internet in the palm of their hands; they get digital media and push it forward,” said Stephen Freitas, OAAA’s chief marketing officer. “We want to show them some ideas are too big to stay trapped online. Bold ideas need a bold platform.”

Ben Putland, MD of QDOT, said: “The technology and ad tech systems are now in place to make the delivery of real-time creative across multiple digital OOH networks seamless. Flexible, contextual messages complement the broader static campaign whilst responding to social triggers and encouraging people to participate online.”

Josh Horn, Creative Director, Publicis New York, commented, “OOH has become the ultimate stage for brands to get their message seen. It’s contextual, measurable and responsive. We wanted to celebrate its power to amplify today’s best campaigns.”

For the past 14 years, Advertising Week has brought together industry professionals in New York City to discuss marketing, branding, technology and the evolution of the industry.

This year’s seminars and workshops touched on all the hot topics including native ads, programmatic, data and mobile, leadership, transparency and the role of politics in our world. Across all discussions, a huge emphasis was made on how the broader advertising
industry continues to use an innovative and tailored approach to address these subjects.

Extended and Embedded Models

With new players continuing to be introduced, the role of CMOs must evolve to remain relevant in their respective businesses. As a result, more teams from across the creative landscape are beginning to cozy up to the idea of sitting within the client’s team or at their partner’s spaces, to facilitate efficiency on joint projects. The experimental mindset is growing and the model of extended teams is being embraced and improving results for clients.

Clients have different needs and the advertising ecosystem is continuing to evolve and grow to meet those needs. In the session An Uncomfortable Conversation with CMOs, Angela Ceccarelli, Vice President, Marketing, HSBC said “Marketers need to be orchestrators and not conductors; they need to leverage their staff, partners and loyalists.”

Connected Screens

Another interesting theme emerging throughout the week was the evolution of connections between the digital and physical worlds. Consumers only perceive one connected world, therefore you shouldn’t have separate online and offline strategies, you should have one overarching strategy that touches all elements within the consumer’s journey.

As technology and digital solutions continue to evolve, it’s interesting to see how advertisers are aligning marketing objectives across different devices and locations. There’s a certain excitement around treating offline the same way we treat online. What does programmatic outdoor look like? What does search in a physical environment imply?

Outdoor Solutions

During the session, When Programmatic Buying Gets Placement Right, Nathan Eide, Director, Media Technology & Innovation, FRWD, enthusiastically shared his experience with programmatic digital OOH for one of their biggest clients; a top national retailer. Programmatic buying, and the right location and data partners meant that they could identify and track individuals – meaning that for the first time they were able to measure the client’s ROI down to the dollar.

Modern Convergence

As consumers constantly change and absorb content in different ways, agencies need to feel equally comfortable with outsourcing to specialists that create content and other connected solutions in different ways as well.

At the end of the day, we all need to learn how to collaborate in this ever-changing playground. It’s important to play nice in your client’s roster and educate your partners on what you do best (and vice-versa). This will help you deliver beyond your scope, and clients are expecting you to do so.

As Winston Binch Chief Digital Officer, Deutsch NA, wisely said “Meet the ask, but bring the need.” The digital capabilities are out there, it’s time to partner up and move the industry forward.

*Article first appeared on Exchange Wire 21st November, 2016

In the last ten days I’ve travelled extensively by plane, train, automobile and bike. I’ve been to four states, on both coasts, and encountered thousands of adverts. These ads were not viewed on my laptop thanks to an ad blocker, nor on my phone where I run very few free apps, and I didn’t see them on TV thanks to the fast forward button on my DVR.

What I’ve seen are thousands of Out of Home (OOH) ads both print and digital. This may not surprise you given that the US is the world’s largest OOH advertising market, by revenue. Impressive digital OOH (DOOH) growth continues to buoy the sector and is set to capture 53% of total US OOH ad spend by 2018, according to eMarketer.

But, as I travelled about, I got a nagging sense that the creative evolution of the medium has not kept apace with the technological advancements, and that brands are not making the most of the mediums fully expanded digital feature set now on offer.

NYC – the Digital Theatre
Back in New York City, my home for the last three years, the pace of change across the DOOH landscape is breathtaking. Driven by significant investment in the realm of nine figures, NYC is by far the most valuable OOH market in the US. Its population density and extensive public transport network, make it an atypical American city, and the scale of investment going into the city’s DOOH architecture is a testament to this.

The opportunity to turn the whole of Manhattan into a digital theatre, where a brand can tell it’s story, will soon be the biggest and best opportunity in the world. Consider what’s already there; The New York City Subway is at the forefront of the US’ transition to DOOH formats. Screens are ubiquitous across the networks platforms and stations, providing essential customer information and offering high value display advertising.

The Westfield World Trade Center recently opened with a single screen that’s over 280 feet long in addition to the rest of their downtown “DOOH District”. Intersection’s LinkNYC has new kiosks popping up everyday and with free Wi-Fi usage now surpassing 576,000 people, and still growing. Outfront have their Hudson Yard network, JCDecaux are adding more digital transit shelters to their network and other large format displays are constantly appearing.

The digital inventory is there, as well as addressability through platforms such as OpenLoop. When you combine this with the additional plug-in features such as WIFI, multi-screen synchronization, full motion, geofencing, mobile and social integration, live feeds, closed networks, and multiple attribution methods, it is clear the advertiser has a huge choice before them.

Embrace the Technology
Going beyond DOOH’s impressive broadcast capability, the infrastructure is now there to facilitate smarter more intelligent communication. It’s a much richer canvas on which to tell brands stories. Dynamic, interactive, and data-driven campaigns, reflecting real-world events in real-life environments are now possible. For advertisers looking to make a splash in NYC, it means you can connect with consumers via multiple formats, touchpoints and technologies during the course of their day.

As data becomes increasingly important there is a real opportunity to harness the ‘Context Effect’, where dynamic and locally relevant conditions can inform and drive content and supercharge campaign effectiveness. With its public, high-impact presence, DOOH is perfect for Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) and the medium deserves a fresh and engaging creative approach that resonates with context and audience mindset.

Programmatically informed creative is already making in-roads in the US. Earlier this year Amazon launched a people-powered DOOH campaign for Catastrophe, inviting the public to tweet in their favourite themes from the series, like #Sex or #Romance. A live poll mechanism then delivered trailers tailored to audience preference, continually adapting and changing over the course of the campaign according to audience interests.

Google Play Music took this a step further when it delivered the first programmatically informed DOOH campaign to span four States and multiple media vendors. The initiative saw premium roadside and city centre screens behaving in a similar way to the music app – offering perfect soundtracks based on the consumer’s mind-set in that moment.

The campaign used multiple triggers including real-time traffic data, weather, location and time of day and OpenLoop delivered the contextually relevant playlists. Suggestions included Classic Rock Wake Up Call during the hectic morning rush-hour in Chicago, The Overcast Feeling on a cloudy day, or Hot Miami Nights: Latin House on a clear Friday night in the sunshine state.

Whilst it’s not surprising that heavy weight digital brands like Google and Amazon are leading the way with smarter dynamically optimised DOOH campaigns, the same benefits can be leveraged by any brand. The scale of investments being made in DOOH infrastructure in NYC mean that this is not a medium for only the brave; the risks are low and the rewards are high. Now is the time to embrace the technology and the burgeoning opportunities that make DOOH such an exciting space to work in.

The Brave New Advertiser
DOOH has the potential to play an integral role in NYC’s modern, WIFI enabled “smart city” infrastructure. But, navigating this increasingly complex landscape, and making it all work together with brilliant creative is an artform in itself. Whilst landmark campaigns from Google Play and Amazon will help to spur the market on to thinking more about DOOH as a smart, real time, data driven medium, at present, DCO campaigns remain the exception rather than the rule.

It’s time to tear up the traditional outdoor creative handbook and embrace the brave new world of DOOH – it’s a new way of thinking. Creative agencies are best placed to drive the growth and adoption of this brave new world of DOOH, alongside production specialists and media owners who can provide the insight and know-how to handle the nuances of the medium.

One of the first important steps is prioritising your data strategy over your creative one. From a creative perspective, we can access an enormous amount of data to contextualise copy. There’s location data, 3rd party data and brand owned data including pricing, stock levels, retail stores. Through these layers of data, we can exploit the ‘Context Effect’ – providing dynamic, data-driven and locally relevant information.

To realise DOOH’s true creative potential the industry needs to adopt a new cohesive approach to working – based on a frequent interface between agencies, production house and media owners. More broadly, the market needs to attract those from a digital background, whose expertise will help to boost new creative ways of working. The most successful projects feature true collaboration with all stakeholders working together.

Looking ahead to 2017
Digital OOH, plays a key role in creating exciting, modern and memorable cityscapes. Nowhere is this more visible than in NYC, where the medium continues to evolve at breakneck speed with a sophisticated, world-leading DOOH infrastructure in place.

Now is the time to make NYC a leading light for creative excellence. To do this we must embrace a new collaborative way of working, and we must challenge every brief response with smart digital enhancements. Only then can we drive creative standards and help spur the medium onto a more dynamic reactive, and relevant future – a future which will see the city’s agencies topping the leaderboards of outdoor advertising award programmes around the world.

Branded Cities and Grand Visual have teamed up to create a dynamic DOOH campaign targeting creative agencies, media buying agencies and advertisers attending Adweek in New York, 29th September to 3rd October.

The campaign will run 40 times per day throughout Adweek on Branded Cities’ Nasdaq and Thomson Reuter’s digital sites in Times Square. It will feature a call to action for Adweek attendees to submit either an Adweek selfie, or text an update including their name, agency and #BCNAdweek. Submissions will appear instantaneously on the sites demonstrating the power of large format digital for social and interactive campaigns.

The agency with the most participants over the week will be rewarded with campaign space for themselves or their clients to use. They will also be featured as a winner on the boards themselves, giving the winning agency valuable exposure and highlighting the powerful reach of the sites.

Grand Visual, which opened in New York earlier this year, created the “live” feed updates via its OpenLoop management dashboard. This technology allows real time social interaction and showcases the OOH medium as the perfect vehicle for an interactive/social campaign.

Tim Kennedy, President, Eastern Region for Branded Cities Network said: “This campaign will show off the brilliance and interactive/full motion capabilities of the Nasdaq and Thomson Reuter’s digital screens. We’re looking forward to seeing how Adweek responds and to sharing the results.”

Ben Putland, COO of Grand Visual said: “We were delighted to be able to work with Branded Cities to deliver a campaign that will allow a huge number of people to get involved and, potentially win a fantastic prize. It is also a chance for us to show our target audience how our OpenLoop technology can be a hugely useful tool in creating immediate impact for an OOH campaign.”

Click here to download a PDF of the press release.
Click here to download a Word format version of the press release.

July saw the launch of Grand Visual’s New York office. The initiative brings our unique, award winning creative services and technology to the US out of home advertising market.

Ben Putland, previously Production Director has relocated from London to head up the office – and has been bumped up to COO.

Jennifer Bolnick, has been recruited as Account Director for Grand Visual NY. With over 16 years working in New York planning, buying and selling OOH media, she has a comprehensive background in OOH innovation through work for MediaCom, Kinetic and on direct sales for Outcast and General Growth Properties.

Joining Ben and Jennifer is senior producer, Rebecca Jean Louis.

Neil Morris, Founder of Grand Visual said, “This is a natural next step for the company, we have been servicing US clients from the UK office for the last few years. With a strong leadership team in place to guide the new office we are excited to begin this next chapter.”

Ben Putland added: “Clients are challenged today by the variety and complexity of Digital OOH communication opportunities. With our unrivalled experience in DOOH production together with our bespoke platforms and technology, we can help clients and their agencies to be more agile in overcoming the challenges and exploiting the medium to its full creative potential.”