Zevi Tilles Account Director Grand Visual. Winning an ABBI award for Good Omens 2019
Our US Account Director, Zevi Tilles, shares the awesome year he has had so far since joining the team at Grand Visual.

Zevi Tilles Account Director Grand Visual. Winning an ABBI award for Good Omens 2019

Every year starts with a clean slate. In business, our clean slate is a (relatively) empty spreadsheet, ready to be filled in with activity and results. For me personally, 2019 turned out to be a very special year for a handful of reasons.

Joining the talented and supportive team at Grand Visual and reconnecting with the fast-paced OOH industry has been especially fulfilling. For OOH, 2019 has been a time of explosive growth and evolution. Reports from the OAAA showed that spending in OOH increased by 7.7% year-on-year in Q2 2019, representing the highest rate of quarterly growth since 2007. I believe this is solely down to the affordable and unskippable nature of the medium and its brilliant canvas for creativity.

Before I knew it, it was May and I was jetting out to Las Vegas to attend the OAAA and Geopath’s National Convention & Expo with our CCO Dan Dawson and COO Ben Putland. The conference was buzzing with excitement and anticipation as the industry came together to celebrate the medium. The renaissance and reinvigoration that comes with bigger investment and a greater of total advertising spend was a hot topic of conversation.

Also in May and easily winning my favourite day of the year, was the campaign we did for Amazon’s Good Omens launch. Who else can say that they brought Armageddon to Times Square, one of the industry’s most iconic locations where a staggering 380,000 people pass through each day? 

As the end of the world unfolded in the square, there was magic and excitement in the air. Mother nature was also on our side and even supplied a brief thunderstorm! From this four hour execution, we managed to own a huge 5% of all social conversations during the show’s launch week.

My next highlight for the year came in August when we worked on an awesome project for jetBlue. What a whirlwind of a project, we went from initial briefing to getting the campaign live in just 9 weeks – not bad for a project of this size with huge creative ambition. It was an extremely rewarding project to get across the line. Working with Rapport and Mullenlowe, we produced “Escape the Cape,” a dynamic digital OOH campaign, targeting vacationers stuck in Cape Cod traffic.

The campaign used real-time API’s and JetBlue’s flight schedule to compare Cape Cod driving times to flight times for alternative destinations. The campaign even ran on the side of a mobile billboard on a truck – an industry first!

Zevi Tilles Grand Visual Ben Putland MediaPost Digital OOH Awards

The final highlight of my year has been attending and winning at the OBIEs, ABBIs and MediaPost Awards. It has been great to be recognised by these awards programs for our awesome work on Spider-VerseGoogle Explore and Good Omens. There’s nothing better than being rewarded for the hard work that goes into each digital OOH campaign.

I can honestly say that I always have a smile on my face as I go to work every day and help to entertain consumers during their day-to-day lives, whether it be during the commute or on a shopping trip. I’m proud to work for a company like Grand Visual, who is constantly raising the bar for creativity and globally supporting the growth of digital OOH.

I can confidently predict that 2020 will be a year of impressive creativity and technology.

If you’re looking to craft some stories for digital OOH or you’d just like to find out more about the medium, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

 

Out of home advertising professionals gathered last week in Boca Raton, FL for the TAB/OAAA “ BIG Picture” conference. It was Grand Visual’s 3rd year attending, and it was heartening to see digital, data and technology taking centre stage. Ben & Neil have shared their highlights from this years event.

A Vibrant Canvas

As with most advertising conferences right now, online and ad-blocking featured on the agenda. Gerry Graf, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Barton F Graft 9000 said: “Online is swallowing other media but it can’t swallow Out-of-Home because it can’t replicate the real life experience of OOH.”

A sentiment shared by the creative community – with consensus across the event that OOH is still as big and bold as it’s always been and digital adds a level of agility and richness. Ted Florea of PNYC, discussed OAAA’s “Feel the Real” campaign which “delivered eight different levels and 288 individual creative messages.” A campaign which proved OOH is no longer a one-size-fits-all model and sets of creative assets should work together to create a unified whole.

Change; Building a Team for the Future

It was great to hear solutions for how the industry should navigate as it moves towards a more digital future. Futurist Mike Walsh said: “Young people expect everything in the physical world should work like magic”. Digital has the opportunity to make OOH a truly magical medium for the generations to come. He continued, to prepare for a changing future the question is, “what capabilities in your team will be less relevant in 5 years time? What skills will be absolutely essential?”
An essential consideration as the OOH medium evolves. We need to recognise that functions that have been around for years will be replaced by those enabling new digital capabilities. Holding on to old behaviours will stifle evolution just when we need be nurturing new ways of working.

Making the most of Digital

With available levels of data and digital inventory increasing, it was great to hear the question being asked if we are making the most of these opportunities. Dennis Camlek, Turner Media stated: “Advertisers like digital because it’s easy to target, deploy and report.” Whilst digital solves some problems, it also reveals others with Jennifer Seickel, from OOH Pitch stating “On major digital flights we cannot even get logs or Proof of Play reports within the flight period and when we have contextual or triggered creative reporting becomes even more important”

Whilst targeting is getting better with initiatives by organisations such as Geopath with mobile data, deployment and reporting are still far from “easy”. In order to see best use of the medium, we need to be able to tick the “easy” box on each of those tasks. As we move towards a programmatic future it is essential we get reporting right.

Whist it was great to see digital feature so heavily across the agenda, it was shame that digital campaigns are not yet represented in all categories at the OBIE Awards. Our hope is that next year digital campaigns will infiltrate all categories, and not be confined to one section of the awards programme.

At this years awards GV had a record 4 campaigns shortlisted, and we made off with two OBIES! We took home a Gold for the ‘Oreo Eclipse’ campaign which ran during last year’s solar eclipse in the UK. We were equally delighted to be awarded a Silver OBIE for our ‘Disney Shadows’ campaign. A perfect end to a great conference.

Pepsi MAX Bus Shelter Augmented Reality interactive digital OOH

AMV BBDO & Grand Visual earned a Gold OBIE Award at the Outdoor Advertising Association of America’s (OAAA) 2015 OBIE Awards. We were recognised for our augmented reality Pepsi Max bus shelter in London.

Pepsi MAX unbelievable bus shelter

The OBIE Awards are one of the oldest and most prestigious advertising programs, honouring creative excellence in out of home (OOH) advertising campaigns.

Inspired by the idea that Pepsi Max urges its consumers to push themselves “to the max” and accomplish “unbelievable” feats, AMV BBDO & Grand Visual pushed the boundaries of technical innovation. Augmented reality features were installed in a London bus shelter, and passersby became a part of a truly “unbelievable” experience as the scenery around them was disturbed by flying saucers, wild animals, and other out-of-this-world encounters.

“This bus shelter execution illustrates that OOH has become one of the most engaging, interactive, and innovative media in the world,” said Stephen Freitas, OAAA chief marketing officer. “Through the brilliance of augmented reality, Pepsi Max masterfully disrupted a standard shelter and captured the attention of consumers who passed it.”

The complete list of OBIE winners and finalists can be found at www.obieawards.org.