This week Airbnb kicked off a bright, London-wide digital OOH campaign featuring real local hosts, aiming to encourage people to sign their homes up to the accommodation marketplace.

The smart linear campaign touted the financial benefits and freedoms that being an Airbnb host brings. With creative featuring real people like Dennis, who uses it to afford his jazzy wardrobe. Or Silvia and Matteo who host to help pay for their travels around the world. The campaign capitalises on the summer holidays with people planning trips away from home and provides an alternative to leaving their homes empty.

Depending on the particular digital OOH site, the creative would display suburbs accessible from that station. For example at Waterloo station, you could be asked to become an Airbnb host in Waterloo, Vauxhall, Putney, Clapham, Richmond and Windsor.

As part of a larger campaign, we worked with creative agency Wieden + Kennedy and Media Agency Starcom. Tailoring the creative for digital OOH and localising the creative assets, ensuring they displayed the relevant locations. The campaign will run for eight weeks from the 6th August across DEPs and D6s at selected London stations.

This article first appeared on Contagious on 22nd May 2018.

Ric Albert, creative director at Grand Visual, explains how film studios are raising the bar with exceptionally creative uses of digital outdoor.

Ten years ago, digital out-of-home was in its infancy; a blank canvas yet to be painted with the exciting content we see today. Film marketing was still very much focusing on the traditional channels of TV, print and OOH; video-on-demand and pre-roll ads had only just started to appear. In fact, online was where film marketing first started experimenting creatively. However, as the functionality and scale of Digital OOH has expanded, so too, has the way in which entertainment brands use it.

Fast forward 10 years, and things have changed dramatically. Today, digital inventory has given OOH film campaigns a new lease of life, adding some movie magic to outdoor executions. Now marketeers can run trailers and video content on the street, introduce characters, plot teasers, or run live-action sequences, direct from the film to whet the public’s appetite. Digital OOH has become the ideal advertising channel for the entertainment industry.

Shifting the needle

There’s been experimentation. It started in 2006 with Rocky Balboa running up the first digital escalator panels on London Underground, changing the way we thought about multi-panel creative. It continued with Legend of the Guardians, which saw a campaign pioneering subtle motion on roadside screens, a motion format that’s now an international standard.

In 2011, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 streamed its world premiere live to DOOH screens. Then there was the Jurassic World execution at Waterloo, which combined, traditional OOH, station wraps, Digital OOH and experiential. And a variety of AR and VR activations were used across the world for the release of supernatural horror IT.

There is real momentum to this creative evolution, and advertisers are changing the way they create and use OOH media. From static branding channel to high impact PR vehicle, DOOH now live streams worldwide premieres, provides immersive augmented reality events and delivers iconic treatments tailored for iconic buildings, environments and screen locations. Now OOH can be engaging, immersive, participatory, integrated and scalable.

Scaling interaction

Connecting with film fans on a deeper level is now achievable. Digital OOH offers interaction via a multitude of creative technology solutions. A campaign for Dr Strange opened up live portals between sunny Los Angeles and rainy London, and allowed people to warp the world in front of them. An AR campaign for Batman v Superman allowed participants across several markets to become their favourite superhero. And these aren’t just one-off special builds, we’re seeing interactive campaigns becoming more scalable: it’s now possible to produce engaging, responsive experiences seamlessly across borders and markets.

The digitisation of OOH has also enabled outdoor creative to become firmly embedded in the broader digital strategy, playing a central role in an omnichannel execution. The power of social media and its influence over box office results means that OOH can be a great conduit for driving audiences online, and vice versa. Digital outdoor activations can be crafted to generate shareable content for garnering audiences online.

For the recent launch of season 7 of Game of Thrones, dramatic fan reactions posted on social channels were shared moments later on digital screens across the UK, tapping into the buzz and excitement of the show whilst delivering a powerful UGC endorsement. Interestingly, Digital OOH has also begun to influence other channels, with its content nowadays seen at movie premieres and press junkets, as well as within online banner creative and social feeds.

Digital OOH’s presence and ubiquity in cities around the world is also part of its allure to the film and entertainment industries. Film campaigns demand an international rollout, and as DOOH spend overtakes traditional OOH revenue in markets around the world, this has forced us to change our approach. Nowadays scalability is vital to production processes, so now we use master creative toolkits and flexible creative that can adapt to all the different shapes, sizes, durations, environments and audiences of the screens we’re faced with.

To give you an idea of that scale, in 2017 we delivered over 12,500 files to 52 markets, from Guatemala to Kazakhstan. Localisation and delivery become paramount, as does sophisticated ad-serving technology from QDOT. Now multiple markets can take advantage of a toolkit of creative rather than the traditional siloed approach.

So, what next? It’s undeniable that Digital OOH has become a major marketing channel for film studios and entertainment brands. Moreover, the film industry has become a major driving force for the continued development and evolution of global Digital OOH campaigns.

Now that the production processes have been nailed and the intelligent ad-serving infrastructure is in place, we expect to see truly global campaigns that deliver local relevance become the new standard. Combined with tactical, interactive and cross-channel strategies, the marriage between film marketing and digital OOH looks set to blossom.

Summer is a great time of year to target people with digital OOH advertising, with nearly half of the population becoming more active during spring/summer when the weather gets warmer*.

The good weather has a positive effect on people’s mood and will make people more likely to get involved with interactive campaigns. Take this fun, engaging campaign for Hasbro Monopoly for example.

Summer is also a great time to integrate the warmer weather with a dynamic digital OOH campaign and provide relevant & contextual messages. This campaign for refreshing, cool beverages from McDonald’s, only went live when the temperature rose to a “balmy” 17 degrees.

Of course, it doesn’t need to be dynamic to catch people’s attention. This summer campaign from Tropicana brought sunshine to the stations of London with eye-catching, linear creative.
It’s easy to see why advertisers are using digital OOH in the summer, with more people out and about, it’s the perfect time to be seen.

Sources:
*Talon Generator
OMA Summer
Media Village, Reaching the On-the-Go Consumer in Summer