2012: A Bumper Year for DOOH and a Look Ahead to 2013
Many significant international events converged to make it a great year – kicking off with Euro 2012 then the Queen’s birthday, quickly followed by that small matter of the Olympics. With all eyes turned towards London and the UK this summer, Out of Home media has been a hot bed of creativity as big name advertisers vied for attention amongst the burgeoning crowds in and around the capital.
In the last 12 months we have also seen digital OOH media hit a critical mass made up of quality networks, dedicated media owner facilitation and improved ad serving platforms such as OpenLoop.
All this has helped to fulfil the ideas, appetites and ambition to green light campaigns. The summer saw advertisers such as Nike, BP, Heineken and The Times tap into the national spirit and festival atmosphere by delivering dynamic, real-time, relevant content.
Q3 spending reflects these developments with outdoor revenue up by 25% year-on-year and digital outdoor even higher up by a massive 70%. Digital outdoor accounted for 19.3 per cent of all outdoor spend during the quarter – digital’s biggest-ever proportional contribution.
And from a Grand Visual perspective it’s certainly been a standout year. Here’s just a few of the best bits…
Technology highlights
We launched OpenLoop externally – our digital OOH campaign management dashboard that facilitates dynamic, real-time content across multiple networks and markets.
Agent – Grand Visual’s game changing mobile interaction system for DOOH was unveiled in a campaign for NCDV – where your phone becomes the remote control.
Creative highlights
- Playing our part in the biggest digital billboard campaign in British history for Missing People – powered by OpenLoop
- Phillip Schofield talking about our OpenLoop technology on ITV’s This Morning show!
- Developing the first ever live donation billboard for the MicroLoan Foundation
- Launching the UK’s first SMS-driven interactive billboard for Amex
- Creating the UK’s first mobile controlled digital billboard for NCDV powered by Agent
- Launching the UK’s biggest ever interactive digital OOH campaign for Microsoft powered by OpenLoop
- Collecting our biggest ever awards haul! Along with our agency partners we picked up: 1 x Gold Lion, 1 x Bronze Lion, 2 x Bronze LIA, 4 x Gold Kinsale Sharks, 1 x Bronze Kinsale Shark, 1 x Epica Grand Prix, 1 x Epica Silver to mention a few!
What’s ahead for 2013?
This year, from a digital inventory perspective, the UK will see some major investment in the quality, scale and sheer impact of digitally enabled environments that offer multi faceted interaction.
As the quality of the media continues to evolve we will see is the continued convergence of ambition, budget, facilitation, and creative thinking, and clearer ties between the integration of real world activity with social media support.
Now that digital outdoor networks are fully responsive the ability to interact on a more intimate level will continue to be an important growth area. There are a whole host of new and emerging technologies to pick from and we have been playing with gesture, gender, image recognition, colour picking, AR, mobile and more and we are excited about applying this knowledge to entertaining and innovative campaigns over the next 12 months.
