Grand Visual has produced a large linear DOOH campaign supporting the launch of Disney Life, a subscription based video streaming service in the UK. With a Disney Life membership the whole family can enjoy hundreds of movies, TV shows, books and more from Disney’s unrivalled entertainment portfolio.

Working with Disney, we created master animations and multiple reversions per creative for ad formats in Retail, Roadside, City Centre & Rail environments over the campaign’s 4 week duration. The release of each new campaign creative is scheduled to coincide with the release date of particular content becoming available on the Disney Life app.

The campaign started 19th March and will run until the 20th April across Canary Wharf Media, Clear Channel, Exterion, Forrest, JCDecaux, Maxx Media, Ocean, Outdoor Plus, Primesight, Signature and Storm.

Grand Visual has produced a colourful motion graphics creative to support the launch of the Clinique Pop Artistry lip-gloss and lipstick line.

The motion graphics sequence promotes the new lip lacquers & glazes from Clinique’s Pop Artistry range, and directs consumers to the playwithpop.com interactive website featuring music artist, Zara Larsson.

Grand Visual worked with M2M and Talon Outdoor to produce the colourful DOOH campaign which is currently playing out across JCDecaux, Exterion Media and the iconic Signature Loop screens in Birmingham & Manchester.

When Grand Visual launched over 10 years ago, one of our first campaigns was for Rocky Balboa, and featured Rocky running up the stairs at Tottenham Court Road on the Digital Escalator Panels. Today, we come full circle as we have again produced a Digital Out of Home campaign for the latest film in the Rocky franchise, Creed.

Creed, the 7th film in the series sees Sylvester Stallone once again reprising the role of Rocky Balboa. Released in the UK on January 15th, the film has received critical acclaim with Stallone picking up the Best Supporting Award at this year’s Golden Globes, and a nomination for an Academy Award. The release of Creed comes on the 40 year anniversary of the first Rocky film, which received a similar level of accolades.

The international DOOH creative promoting the film is playing out across 5 countries reflecting the industries increased investment in DOOH as a key advertising channel.

Grand Visual produced the DOOH creative which is being played out across Ocean Outdoor, Clear Channel, JC Decaux & Exterion network in the UK.

Lurpak once again turned to Digital Out of Home to promote their latest product range which includes Lurpak Lightest and Lurpak Olive Oil. The multi-format DOOH campaign went live at the start of January across the JCDecaux rail network.

Drawing from the strong visual imagery of the campaign, we have used subtle motion to animate the Lurpak creative. Now a widely used technique across DOOH in the UK, this campaign demonstrates how ‘subtle motion’ can bring creative to life in a new and beautiful way.

Subtle motion is a technique developed by Grand Visual Digital Director, Ric Albert, as a way to make the creative work harder, whilst being subtle enough to not distract drivers in roadside advertising. The first application of subtle motion came about as a result of a Silver medal win at Ocean’s ‘Art of Out Outdoor’ competition for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and was deployed on their ‘Two Towers’ site.

The campaign creative was supplied by W+K with DOOH production by Grand Visual and deployed across JC Decaux rail sites.

A digital screen displaying Topshop Autumn-Winter campaign creative

This week Topshop launched a nationwide Digital Out-of-Home campaign to promote their highly anticipated 2015 Autumn/Winter season. Fronted by supermodel of the moment Gigi Hadid, the tactical DOOH campaign will appear on digital screens at key shopping areas across London, Glasgow & Manchester.

Ric Albert, Digital Director at Grand Visual says:

“It is an exciting time to work with Topshop who have proven themselves as innovators not afraid of pushing creative & technical boundaries in order to deliver unique experiences for their customers.”

The 2015 Autumn/Winter campaign produced by Grand Visual follows on from a tactical execution produced to support the ‘Playland’ event at Topshop’s Oxford Circus store this past summer.

The Topshop creative is playing out on premium digital sites across the Storm, Ocean Outdoor, Exterion Media, Blow Up Media and Forrest networks for two weeks from the 14th of September, 2015.

By Neil Morris, Founder, Grand Visual

DOOH is delivering intelligent advertising at real scale every day and great progress has taken place over the past 10 years, the same 10 years that Grand Visual has been getting busy. We’re extremely proud of the work we’ve done over that time to break new ground and pioneer the use of creative technology and of execution technique.

So in the spirit of our 10th birthday I’ve pulled together 10 observations about the current state of the industry which I’ve been sharing at various events.

1: THREE REGULAR TYPES OF DOOH HAVE EMERGED

An informal categorisation of campaigns has emerged and there are 3 types:
Linear display – usually animation or live action video or static “spot” played in a loop
Dynamic display – messaging that is feed based or triggered by specific events or updates
Interactive – touchscreen or AR or mobile driven interaction between user and creative

Across the industry these are accepted categories and even if the exact description or terminology varies there is a way to quickly establish what the campaign profile is.

Of course, each type will have different elements and associated potential issues. Linear is relatively simple whilst dynamic will require longer lead times and more testing and QA. Interactive may involve additional hardware and experiential elements.

2: INFRASTRUCTURE VS PEOPLE

We are all clear on the sheer scale of investment that has been put into site development and hardware by media owners but I wonder if that investment has been at the cost of the human infrastructure required to make the most of it.

The skillset and mindset required for digital OOH is different to that of traditional OOH. Either through retraining or new hires the industry needs more “digital” people in order to facilitate the growing ambition for the channel.

3: SCALABLE (GLOBAL) CAMPAIGNS

Other territories are catching up with the UK.

The proliferation of digital inventory across the US, Europe, Australia and the Middle and Far East means that global DOOH campaigns are possible, practical and make sense in terms of leveraging campaign execution budget.

This is a real plus for DOOH as a channel and it’s chances of attracting media budget.

4: SMARTER CREATIVE

Smarter and more dynamic creative should be the norm by now. Tactical and smart creative using data to contextualise messaging and target audiences is not “innovation” and should not go in the “innovation” box.

Posterscope’s excellent recent study into dynamic usage tells us that:

So there is huge “head room” for growing the level of dynamic activity to reach client ambition. To do that we must challenge every brief response with smart digital enhancement and make, dynamic campaigns “everyday” not “special”.

5: CREATIVE AGENCIES ARE KEY INFLUENCERS

Despite creative agencies being key influencers there are some examples of an agency not being as supportive of smarter digital OOH as they, or we, would want.

Successful delivery of “smarter” DOOH really comes down to workflow. The increased effort smarter campaigns require can be difficult for a creative agency to deliver against. Timelines can be short and pressured and these factors must be better communicated. At the same time we must all work together to make using digital OOH easier to engage with.

6: REPORTING IS INEVITABLE

If we want a truly digital medium – one that can offer flexibility, intelligence, speed and relevance – we must embrace a campaign flow that is complex to manage and maintain. Smart campaigns inevitably bring an abundance of permutations from scheduling through to triggers and outcomes.

Stakeholders must have visibility of all of these moving parts as a campaign runs. Monitoring and reporting are key to ensuring a campaign runs correctly, to adjusting a campaign’s profile, to measuring effectiveness against other data sources.

So if we want this truly digital medium, visibility and reporting must come as part and parcel of it.

7: PROPERLY INTEGRATED CAMPAIGNS

As DOOH becomes more “digital” it becomes more agile, it becomes more able to add value to other channels, it becomes richer and it is more able to play its part in a big idea that is carried across multiple channels.

We see it more and more that DOOH can be more than support – it can be an active element in a multi-layered campaign and this is where DOOH’s future lies.

8: ONE TEAM ONE DREAM

Campaigns often require constant updates meaning frequent interface between agency, production and media owner. This is a multi-stakeholder project profile and it fails if we do not work together. Collaboration and cooperation go a long way towards effective campaign delivery.

Out-dated, black and white assumptions of partner roles are counter-productive. One team, one dream people.

9: FEED THE HUNGRY BEAST

We can be happy with the scale and intelligence of DOOH and it’s ability to deliver on audience engagement. But there is a major challenge from the OOH audience in the shape of expectation levels.

People believe and presume that digital media can easily be rich and real-time and entertaining. That means we have to match that with the quality of DOOH campaign work.

We must not disappoint our audience.

10: THE FUTURE OF THE MEDIUM IS IN SAFE HANDS

All areas of the industry (from creative, to planning, to execution and display) are now populated by people who have grown up with DOOH and don’t consider it “new and emerging”.

There are, of course, still people who will stand in the way of progress but sometimes you can’t persuade a dinosaur to get out of your way – you have to wait for it to die.

IN CONCLUSION

So, following an amazing 10 years, where do we go from here?

Albert Einstein said:

“Life is like riding a bike. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”

And that is definitely true for DOOH. To not fall over in a constantly evolving digital media ecosystem we must be active and keep moving.

Last weekend Top Shop transformed their store into a giant playland complete with a huge inflatable store frontage and a giant arcade claw that filled the entire store window. As part of the promotion, Grand Visual produced a fun and tactical DOOH campaign, for the Exterion DEP’s at Oxford Circus Tube Station.

The fun playland creative featured the details of the promotion and directed commuters up the escalators and towards the store entrance on Oxford Street.

From Friday 29 May until Sunday 31 May, shoppers could get involved in a series of activities including a Zoltar ‘fortune teller’ who read the ‘fashion future’, Pac Man and a Penny Pusher fairground games. The store also gave away Slush Puppies, popcorn, candy floss and ice cream sandwiches as part of the promotion.

Talon and Grand Visual have delivered on a real time reproduction of the solar eclipse using Digital Out of Home screens around the UK in association with Oreo.

The creative ran for two hours, from 8:25am-10:40am on Friday morning (20th March) to coincide with the partial solar eclipse seen across the UK, matching the trajectory of the eclipse in real time.

The campaign is a collaboration between Talon and Grand Visual and provides a unique opportunity to showcase the tactical and real time opportunities within Digital Out of Home.

The partnership includes media owners Storm, Outdoor Plus and Forrest Media with brand partners PHD and Mondelez. The campaign will feature the hashtag #OreoEclipse.

Richard Simkins, Innovations Director at Talon explains

“We often talk about how data can improve the targeting of OOH campaigns. With #OreoEclipse we used astronomical data to build a wonderfully simple campaign only matched by the wonder of the solar eclipse itself.  We have created a domination opportunity on multiple Digital Out of Home screens for the duration of the entire eclipse. This has created a unique opportunity for Oreo to entertain people with a wonderfully creative ad, delivered in real-time, that was literally out of this world.”

Jeremy Taylor, Account Director at Grand Visual adds,

“The Digital OOH canvas is a fantastic home for both rich content and being smarter with context, timing and location. This execution mirrors the exact timings and trajectory of the eclipse, which allows for Oreo to position their brand in a playful and creative manner but with an added layer of intelligence.”

The eclipse was seen in real time on Digital Out of Home screens, without the need for a special apparatus, in the following locations:

“Click Here” to view a time-lapse of the event at Piccadilly.

Jupiter Ascending is a 2015 American Sci-Fi film written, produced, and directed by the Wachowski brothers. Starring Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis, the film is centered on Jupiter Jones (Kunis), a down-on-her-luck cleaning woman, and Caine Wise (Tatum), an interplanetary warrior who informs Jones that her destiny extends beyond Earth.

The films release was supported with a DOOH campaign that extended across Ireland, Lebanon, Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden, Mexico, Slovenija, Russia, Slovakia, Argentina, Germany, and Asia. Creative execution had two formats and featured animated artwork and an embedded trailer of the movie.

A photo o the Red Bull Air Race creative in situ at Waterloo

Ascot Racecourse was the venue for the UK leg of the Red Bull Air Race on August 16th and 17th. As befits the “fastest, most demanding race on Earth” creative agency Y&R turned to the UK’s largest indoor advertising screen — JCDecaux’s Motion@Waterloo.

After a three year break the Red Bull Air Race returned better than ever with twelve elite pilots, including the defending World Champion, Briton Paul Bonhomme, in competition. Over the weekend, the daring pilots raced around low altitude courses between high pillars, or “Air Gates” in what is recognised as one of the fastest and most exhilarating of extreme sports. The final results saw a Brit one-two with Paul Bonhomme and Nigel Lamb taking the top two spots, followed by Frenchman, Nicolas Ivanoff and Germany’s Matthias Dolderer.

The Motion@Waterloo creative featured footage from the daredevil race and the public was encouraged to either visit the event at Ascot, or view it live on Sky Sports.

Creative was overseen by Y&R, with digital production by Grand Visual. Media was planned and booked by Talon.