AA Roadside DOOH
To celebrate the return of being back on the road after a long period of restricted travel, The AA has parodied a famous ad for electronics brand Maxwell as the UK eases out of lockdown.

Created by Adam & Eve/DDB and produced by Grand Visual, the OOH campaign creative features Tukker the dog, sitting with the wind its hair to replicate the freedom of sticking its head out of a moving car. 

AA Roadside DOOH

The large format DOOH campaign will play out nationally on JCDecaux and Ocean Outdoor sites, and will feature a contextual shout out to each city it runs in.  

The OOH element will run as part of a wider campaign alongside television, digital and radio, as well as a partnership with Spotify on sponsored road trip playlists. 

AA Roadside DOOH

Produced by Grand Visual, with planning and buying by Goodstuff and Talon Outdoor, the campaign will run from 20th July to 2nd August 2020.

Ad Club New York OOH Now 2019
Zevi Tilles, Account Director, shares his thoughts and feedback from last weeks Ad Club of New York’s annual Conference, OOH Now 2019.

Every year, I look forward to attending The AD Club of New York’s end of year conference. Getting to Pier 60 by the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan in December is a cold trip. However, once inside I’m always reminded of why the event is worth travelling to.

This year was no exception, and it was better than ever. The agenda centered around how data, technology, creativity, and the experience of OOH specialist teams, are leading growth and expansion across the industry. The view presented at the event promoted more focus on digital OOH and how the medium should move to utilize real-time triggers from time of day or weather to dynamic creative optimization at a greater scale. We also heard from brands using ad tech solutions that are giving their planners the ability to find locations where their audience over indexes and that allows them to optimize their digital OOH plans and creative accordingly, to drive contextual relevance and impact by using real-time conditions. 

There was an amazing session on THE CREATIVE CANVAS led by Dan Brill, Group Creative Director, Spotify, Travis Sterner, Director of Media, United Artists Releasing, Robin Tilotta, Director of Consumer Marketing, Twitter and Paul Woolmington, CEO, Canvas Worldwide. It was moderated by, Ed Herty, National Creative Director, Outfront Media. The panel was in agreement, creative storytelling is now informing the buy. Advertisers are looking to make DOOH interactive, contextual, and they want to personalize their messages to specific audiences based on time of day and in the moments that matter to the viewer. This was exactly the sentiment I was hoping for and it was coming directly from the brands! This is the type of ambition that will lead our channel to new heights in 2020.

The MEDIA BUYER SPOTLIGHT featuring: Andrew Weinstein, Manager, Rapport Worldwide, Fatima Winfrey, Group Director, OOH, Horizon Media, led me to believe that the agencies were coming to the same conclusions. Better creative and smarter standards drive superior outcomes.

Throughout the day, a recurring theme was discussed by the speakers. The sentiment being, OOH faces challenges as it moves towards a programmatic future, and how we collectively handle them will have an important impact in our industry. Particularly as omnichannel platforms are moving into digital OOH. It was highlighted that we need to make sure there is consistency in how impressions are reported. For digital OOH there needs to be independent third-party verification of campaign playout, including interactions and other campaign-specific metrics. We must provide advertisers with a level of transparency and accountability, to realize the full potential of programmatic digital OOH. 

Furthermore, advertisers and agencies need better workflow tools for the management and trafficking of digital OOH campaigns. These tools should be dedicated to quality assurance, distribution, and auditing of digital OOH creative. This will, in turn, accelerate the path from creative producers to media owners simplifying the management and delivery of DOOH creative across networks and platforms. 

In conclusion, a digital-first OOH mindset and added experiences through touch, gesture, recognition, mobile, social and experiential have marketers and brands excited! They are spending more time, measuring the outcomes, and investing more budget into the channel. 

I can’t wait to see what happens as we transition to the next decade for OOH in 2020!

 

IG London Commuters DOOH
Today, IG, the leading UK-based financial trading company, has launched a digital Out of Home (DOOH) branding channel to bring breaking news to commuters in the city.

A DOOH media first for the financial sector, this long-term initiative is booked to run on JCDecaux’s Motion@TheCity network until 27th April 2020 inclusive.

Produced by Grand Visual, IG’s financial news channel will stream breaking news stories and images from the company’s website alongside branding pieces to large-format screens in the heart of the city’s financial district including Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street, Cannon Street, London Blackfriars, and City Thameslink.

The targeted DOOH activity was planned and booked by JAA Media and Talon and supports a broader OOH campaign including ECN’s workplace network. Campaign management and dynamic delivery is handled via OpenLoop, the Dynamic Creative Optimisation platform from ad tech specialist QDOT. The OOH drive is part of a wider campaign planned and booked by JAA Media.

Elaine Bramall, UK Senior Marketing Manager at IG, said: “DOOH is the perfect channel for IG to bring targeted news to the heart of London’s financial district. Dynamic updates keep content fresh and engaging so it remains relevant throughout the campaign duration.”

 

Ric Albert, Creative Director at Grand Visual, said: “DOOH is the perfect medium for IG to deliver up-to-date news and insight direct to commuters in London’s financial district. The DOOH activity is intelligent, dynamic, and seamlessly integrated with the broader campaign.”

 

James Sibree, Account Director, JAA Media, said: “This campaign is the result of a close collaborative team of agencies and the outcome is a fully integrated digital Out of Home campaign that emulates the content and display partnerships IG have across key press titles in a campaign that reaches audiences at home, at work, and on the go.”

Pepsi Max interactive digital OOH
OOH on its own is an incredibly strong advertising medium, however, when used in conjunction with other channels it’s been proven to extend the reach and effectiveness of a campaign.

Consumers today spend 70% of their time outside of their homes making out-of-home (OOH) advertising a prime channel for reaching your target audience. With a low CPM and high ROI, what’s not to love about the traditional channel?

OOH & Online Ads

You might think of these two advertising mediums as occupying two completely different worlds – one physical and one in cyberspace. But with 27% of our year spent online, both mediums actually do a pretty similar job of catching us in our everyday lives.

When OOH is combined with online ads, brands can elevate the effectiveness of their overall campaign by 31% and increase the overall reach by 68%. Used together as part of the marketing mix, these two channels thrive.

OOH & Mobile

Did you know there are more mobile phones in the world than there are people? We’re clearly obsessed with our handsets. So what happens when a relatively new channel like mobile is combined with a traditional channel like OOH?

According to recent studies, when OOH is combined with mobile it can increase a mobile campaign’s reach by 316%.

McDOnald's Waze Mobile and OOH Geofencing

A great example of OOH working well with mobile comes from McDonald’s in the US. They utilised mobile geofencing to retarget audiences through Waze (a GPS navigation software app). Displaying the same billboard creative within the app, as they were in close proximity to an outdoor ad. This approach saw McDonald’s earn 6.4 million mobile impressions and 1.9 million unique consumers in 8 weeks.

OOH & Social Media

With 45% of the total world population using social media, social is one of the most effective channels for targeting audiences. In its simplest form, the combination of OOH with Social Media could just be a hashtag on a billboard, however, there is a multitude of ways that these channels can work to complement each other.

In 2014, Pepsi Max launched “Unbelievable,” a campaign that beautifully combined digital OOH (DOOH) with Social Media. Featuring an Augmented Reality DOOH stunt, the brand earned over 50 million views online, as well as news coverage and countless awards.

When OOH is combined with Social Media, it amplifies and extends the reach of a campaign from a physical to a digital level. Results from Talon’s 4th space research saw a 48% increase in consumer action when digital OOH was added to a social plan.

OOH is a great amplifier, and when added to your marketing mix as part of a comprehensive strategy, increases campaign performance.

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-Verse,  Google 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.

 

Escape the cape roadside DOOH News
Welcome back to our DOOH News for September 2019. This month we’ve been exploring Gen Z’s feelings on OOH, we produced a fantastic dynamic campaign for jetBlue and we went behind the scenes of digital OOH production. Enjoy!
This month… we ‘Escaped the Cape’ with jetBlue! ✈️

jetBlue airlines targeted vacationers driving to Cape Cod with this roadside digital OOH campaign. The dynamic campaign encouraged vacationers to explore different vacation destinations with similar travel times.

In other news…

Gen Z Digital OOH Hyundai BTS DOOH News

Grand Visual’s very own Gen Z’er Charlotte, explores the power of Gen Z and digital OOH. 

 

Google Pixel 3 Retail DOOH News

The busiest quarter of the year is just getting started! Here are our top tips on how to prepare your digital OOH for the busiest period in retail.

DOOH News Adam Stephenson Production

Ever wanted to see behind the scenes at Grand Visual? Adam our producer gives us a peek into the life of digital OOH production.

With our latest promo for Google, we highlighted the data triggers used to ‘Make the Most of Summer!’

DOOH news OreoEclipse

For this month’s insights, we discussed how food & beverage brands can connect with consumers through digital OOH.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our DOOH News for September 2019. If you would like to start receiving our monthly DOOH Newsletters in your mailbox, then please sign up here.

Voice activation creative technology testing for digital OOH. Grand Visual.
We’re always trying to learn new things and experiment with new technologies. Often projects come about by a question being asked that we don’t know the answer to. Our latest project stemmed from such a question, will voice activation work for OOH?

Voice recognition/activation is a technology that is growing exponentially. According to ComScore, 50% of all searches will be completed via voice by 2020. That’s a figure that becomes less surprising as time moves on and more people have an Alexa or Google Home. With voice commands seamlessly assisting with the day to day running of households, why wouldn’t it be able to be used in OOH as well?

To find out how possible it is, we thought we should start by buying a few different types of microphones to test what was going to be the most suitable in the OOH environment. We opted for two little mics, one stage and one shotgun mic. We thought this would provide a decent range of sizes and multi-directional options to at least give us a starting point.

The actual process for testing a microphone isn’t remarkably scientific. Our creative technologist Jon Jones attached various mics to an easyVR module for testing. And by attaching, it is literally getting the old soldering iron out and sticking the parts together. Then someone stands a metre or so away from it to see whether easyVR can understand what they’re saying without being affected by irrelevant noises.

We found that while the easyVR module was trainable to a particular voice, it would struggle to accurately understand the same phrase being said by someone else. As it’s primarily designed as a hobbyist item, we had to explore different software options for speech recognition. Writing some software to interface with Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive voice services proved hugely successful and accurate in transcribing what a user was saying.

In our tests, we found that all of the microphones performed well but the directional shotgun mic gave us the greatest flexibility, but being realistic, it wouldn’t be practical for digital OOH. We would likely need something much smaller and more compact, that could deliver us the same accuracy with results.

We decided to see how far we could push the compactness of the microphone and invested in a small USB lapel mic, which would be perfect for hiding in a digital OOH installation. A couple of test trips down Regent Street and at bus stops later … Success! This combination of hardware and software was performing brilliantly.

With the mic sorted, the next phase was training the AI to recognise what people are trying to say. People generally veer away from the script if the question is too vague or open-ended.

Entering a bit more code enabled us to not only hear what a user was saying but also understanding, in-depth, the meaning and intent of what they were saying. For example, saying “I’m hungry” or “What’s for lunch?” has the same intent – it’s a request to find somewhere to eat. With voice activation/detection in OOH, simplicity is the key, so minimise the options available as potential answers or actions.

To train the device, we had our colleagues talk to the computer and answer the set question. We ended up with some rather rogue responses… But it was all a learning curve and really reinforced the need to ask simple questions that couldn’t be misinterpreted.

Overall it’s been an incredibly interesting project, and certainly the potential for bringing voice activation to digital out of home is there. It will be exciting to see how voice technology evolves and becomes a more prominent feature in people’s lives.

This month, the topic is “food, glorious food” and how food and beverage brands can connect with consumers through meaningful digital OOH.

With Pumpkin Spice season officially here, many consumers are already starting to plan for their holiday feasts. According to research from Deloitte, 82% of these consumers’ feasts will be influenced by promotional offers. So in the messy food fight for seasonal sales, how do great brands stay relevant and cut through the noise?

Food and Digital OOH

With consumers on high alert for the best deals, digital OOH has the ability to engage these consumers on-location and at a personal level. Here are some food and beverage brands who used digital OOH to showcase their product in eye-catching and engaging ways.

Oreo

Oreo leveraged the biggest solar eclipse in over a decade with this incredibly clever linear, digital OOH campaign.

McDonald’s

McDonald’s celebrated its iconic Big Mac with this innovative, interactive digital OOH stunt.

Walker’s

Here’s an interactive campaign we produced for the famous chip brand to entertain shoppers and give them the chance to win a vacation!

Volvic

Volvic launched this campaign in a busy mall, encouraging shoppers to “get juiced” for the chance to win refreshing prizes.

Want to discuss your upcoming digital OOH plans? Get in touch!

As Grand Visual’s resident Gen Z’er, Digital Marketing Apprentice, Charlotte Jones explores the power of Gen Z and digital OOH.

You wouldn’t be wrong to think that Gen Z came into the world with an iPhone in one hand and a MacBook in the other. We basically did. Born between 1995 and 2015, we’ve seen mobile phones go from this funny old Nokia to this technicolour dream…

Basically, a lot can change in 20 years.

As a generation obsessed with technology (not our fault btw), it surprised me to discover that 55% of Gen Z’ers favour OOH advertising because “it’s relaxing.” Theoretically, wouldn’t it make more sense to prefer online ads, given we’re life-long internet junkies?

According to another study, around 82% of Gen Z’ers are actually skipping online ads – and to be honest I’m not really that shocked, given how annoying they can be… So as a generation who regularly skip ads, why do we prefer OOH – a medium that we can’t skip?

I think Gen Z are drawn to billboards because digital OOH isn’t intrusive. It doesn’t pop up every time we watch a YouTube video or use the internet. We can choose to look at it or choose to ignore it. Plus it doesn’t know everything about us. It may be able to direct us to the nearest shop or inform us about the local weather, but it doesn’t know personal details like where we live or our online search history.

Digital OOH also makes for great social content. Seeing your favourite celebrity, on an enormous screen in a location as iconic as Times Square definitely calls for a picture or social post, doesn’t it? Also, have you ever seen somebody post a picture in front of an internet ad? No, that would be totally uncool.

Here are a few of my favourite examples of digital OOH campaigns which have gained massive Gen Z traction.

Netflix: Stranger Things 3

For one of Gen Z’s favourite, “bingeable” TV shows, Netflix decided to choose digital OOH to target the ad-blocking generation. With huge billboards in iconic locations such as Times Square, the campaign earned huge traction across social media; with fans snapping selfies and one fan even tweeting how “big” the show must be because of its Times Square billboards.

Little Mix

With over 30 million followers on their combined social media accounts, you could say that the British girl band Little Mix are popular! In fact, they’re so popular that over the Summer their US fans bought them a billboard in Times Square to promote their latest single. They used the ad to catch the girls’ attention online… which they did!

Hyundai X BTS

Personally, I’m not too keen on BTS but I cannot deny that their influence on Gen Z is anything short of phenomenal! In May 2019, the latest Hyundai X BTS advert premiered on the iconic digital OOH site, Piccadilly Lights. 

Hundreds of fans gathered around the famous London landmark to get a glimpse of the campaign. Photos and videos from the reveal were posted to social media, accumulating thousands of interactions from fans worldwide.

If you compare the BTS premiere to the Lights’ first-ever live stream from Victoria Beckham last year, the results are clearly visible. 

BTS:

Victoria Beckham:

Whenever Gen Z is involved, a brand has a bigger influence on digital OOH than ever before!

You may be reading this whilst relaxing on your Summer holidays, but for consumers, the busiest quarter of the year is just getting started! 

With 28% of shoppers completing their Halloween shopping in September¹…

And research from eBay showing that shoppers made two searches for “Christmas” every second on its site in August last year ²… it’s never too early for brands to start thinking about their outdoor campaigns for Q4.

Digital OOH Retail Insights

Consumers are constantly on the lookout for the best deals, and digital OOH has the ability to engage shoppers on-location, showcasing products and displaying offers in real-time.

Let us show you a few examples…

eBay Fill Your Cart With Colour

eBay brought shopping inspiration to the streets of the UK, with this colourful, weather-activated digital OOH campaign.

Estée Lauder Clinique Chubby Plump & Shine

An interactive digital OOH campaign for clinique's new chubby, plump & shine liquid lipstick

Here’s an engaging Augmented Reality experience we created for Clinique to promote the launch of its latest product.

Topshop Autumn/Winter 2015

Here’s a linear digital OOH campaign we produced for Topshop to promote their highly anticipated Autumn/Winter collection.

Marmite Love It or Hate It

Controversial condiment brand, Marmite, enabled shoppers to join in with its interactive Christmas digital OOH campaign.

Want to discuss your upcoming digital OOH plans? Get in touch!