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%.

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.

Sun, Sea & Digital OOH!

With Summer on the horizon, we are sharing our top considerations for digital OOH this warm season. It’s a great time of year to use digital OOH to reach your target audience, as nearly half of the population become more active as the weather gets warmer! So why not consider planning your next digital OOH campaign just as you would plan a vacation?

Audience

Who’s your ideal travel companion? Family, friends or a solo adventure? Just as you consider who you travel with, it’s just as important to consider who is the ideal audience for your campaign.

Here’s an augmented reality experience we created for Sky Q, designed to target commuters with fun and games during the school holidays.

Moment

What’s your perfect Summer vacation? A relaxing seaside break or adrenalin filled adventure? Considering the moment you want to create with your digital OOH is key. What do you want your campaign to make consumers feel, think or do?

For the cinematic release for Inside Out, we created a user-generated experience in Times Square. As the movie was centred around emotions, the campaign was designed to capture a participant’s emotions before sharing them to the digital screen.

Lasting Impression

What’s your most memorable vacation? With digital OOH campaigns, it’s just as important to consider the lasting impression you want to leave. Focus on creating a moment for your audience that will truly leave a lasting impression.

Here’s an augmented reality experience we created for Disney. The social video has been viewed over 300 million times and shared over 5.9 million times around the world. It also earned the title of the 2nd most shared ad of 2015.

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

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.