Unlocking the Power of OOH Solutions: Innovative and Specialist Strategies

Hear us Out

Businesses are often drawn to building their brand’s visibility via high-impact online advertising. But, we are here to tell you that there are other options! It’s time for businesses to explore Out of Home (OOH) and what is has to offer, including, technology solutions, current trends, benefits and how businesses can effectively reach their target audience. With OOH being one of the most trusted forms of advertising and constantly advancing in technological innovations and creative opportunities, brands can learn how to leverage this dynamic medium to achieve their marketing goals.

What’s to Come

  1. OOH advertising is effective for capturing audiences on the go.
  2. Despite digital marketing growth, OOH offers high ROI.
  3. Technological advancements like programmatic buying enhance OOH campaigns.
  4. OOH provides unique creative opportunities for brands.
  5. Grand Visual offers innovative and effective OOH solutions.


Let’s Dive in

Let’s pretend you have never heard of OOH before…

Out-of-home advertising encompasses any ads that reach consumers while they are outside their homes, so, this includes everything from billboards, experiential activity, pop-ups, transit ads, and digital display ads. But the caveat is, that this excludes adverts viewed on a mobile phone. The pros to outdoor advertising are endless, let me tell you… it can be an effective methodology for reaching more customers and a wide audience, builds brand awareness, can be highly targeted, reach high-traffic areas, the list goes on.

Research also indicates its strong power towards complimenting other advertising channels such as TV, radio, mail, or even direct online ads (OAAA, 2019).

OOH advertising allows you to capture the audience’s attention when using messaging that stops people in their tracks. This can be particularly effective if the brand already has a well-known tagline, e.g. Should’ve gone to Specsavers.

40% of consumers trust billboard brand advertising (35% trust TV ad and 19% do newspapers ad) (Statista, 2023)

Out of Home advertising industry reports revenues for the second quarter of 2024 total of £355m, an increase of 17% compared to the same period last year (Outsmart, 2024).


The Resurgence of OOH Advertising

Outdoor advertising has always been a popular medium for advertising but the industry has seen a particular increase in recent years as brands allocate more budget to the medium and use OOH advertising as a pillar for their advertising strategy. In 2023 alone, Out of Home advertising spending in the United Kingdom grew to 1.3 billion British pounds and continued to grow another 7% throughout the year (Statista, 2023).

Outdoor advertising provides brands with one of the strongest reach of channels, making it a valuable component of a brand or comprehensive marketing strategy. With 66 million people living in Great Britain in 2021, more than 52 million see OOH and outdoor ads weekly, resulting in a reach of roughly 80 percent (Statista, 2023).


We’re Getting Innovative with Tech

The Out of Home advertising space is always evolving as creative studios come up with innovative ways to advance and keep ahead of the curve. Just one example of this is Programmatic Buying. This recent development of prOOH allows advertisers to purchase ad space in real time, optimising their campaigns based on data analytics. Pretty useful, am I right?

The number of impressions, clicks, sales lift, and websites your ads appear on can be tracked in real-time, and you don’t need to wait until the end of the campaign to evaluate its performance. Besides with programmatic campaigns, you can also optimize them while they’re still running, making adjustments where necessary and adapting them to current climates, environments etc which in turn will positively impact the end result.

Advertisers are continuing to adopt this advanced form of control on digital billboards with statistics indicating increased spending on programmatic digital billboards for Out of Home which reached almost a third (31%) over the past 18 months (WARC, 2023).

With more technological innovations, comes the enhanced ability and benefits of targeting audiences more precisely and effectively. Research by Nielsen (2024) supports this with campaigns seeing a 42% increase in ROI when advanced data and analytics are integrated into OOH campaigns.

Let us Show You How We Did it

Hiscox Insurance

In a bid to drive awareness of advanced cybercrime and the threat to small businesses, Hiscox Insurance launched an intelligent and hard-hitting Digital Out of Home campaign.

In a media first, the data-driven creative was powered by real-life hackers and displays real-time cybercrime in a tactical digital prOOH execution which ran nationwide across key cities and roadside locations. The unique campaign worked by pulling data on online activity from a purpose-built honeypot system typical of any standard small business server set-up.

The honeypot monitored live hacks and the poster creative responded with a real-time pulsing “Cybercrime” headline and a ticker display showing passers-by the cumulative amount of attacks to have hit the honeypot that day. As the breaches build, so too did the headline, with each poster evolving and reacting throughout the course of the day.

Hiscox Insurnace digital out of home advertising

San Miguel

To capitalise on the British Summer weather, San Miguel launched a temperature activated, digital OOH campaign. The UK-wide campaign targeted consumers when the weather was hot by tempting them with a refreshing San Miguel and informing them where they could purchase one.

The campaign creative was displayed on sites in close proximity to grocery stores, pubs and other San Miguel retailers nearby. The campaign was activated only when temperatures rose above 18 degrees Celsius. OpenLoop, the DCO ad server from ad tech specialist QDOT, used the weather API feed to update this creative in the real-time location.

San Miguel out of home advertising

Creative Opportunities

Out of Home offers marketers the unique opportunity to enhance consumer interaction and further audience recall. Research from Neuro-Insight (2021) proves, for the first time, that evolving Out of Home (OOH) creative boosts long-term memory encoding which is essential for campaign efficacy. This demonstrates that incorporating the strategic use of creative evolution into a brand’s campaign delivers greater impact. Mic drop.

British Heart Foundation

This campaign from the British Heart Foundation shows 12 murals of 12 young football fans who tragically lost their lives to heart disease.

The murals went live ahead of the UEFA EUROs to celebrate their lives and highlight the sad truth that heart disease can strike anyone, at any age. A big thank you goes out to the families who took part. Any donations go towards life-saving research. It was an emotional campaign to be a part of and one we hope made a real impact.

BHF 'Til I Died out of home advertising

Allwyn Lotto

Across the UK, we deployed 1,000 playful OOH special builds that invited people from all walks of life to imagine themselves as future millionaires. These included mirrors, see-through billboards, bus shelters, and a live spotlight mechanic that lit up unsuspecting passers-by after dark. Creative copy tied to specific locations heightened the drama, suggesting the next millionaire might be “at this crossing” or “at King’s Cross station.” To coincide with the launch of the new brand platform, a transparent billboard outside King’s Cross St. Pancras targeted 200,000 daily commuters and tourists over two days.

Allwyn Lotto OOH ad

Adding to the interactivity, we launched a static billboard with stage spotlights and motion sensors to highlight passers-by. When no one was nearby, the billboard cast the message “Will you be next?” onto the ground with a single spotlight. As someone walked past, the corner spotlights activated, moved to the centre of the billboard, and illuminated the person, placing them at the heart of our campaign.

Allwyn Lotto out of home advertising

Extra Flamin’ Hot

Earlier this year Ashley Roberts hit the headlines when she appeared with sweat patches on the red carpet. This prompted the launch of the ‘Sweat shame to sweat fame’ the Hot Couture campaign by PepsiCo, bringing a sense of humour to what can sometimes be an embarrassing situation.

As well as the wider OOH campaign, we were tasked with creating a billboard that actually looked like it was sweating to show just how spicy the Extra Flamin’ Hot snacks are. The Special Build was launched in East London, which featured a water feature that pumped 1,000 litres over the billboard to create that sweating effect.

Extra Flamin' Hot out of home campaign

What Are We Talking About?

Well, to sum up, as the advertising landscape evolves, OOH solutions remain vital for reaching target audiences, measuring, and achieving marketing goals. Embracing the latest tech can enhance OOH effectiveness and leveraging creative opportunities and integrating with digital strategies can maximise campaign impact.