The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Starcom Mediavest Outdoor Advertising

Creative Out of Home Awards: Q&A with Starcom co-CEO Steve Parker and Kinetic Active MD Rosh Singh

Author

By The Drum, Editorial

September 3, 2015 | 7 min read

Ahead of The Drum's Creative Out of Home awards, judges Steve Parker, co-CEO at Starcom, and Rosh Singh, MD Kinetic Active, told us what brands should be doing in the out of home space to create more effective advertising.

Steve Parker

How would you like to see brands using OOH more effectively?

Be open to different environments/format they have never used before with the right justifications.

Utilise OOH specific creative – not just TV or press creative, but creative built for OOH alone.

Be bold with digital tech and link data with real time activation effectively.

Be more integrated in cross channel planning and don’t look at OOH purely as an awareness/broadcast medium, but as a vehicle to house and distribute content.

What examples are best in class in OOH?

TomTom – Utilising EE data in order to target runners accurately with six sheets on well-known routes.

Lucozade – Scheduling radio airtime with OOH digital activations on key roadside sites. Listeners are targeted twice with both digital OOH and radio.

Heineken Rugby World Cup – Game only activation on rail and large format digital activation in host cities and on specific rail routes during game days and in local. Building a base level of digital coverage and then activating tactically to give relevance.

Heineken - Heineken Cities of the World campaign that centred around the Metro ‘London Unlocked’ partnership where bespoke print and online content was created on a weekly basis providing the target audience with ideas and inspiration for going out over the upcoming week. This content was then amplified both online and in digital OOH, updating on a weekly basis. Online display ads were served dynamically, pulling themed content into contextually relevant environments. In OOH, digital formats were utilised to take advantage of time of day and day of week targeting, allowing Heineken to reach an audience when they were making their plans for the week ahead. High dwell time environments were selected to do this – transvisions and XTP’s ran on Mon/Tue on alternate weeks for the duration of the campaign to showcase the top 5 Metro events that week. This is a really great example of a cross platform campaign and really demonstrates collaboration between precision disciplines.

What new innovations in OOH are you keeping a close eye on?

Mobile data developments – the next big thing has to be tracking people via their mobiles and using this data to plan, even activate screens. Telefonica has just signed a deal with Exterion for data sharing. beacons are part of this.

I also think that utilising various data streams to enhance our targeting and relevance is the clear option here. Whether that’s integrating more data streams into our actual site selection (like the TomTom campaign) or whether that’s using data to serve relevant messages at relevant times. Also, it’s worth while keeping an eye on moving towards a more programmatic lead buying approach. The industry is quite a far way off trading like this, but things are starting to gear up in that direction.

Rosh Singh

How would you like to see brands using OOH more effectively?

Personally I think it is a crime that brands are still putting static creative on screens that can take full motion. You wouldn’t put a still image on a TV ad - so why do it on a digital screen? As a very minimum we need to make sure that we are building content specifically for each screen taking into account the nuances of the format and making the most of the medium, we see too many adapted print ads on OOH/DOOH and this needs to stop. The amount of clients fully utilising the dynamic and real-time capabilities of these screens is also pretty low - DOOH screens are immensely powerful and capable of delivering contextually relevant and data driven campaigns and this is not being utilised enough.

Effectiveness is an interesting area as well - machine vision can be used as a great tool for understanding effectiveness of our advertising. Be that looking at how long people spend looking at our ads or understanding the emotional reaction they have to our advertising we need to be gathering this anonymised data and using it to measure the impact of our campaigns as well as using it to dynamically serve content.

What examples are best in class in OOH?

As an industry we are getting very clever with our use of data and DOOH which can now deliver scale and reach at a level never before possible. A campaign that is live at the moment for Coca-Cola uses digital screens booked over 27 weeks to tell a story about London’s happiness in real-time, using a mixture of Twitter sentiment to power a Happiness Meter and pulling in real-time and user generated content. Using Kinetic’s content management platform d:4 Coke are able to publish content across 300 screen and multiple media media owners at the click of a button. Google 2.0 really set the bar and serves as a great way for clients to use their own data to run a DOOH campaign, a truly best in class campaign.

The OOH industry is also finding very clever ways of serving content and more specifically, interesting things to ad-serve against. The BA-Look Up campaign ad-served OOH against a plane, which was revolutionary and WCRS ad-served against a users gaze for their Womens Aid campaign, both extremely innovative and have swept up the awards circuit - and rightly so.

What new innovations in OOH are you keeping a close eye on?

The OOH industry can sometimes be guilty of trumpeting technology without putting in the necessary ground-work or having the patience to see it through to fruition. We have still yet to fully realise the potential of beacons, they have started to be deployed but we are yet to see them used effectively in the UK. If done right, beacons could revolutionise OOH comms and open the door to a much more personal user experience through much tighter targeting.

Machine vision is also a potential game-changer, the ability for small yet powerful cameras to monitor and understand the environment around them offers huge creative potential within OOH. Be that through vastly improved eye-tracking, facial detection, emotion recognition or object recognition we can start to find even more things to ad-serve against in the future.

With OOH being the only media channel that can target all five senses, the maturation of Haptic technology offers some interesting opportunities when it comes to touch, but as with will all technology having an eye on something and it being ready for mainstream adoption are two very different things.

The deadline for entries for The Creative Out of Home Awards, which are sponsored by Ubiquitous, is today (4 September). Extensions are available. For more information please visit the awards website.

Starcom Mediavest Outdoor Advertising

More from Starcom Mediavest

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +