What does the future hold for outdoor advertising? Havas Media, OMD and Metro debate
From personalised ads to facial recognition and beyond, what lies ahead for out of home advertising ranges from the widlly innovative to the unknown. And as more and more billboards shift from poster to digital, brands are increasingly looking to take advantage of more immersive, and lucrative, experiences.
To find out what the future holds for out of home The Drum caught up with some of this year's Creative Out of Home Awards judges including OMD creative director Ann Wixley, head of creative strategy at Havas Media, Rik Moore, and David Volkes, partnerships director at Metro UK.
Rik Moore
The future of out of home is creative digitisation,so more and more digital screens and then how can we access data in a really clever way to make the content we put on those screens ever more engaging. It will still be huge broadcasts, short, sharp dwell times, and a big message but it also allows us to do some really interesting things and creative personal experiences.
Everything from RFID chips, iBeacons: they start to allow very personal ways of using broadcast media in a targeted way so I think that is really interesting and will dominate our lives. Also people talk about ad blocking technologies coming into mobile and we talk about TV and how people are moving away from standard scheduling - people are always going to be exposed to posters so the more we can be smarter and show more intelligence in the way we deliver content in those spaces will be very interesting.
Ann Wixley
There always need to be a great idea at the heart, [but] the possibilities are just more and more open. I think going forward the challenge and the opportunity is in the same place, which is anything is possible, the trick will be to be guided by the idea and be as economical and as smart as possible. It will require more collaboration across disciplines and agencies because [there are examples] where there is great innovation at the back but the creative execution could have gone up a notch. The ideas that win are the ones where media, creative execution and innovation are all working together and that cannot be done without the agencies working together.
David Vokes
The future of out of home is the same as the future of most media: it's about people working together to explore what’s possible. The future is [also about] how brave brands want to be. If they want to really disrupt and explore what its possible there are a lot of companies and technologies that allow them to be really creative and make people engage and stop. In lots of ways it's not just about hitting numbers it's about doing stuff - just a single stunt that given the other platforms you’ve got can go viral and have a huge impact globally. I think the future is incredibly exciting.
The nominations for The Drum Creative Out of Home Awards are set to be announced next Wednesday 21 October. Keep an eye on The Drum website to see who made the cut.