From burning billboards to stunning projections, how OOH drove BBC fame
BBC, BBC Creative, Havas Media, Talon Outdoor and Grand Visual all won The Drum Awards for Out of Home 2022 category Brand Fame with a data-driven OOH campaign to inform the public how the broadcaster is the ’brand for me’.

From burning billboards to stunning projections, how OOH drove BBC fame
The brief
As the oldest broadcaster in the world, the BBC’s mission has always been to enrich people’s lives with programs and services that inform, educate, and entertain. It needed to position BBC as a ’brand for me’.
Advertisement
OOH was deemed the perfect platform to reach and engage with new and existing audiences to encourage positive perceptions of the BBC. It used the platform to drive reach, while also overlaying targeting capabilities; building brand awareness effectively and in a trusted environment; and the creative opportunities it offers to drive fame and generate buzz, especially amongst the harder-to-reach young light TV viewers.
The idea
The difficult part of this brand campaign was that it had to benefit the umbrella brand as well as BBC One, BBC Three, BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds, CBeebies, BBC Radio, BBC Sport, and BBC Wales.
Throughout 2021, the BBC was present in the OOH space every week, running approximately 45 campaigns across 9 brands. Of these campaigns, the broadcaster delivered nine creative solutions campaigns, nine data-led optimized campaigns and three digital dynamic campaigns.
Advertisement
Using Talon’s DMP Ada combined with Nielsen data and first-party data, it created bespoke BBC audience clusters that have different needs and relationships with the BBC. A data-led approach allows it to reach audiences based on their behaviors and mindsets, tapping into different viewing habits, buying habits, interests and mindsets. Through Nielsen segmentation, Ada identified these audience types and combined them together to create each BBC audience cluster and apply this to key campaigns throughout the year, optimizing OOH schedules towards the BBC audience relevant to each brief and identifying the best-reaching panels for individual campaigns.
Most notable was the Perfect Planet – a series of billboards destroyed to resemble human impact on the planet, including one billboard on fire.
The results
The data-led approach led to an average 25% uplift in target audience delivery when using Ada optimization vs natural delivery of the OOH schedules.
Suggested newsletters for you
This campaign was a winner at The Drum Awards for Out of Home 2022. You can see all the winners here. The Drum Awards for Marketing are currently open for entry. Find out how you can enter now.