Digital adds a live element to poster power

6 May 2010 | By MaryLou Costa

Marketing Week (MW) Research shows that in 2009, outdoor was used primarily to drive sales or footfall. In 2010, do you see it being the same situation or used more for brand building?

Danni Murray (DM) The medium has worked hard to establish its credentials for driving sales and proximity. However, outdoor has traditionally been used successfully for building brands too and post-recession, I think we will see sectors such as finance and government using outdoor to rebuild consumer trust.

Rachel Bristow (RB) Brands will use it for both. It’s important to create market standout and engagement with consumers, and outdoor can play a big role in meeting these objectives. We use outdoor advertising as part of brand launches to highlight key messages, drive footfall to supermarkets and create “talkability”. For example, a Lynx campaign last year featured a live girl as part of the poster – this attracted huge attention on a major London road and subsequent PR coverage.

Chris Merrell (CM) All media has to work as hard as possible to generate return on investment and should include outdoor as a way to drive footfall. The campaign execution should be able to escalate brand awareness via the quality, relevance and creativity of the campaign. GPS navigation is very much a roadside or pedestrian-oriented product, so our objective is to position our message in front of an audience who are in their cars, walking along or close to where they can purchase a Garmin product. Outdoor has to support an integrated marketing campaign and can help to provide touchpoints that make the most sense to the consumer along the road to purchasing our products.

Paul Evans (PE) I would always expect every communications channel to drive both sales and brand equity. Outdoor as a channel is often wrongly perceived as a one dimensional and sometimes blunt instrument, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. I have always found the flexibility and choice of solutions present in outdoor to be one of its most attractive differentiators.

Ash Stockwell (AS) We use outdoor for high impact brand consideration opportunities to support big campaign launches. It is less about offers, but it depends on the scale of the location. A lot of it is down to the position of a site; for example, roadside locations are more suitable for high impact brand messages. We use high dwell areas like train stations and bus stops that might be near our retail outlets to drive traffic, so they have to be store and offer-related. The use will also depend on the time of year, so whether it’s a key retail season will determine whether it’s brand awareness-based or offer-based.

MW Will events like the World Cup see brands pour more resources into outdoor this year? Why or why not?

DM Research conducted by Kinetic’s Moving Minds panel shows that a third of people will watch England games in an out-of-home environment. This offers a real opportunity for brands promoting themselves around the World Cup to resonate with a mobile, summer audience. Those brands will obviously be looking to maximise their sponsorship and leverage further exposure through outdoor.

CM It is going to be difficult to escape an advert or campaign relating to the World Cup this spring and summer. As in previous years, with the Ashes as an example, brands will try to establish tangible links with key impact events on the calendar to bask in the World Cup glow. But as with most campaigns, to be a success, the integrated message will need to work across many media and the product or service will need to be relevant and good enough quality.

PE Many brands need platforms to drive relevant and emotional connections with their target audiences. Outdoor should benefit disproportionately from the World Cup due to its ability to be present at valuable moments of contact. You only have to look to pub TV, table top and bathroom advertising, taxi sides, London Underground posters and city centre six-sheets as examples of outdoor formats that will be visible to young, football-following audiences on match days. Smart brands will go further and seek to deliver real or near-time messaging using the expanding, high quality digital inventory now available, as well as tying this together with the immediacy of mobile messaging opportunities.

AS Events like this will give outdoor more of a push, as it will give all media a lift. But the challenge will be how brands will manage to stand out among the activity of the major official .? Companies will be challenged to be more clever and creative.

MW Has the advent of digital outdoor spaces led to you using more outdoor or using outdoor in more impactful ways?

DM The flexibility of digital technology to turn around campaign concepts quickly and effectively is attractive to us. We recently booked a campaign that ran on the Transvision screen at Liverpool Street Station with only 24 hours notice. It was for the launch of the new series of the US talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show and featured a play on David Beckham’s poster campaign for Armani underwear in which he appeared alongside his wife Victoria. Ellen’s face was superimposed over Victoria’s on the poster as a publicity stunt to surprise David when he was on the show. It had huge impact as we were able to simultaneously co-ordinate similar campaigns running in high profile locations across the US and Europe.

RB Outdoor has always been a main media channel for us but the development of digital is allowing us to grow the consumer experience. The industry needs to create a nationwide footprint in digital sites to attract more brands on a continual basis. At present, there is still a premium cost, which may put some advertisers off.  

CM Through our sponsorship of Middlesbrough Football Club and subsequent Six Nations Rugby advertising, the use of digital outdoor has enabled us to tell a story to our target audience. The creativity it affords means that we can talk directly to 80,000 fans in Twickenham Stadium and to millions watching on TV. Static media doesn’t afford us that dwell time in every scenario, so we prefer the impact that digital can provide.

AS Digital adds a richness to our messages that gives them more visual impact. It challenges us to be more clever about doing things like moving images up a digital escalator panel. Digital is more flexible as it can react quickly to topical things.

MW Outdoor is increasingly infiltrating more areas, such as lift doors, bus tickets and hair salons. What will be the new areas where outdoor makes an impact this year?

DM We will see more temporary installations in high impact areas. Nike recently created a giant LED curtain screen in Manchester to promote the launch of new football boots – the scale and location of the campaign would never be possible with a permanent installation.

RB We’ll see integration with consumers’ mobile handsets and people watching 3D content via a six-sheet. I also expect the industry to increase its number of digital and premium sites.     

PE This area is ultimately only limited by media owner and agency imagination, advertiser demand and consumer receptivity. Rather than predict the “next big thing”, my challenge would be for the industry to drive a fact and insight-based innovation agenda, where relevant moments of connection and persuasion for audience groups are married to the desire for monetisable inventory.

AS Digital will become more widespread across more areas, such as bus sides, with the message changing depending on the location of the bus. There is a lot of scope to transform the side of buses beyond fixed panels.

Digital touchpanels also offer scope for greater consumer interaction, as you are better able to see what elements they are interacting with, along with offering multiple messages and changing them more flexibly. We are looking at ways to bring our product to life more instantly, such as putting TV schedules onto live digital screens.

MW How has the increased measurability of outdoor through video-based tracking technology helped inform your media planning more effectively?

CM The ability to better understand our audience and better target messages is obviously going to improve our media planning. We currently don’t use the technology but I can foresee many scenarios where this kind of information can help us switch messages based on the actual viewers, shorten or lengthen the message based on dwell time and improve the overall relevance to the target audience. 

AS We haven’t looked into this area that much, although we will look into it further. Outdoor agencies have to offer more sophisticated tools because advertisers are becoming more and more demanding. Offering a way to enhance the impact could lead to more investment in outdoor on an advertiser’s part.

MW Some outdoor campaigns have recently linked back to social media sites such as Facebook. Are you seeing more links between social media and traditional outdoor?

DM The ability of digital outdoor to stream live feeds and link with other media is certainly a recent development. I can see it being one of the most exciting aspects of the medium. I think we need to see more examples of the two platforms working in harmony though. In the case of linking directly to a social media presence, we need more evidence that outdoor can do this job alone, in isolation from other platforms. We also need to understand the scale on which this link can be successful, and how cost-effective that is compared to other media channels.

CM Links to Twitter and Facebook afford us the opportunity to generate a longer conversation with consumers and I’d expect more advertisers to be looking at this in the future. The increasing saturation of Twitter means our offline advertising is helping to increase followers and enables us to remain at front of mind long after the first interaction.

PE Offline communication is the greatest driver of online behaviour and outdoor touchpoints are well equipped to deliver both simple and deep engagement. Outdoor, in its various guises, is perfectly able to adapt to the demands of multiple campaign objectives. By its very nature, it has the added advantage of being where people are with their mobile devices in order to drive an immediate response – whether this is a Tweet, a conversation or a purchase.

AS There is an interesting opportunity at the moment to get people to interact with brands using social media, or through their mobiles. We are at a point where I don’t think you can separate social media brand activity from other activity because everything now links back to it. For example, it’s a standard thing to post your latest TV ad on YouTube. Digital shouldn’t be seen as a separate discipline but part of the mix, and everything you do needs to work through it.

MW Which brands do you think use outdoor most effectively and what could other marketers learn from them?

DM Telecoms brands lead the way in terms of creating out-of-home campaigns that are responsive and participatory. Although outdoor is billed as the last true broadcast medium, I think its potential to interact on a one-to-one basis will be a major growth area in the next few years. Orange has managed to deliver the kind of engaging communications that deliver brand loyalty and consumer participation with its Orange Wednesday [outdoor] activity. Getting consumers to share their experiences as part of a wider marketing campaign can foster a sense of loyalty where perhaps there was little or none beforehand. The T-Mobile campaign for Josh’s band [where the ad encouraged viewers to interact with a young man’s music group] is another good example of this. Posters provide mobile networks with an immediate opportunity to engage consumers with a campaign – often through a text mechanic or by going online through consumers’ handsets there and then. There is a wealth of opportunity to engage consumers in this fashion.

RB KFC, Burger King and McDonald’s are all good at having a continual outdoor campaign and it’s clear they are making use of location planning tools to ensure the activity drives footfall. I like KFC’s use of brand arrows on telephone boxes showing the direction of the nearest outlet.      

CM The integrated campaigns from Sky and Powerade have shown how impactful creative and messaging linked across different mediums can be. The recent Aero “Feel the bubbles” digital escalator panels and subsequent ads within the press and on TV showcased how outdoor can help a message resonate from one medium to another and drive both footfall and brand awareness.

AS I will be biased and say that Virgin Atlantic’s Red Hot campaign created a lot of impact, especially at the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. Virgin Trains had some innovative activity that changed as different people went past. Outside the Virgin brand, Mini’s campaigns have been really clever at using 3D in an outdoor space. Air New Zealand has done some clever digital panel work, using clips of cabin crew up escalators. It makes you think about how you can get an ad to be more engaging and put a smile on someone’s face rather than just send a flat message.