Out-of-home advertising has seen huge growth in 2015, prompting a rise in spend in the channel, and its evolution is set to continue as the industry rolls out automated buying next year.
Over the past few weeks, every out-of-home (OOH) advertising frame in the UK has been given a 10-digit code to automate trading of sites between media agencies and owners.
The code allocator, called Space, will cut man hours and work in OOH ad trading and planning, according to the UK marketing body for the industry, Outsmart, formerly the Outdoor Media Centre.
“Instead of humans having to do hours [of work], machines can talk to each other and do the same work quickly,” explains Alan Brydon, CEO at Outsmart. “In any business, if you can get the functional stuff out of the way, your talented people can spend more time doing what is important – having good ideas and working with customers to get better solutions.”
Another innovation announced this month is from Ocean Outdoor, which is gearing up to launch The Loop Live in 2016. The trading system enables brands to buy OOH advertising by number of ‘impacts’. Advertisers will be able to decide on the audience, time and locations and using that data Ocean’s system will optimise the campaign across screens.
This offering will be rolled out to 20 double-sided digital screens in 12 locations in Birmingham city centre, which offer full-motion, real-time ad placements and are fitted with cameras and NFC technology. The trading technology will also be available for other Ocean Outdoor sites known as The Grid, which consists of eight digital screens in six cities.
These innovations are a few of examples of where OOH media owners have made strides in digital offerings this year, which will change the way brands buy outdoor advertising in 2016. Nearly a quarter of outdoor advertising spend is digital. According to a study by media agency Kinetic Worldwide, the total inventory of digital OOH sites in the UK is set to grow more than 40% between now and 2020.
Exploiting installed technology
It is not only in the use of buying automation technology where brands have begun exploiting new digital outdoor offerings, but also the technology installed in OOH sites. For example, Ocean Outdoor’s Media Eyes launched in September with a Virgin Trains campaign at Birmingham’s newly refurbished New Street Station. It has three LED screens with cameras that recognise the gender and age of passers-by. The system is able to select and serve the most appropriate adverts for the audience within the vicinity of the screens. Media Eyes also beams free Wi-Fi for consumers. In exchange, users agree to share data, which can help further refine what to broadcast and select ads the system can push to commuters’ mobile devices.
Battersea Dogs & Cats Home also used a new technique in outdoor advertising this year where a dog followed shoppers around screens in Westfield Stratford shopping centre, asking people to adopt him. The ‘Looking for you’ campaign, created by OgilvyOne in partnership with media owner Exterion on a pro bono basis, used RFID tags placed inside leaflets that were given to passers-by. The tags interacted with digital poster sites so that the dog followed the same shoppers from screen to screen.
Outdoor advertising is not just a vehicle for raising awareness, it can also drive purchase consideration and intent, and be used to communicate brand positioning.
The scale, viewability and dramatic effect of outdoor advertising helps marketers create cut-through and capture consumer attention in a world where other messages struggle to get through.
Less appreciated is the variety of marketing objectives it can achieve. As brands have shown recently, outdoor has applications at different stages of the purchase funnel and can execute on several elements of a marketing strategy.
1. Creating interest via experiences
In July, Sony marked the release of Ghostbusters with a takeover of London’s Waterloo station, centred on a giant installation of the film’s Stay Puft Marshmallow Man character emerging from the ground. Waterloo was chosen for its footfall and scale. The station was adorned with ectoplasm, ticket barrier branding and a wrap of the Underground station. Collaborating with JCDecaux, screens showed spoof news footage, while a pop-up shop offered Ghostbusters merchandise and Odeon representatives sold film tickets.
Instead of a simple awareness drive, the takeover aimed to push the concept further, explains Sony Pictures deputy managing director and marketing director Stuart Williams. “We wanted an integrated experiential outdoor element that worked on a number of levels. We always look at how to ‘eventise’ a film and be part of the zeitgeist, and the scale of this installation allowed us to do that. We were trying to give a nod back to the original film with the iconic Stay Puft character, but with a new spin.”
The objective of outdoor is not to go viral on social, it’s to build awareness and increase engagement
Darcy Keller, Financial Times
The outdoor activity impressed Williams with its amplification through publicity and engagement, helping the film have a point of difference among the summer blockbusters.
2. Providing product education
Outdoor advertising has been part of the Facebook media mix for several years. While brand awareness was the focus of the ‘Friends’ (2015) and ‘A Place For All’ (2016) campaigns, Facebook’s latest out-of-home (OOH) shifted towards product awareness.
“The Facebook Live campaign is designed to educate people on how to go live on Facebook, and to inspire people to go live with their friends,” explains Ewan Adams, communications planning manager. “For these two aims OOH works well. We get the awareness-building performance from large format OOH and contextual relevance from street-level OOH.”
Moon to got really big on Nov. 14th, 2016, it's the biggest supermoon in nearly 70 years
According to NASA, 2016 is going to end in a big way: Earthlings will get to witness a super moon on Nov. 14 and Dec. 14, 2016. It will be huge, huge, I tell ya.
In fact, the phenomenon had already occurred once last month on Oct. 16, but it probably went under-reported.
The last time the moon was so close to Earth was in January 1948. Or for those without elephant memories, a super moon showed up in July 2014.
This month, the moon will appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than an average full moon. This is the closest the moon will get to Earth until Nov. 25, 2034.
Why the big moon? NASA explains that the moon has an elliptical orbit.
One side, called the perigee, is about 48,280 km (30,000 miles) closer to Earth than the other side, the apogee.
And here’s where it is going to get a bit technical.
When the sun, moon and Earth line up, it’s called syzygy.
When this Earth-Moon-Sun system occurs with the perigee side (the closer side) of the moon facing us, and the moon happens to be on the opposite side of Earth from the sun (above picture where the Earth is sandwiched), we get what’s called a perigee-syzygy.
That causes the moon to appear much bigger and brighter in our sky than usual, and it’s referred to as a super moon — or more technically, a perigee moon.
But because the Nov. 14 moon takes only two hours to become full, it’s going to look the biggest it has in nearly seven decades.
NASA also explains that the super moon can look unusually large on the horizon by creating an optical illusion when seen against foreground objects.
“When the moon is near the horizon, it can look unnaturally large when viewed through trees, buildings, or other foreground objects,” says NASA. “The effect is an optical illusion, but that fact doesn’t take away from the experience.”
Here’s examples.
Written by Belmont Lay,mothership.sg
If we display the pictures on the high definition LED display screens, how can they seems like? Perhaps we can have our colleagues and clients to do the same,then let's to see what happen!
