OOH of the Month: October Edition
Distinctive assets are important in every form of advertising, but for OOH advertising they are truly vital. A well-deployed brand asset is the difference between someone recognizing your ad and someone simply passing it by. And used well, distinctive assets can be in the creative driver’s seat, triggering positive emotion as well as familiarity.
This month, we’re looking at three OOH ads that deploy some very famous distinctive assets in very effective ways. Logos, products, color and shape are all harnessed here to create outdoor ads that lodge a brand in people’s minds and build emotional effectiveness, too.
different is a box detailing the special instructions the customer has for their sub: “I’d like one jalapeno placed at random so it’s like SURPRISE! POW!!”
“Get Your Own Way” is the tagline, advertising how Subway will personalize their sandwich orders for customers who have special instructions, and giving this playful request as an example. But that’s not why the ad gets a sky-high 97% Brand Fluency and an even more
extraordinary 95% Fast Fluency, which measures instant recognition. It’s the huge logo in a setting that’s both familiar (a receipt) and surprising (giant size). For comparison, the average Fast Fluency on an OOH ad is only 58%, so Subway have done something well beyond the usual well-branded ad here.
For IKEA in Italy, we have an ad that makes very creative – and cute! – use of one of the brand’s iconic products. IKEA has a lot of distinctive assets but perhaps none are more familiar than the brand’s sturdy blue canvas bags. On this poster, that instantly recognizable bag is used in a most unusual way by an unlikely customer – a couple’s cat, who curls up cozily in the bag while its human owners are under a duvet. The ad copy simply gives the name of the bag range (FRAKTA) and proclaims that it’s 95 eurocents for a cat bed.
This is a beautifully tongue-in-cheek way to use a distinctive asset. Even though there’s no logo, the ad hits the European norm for Fluency and Fast Fluency and easily exceeds it with a strong short-term Spike Rating and very good long-term 3.9-Star Rating. The presence of the cat, the
fact the ad catches the attention and the way it makes the viewer take a second look to recognize the brand and understand the situation all add up to an exceptional level of emotional intensity for an OOHad. That’s unusual, and a reason the ad is so surprisingly effective.
Finally, Coca-Cola in the US has one of the best libraries of distinctive assets in the world – a brand asset for every occasion and every season. It’s deploying several of them at once in this warm-weather billboard ad. The copy simply says “Cold, Crisp”, and the image is of a Coca-
Cola bottle opening, letting the cold drink spray out.
You might think you could hardly get more basic, and you’d be right. But that doesn’t matter if it works, and Coca-Cola is so iconic it can produce something this straightforward and still get a very strong 4.5-Star Rating, hugely above the miserable 1.8-Star US outdoor average. Short-term spike is Exceptional too, and again, streets ahead of the US norm. And what looks like a very simple poster is actually taking advantage of multiple distinctive assets. In Test Your Ad Outdoor, we ask people what distinctive assets they remember from the ad – Coke here gets top scores on logo, font, color and product shape.
Not every brand is Coca-Cola, but this result shows how devastatingly effective an armory of distinctive assets can be. But the other ads this month show brands that you can build even quite an unlikely thing – a bag or a receipt – into something that can work hard for your brand
and be effective OOH.
Credits:
Subway (UK): Saatchi & Saatchi London
IKEA (IT): Ogilvy Italy
Coca-Cola (US): JKR Global