OUT OF HOME OF THE MONTH OCTOBER 2024
The challenges of out of home advertising always come down to one key factor: time. You may have a captive audience for a poster who can take in all that detail you’ve lovingly included. But the chances are most of your reach is coming from people who are seeing it for seconds at most. They aren’t going to take much in.
And of what they do take in, the single most important element is brand. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your visuals are, if someone can’t immediately connect them to the brand your opportunity is most likely missed. So this month’s Out Of Home winners are ads that drive brand well. They do other things too, but their OOH Factor comes from their strong performance on Brand Fluency – the speed and accuracy of brand recognition.
First up is Waitrose, with a UK poster ad promoting its premium No1 range. The poster shows a guy raising a finger to hold his friends off from disturbing him while he feasts on a No1 cake with his coffee, and the caption “No1 Always Comes First” – conveying the food’s superior quality in an amusing and dramatic way (with a bit of non-verbal communication to engage the right side of the brain).
It’s a well-designed and effective poster but what’s most interesting about it is how well it performs on branding – it gets a strong 73% on Fast Fluency (instant recognition) and 92% on overall Fluency, both scores above average for poster ads. The Waitrose logo is prominent, but the distinctive asset doing the most work here is the brand’s signature shade of green, which is used as a strip providing instant visual contrast with the darker shades of the photograph. That kind of color cue is a particularly potent way for poster designers to convey brand in an immediate, almost unconscious way.
The challenges of out of home advertising always come down to one key factor: time.
Color has been central to Coke’s advertising for decades: the brand pioneered it as a branding tool with its classic 20th Century ads emphasizing “Coke Red”. So it’s not surprising to see how well a Coke poster from Sweden performed this month on Brand Fluency. The poster emphasizes the connection between Coca-Cola and food, with a black and white shot of customers queuing up at a Mexico City taqueria. “Where there are tacos, there’s Coca-Cola” is the caption. The only color in the shot is, of course, the bold red of the crates of Coke bottles stacked outside the food truck.
Its a simple trick but a very effective one, which pushes Fast Fluency up to an exceptional 78% and leads to the highest overall Brand Fluency of any of the ads we tested this month (93%). As with Waitrose, it’s the instant reaction to a familiar color that cues brand recognition, and Coke have almost a century of priming behind them that makes them the masters of driving brand in this way. The ad also works on an emotional level – happy people out enjoying food is a winner in any context. But it’s the effective branding that makes it stand out.
Finally this month, the World Wildlife Fund bring us a UK poster which manages to score high Brand Fluency while also raising a smile. The concept behind the A Prescription For Nature campaign is that nature improves our mental health, so seeing animals is like a prescription you can write yourself to help in tricky times. On this poster, it’s some ducks diving in a pond, and there’s a handwritten note at the bottom alongside the WWF’s familiar panda logo: “Amazing how watching some ducks can make you stop worrying about the pecking order”
Unlike the other ads we’ve featured, this poster isn’t built around instant recognition – it’s designed for people to take in the ad’s message, so there aren’t immediate brand cues beyond the logo. But it’s a sign of how powerful and familiar the WWF’s logo is to UK audiences that the ad still achieves a strong, 91% Brand Fluency rating. And the ad also gets our highest Star Rating this month, with a good 3.2-Star score, well over the out of home average. The ad scores as Amusing and Uplifting in the Test Your Ad report, with viewers pointing to the fact that ducks are naturally funny, entertaining creatures. Emotionally effective and well branded – a perfect poster combination. Strong brand is crucial for building the OOH Factor in ads, and these examples prove it.
Brand: Waitrose
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi London
- Chief Creative Officer: Franki Goodwin
- Creative Director: Ali Dickinson
- Creative Director: Brodie King
- Creative: Ollie Agius
- Creative: Pete Ioulianou
- Design Director: Max Henderson
- Designer: Natalie Alves
- Planning Director: Ophelia Stimpson
- Managing Partner: Alice Flanagan
- Business Lead: Paul McHugh
- Account Director: Sarah Covill
- Agency Producer: Jodie Sibson
Production: Prodigious
Producer: Brigette Martin
Photographer: Sam Wright
Brand: Coca-Cola
Agency: Uncommon Stockholm
Photographer: Frederik Trovatten
Production Company: Colony
Brand: WWF
Brand Director: Lisa Lee
Agency: Uncommon Creative
Design Director: Matt Curtis