Welcome to System1 and JCDecaux UK’s OOH Of The Month!
Each month we’ll look at Out Of Home advertising and bring you some of the most effective work we’ve found – Out Of Home ads that really do have that “Ooh!” factor.
We share three of the best ads we’ve seen over the past month. OOH Of The Month is a collaboration between System1 and JCDecaux UK, so as well as the metrics you might be familiar with from System1, we’re bringing in JCDecaux UK’s Attention Score, which predicts the elements of each ad that will attract audience focus. On the System1 side of things, our reports include our short-term Spike Rating and long-term Star Rating, which has been predicting advertising effectiveness for 15 years. And we also look at Fast Fluency – how much of the audience recognize the brand being advertised.
System1’s Test Your Ad isn’t just about video. They also predict the long- and short-term impact of Out Of Home ads, both static images and digital billboards, and each month System1 and JCDecaux UK put the top three under the spotlight to see who really has the OOH Factor.
OOH OF THE MONTH AUG/SEPT
Something outdoor ads offer creative brands which few other mediums can is three dimensionality. Most creativity is designed for a screen, whether that’s in the palm of your hand or as big as an IMAX. But poster ads and billboards are different – the billboard is an object in space and the flat plane of the image can be radically disrupted for eye-catching effect.
That’s what’s happening in two of our Out Of Home ads of the month this month, billboards which get the OOH Factor by playing with the space around the poster to make an image more striking and memorable. We’ve also got a traditional ad, which also makes great use of the space on a poster to create a winning and positive emotional impact.
First up, from the UK, is Waitrose, with an outdoor campaign celebrating its summer range. British Summer Time means picnics and barbeques, so Waitrose has created a very striking image to advertise its summer food range, which includes ready-made kebabs. Alongside the text “Anything’s A Kebab If You Put A Skewer Through It” we see a huge model kebab loaded up with onion, vegetables and meat. It’s a brilliant way of grabbing passer-by attention and encouraging people to think about summer and barbeque season.
That surprise factor pays off in System1’s Test Your Ad results, where the ad scores especially well on Brand Fluency, with 92% being able to attribute the poster to Waitrose and a solid average “dwell time” of 10 seconds viewing the billboard. As one respondent said in the comments “Never seen an ad like this before”. In a crowded out of home environment, standing out and being recognized is a huge part of the battle.
There’s another great example of this from Holland, where sportswear brand Decathlon is advertising its Easybreath snorkel mask. Like the Waitrose ad, this plays with the space around the ad, in this case in a public pedestrian space that’s occupied by a digital billboard. On the billboard itself is the face of a snorkeller, with a huge replica of the Easybreath mask placed on top of it. The top of the snorkel pushes past the upper edge of the billboard, like a snorkel rising from the water.
At its heart Decathlon’s ad is just a simple display of a product, but the three dimensionality makes it far more eye-catching and memorable than a flat image would be. As with the Waitrose poster, it suits the season, reminding passers-by of a fun Summer activity as well as advertising a product. And the effects are similar, with a very high Surprise reaction and an exceptional 95% Brand Fluency score – really strong for a brand in quite a niche market. Decathlon also gets an exceptional score in System1’s Spike Rating, which predicts short-term sales lifts.
What we’ve seen in these ads is how playing with the space around the billboard can be a powerful way of generating Surprise and making people pay attention to the brand. But not every outdoor ad is looking for that kind of reaction. Our third ad this month comes from America, where Haagen-Dasz is advertising a Salted Brown Butter Cookie ice cream flavor.
Here the idea is not to create surprise, but to drive happiness, and so the ad uses billboard space in a very different way, designed to create sensory pleasure and desire. The whole billboard is a rich, cookie-colored brown, with chunks of the cookie in front of the very recognizable Haagen-Dasz tub. And the ad copy lengthens the word “smooth” to fill most of the billboard and emphasize that quality.
Surprise here is actually lower than the average US Static ad, but Happiness is much higher, and drives the ad to a strong 4.0-Star Rating. As the average US Static ad only scores 2.1-Stars, this actually puts Haagen-Dasz in the top 1% of outdoor ads for long-term growth potential. It’s an ad which uses color, branding and poster space extremely effectively to communicate joy and pleasure.
Outdoor ads offer the biggest canvas in advertising to creative brands. It’s hard to always use well – as that low average US score proves. But with imagination and a strong sense of branding, any marketer can take advantage of poster space and even step beyond it to bring an extra dimension that creates the OOH Factor.
Häagen-Dazs
Nice&Frank
Waitrose
Wonderhood Studios
MG OMD
Grand Visual
Talon
Decathlon
JCDecaux
O2H Creative Solutions