OOH Of December —Cadbury, Starbucks and Coca-Cola

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.

Outdoor and print advertising gives brands a canvas to experiment, but not all experiments pay off right away. When you’re looking for the OOH Factor, it’s important to celebrate the brands taking creative risks with outdoor work, and System1’s Test Your Ad Pro platform lets us zoom in on what’s working even in ads with low scores. So this month we’ve got three risk-takers, some of which hit the target right away, while some perform in more subtle ways.

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.

OOH OF THE MONTH DECEMBER

In video advertising, Christmas is the season where the ads get more emotional and heartwarming and where the Test Your Ad scores rise that bit higher. It turns out Out Of Home advertising is just the same. We’ve been spotlighting the good, the great and the innovative in static and poster ads all year and for the holiday season we’re looking at three ads which represent the season of goodwill, with Test Your Ad scores to match.

You might think it’s easy to make ads with the OOH Factor at Christmas – the festive season is full of familiar imagery that brings comfort and joy to audiences. But remember there’s Brand Fluency to take into account too – generic Christmas imagery can make your brand get a little lost. So these ads are from brands which put their own distinctive spin on Christmas with posters that are easy to recognize and bring that festive feelgood vibe.

There’s one brand who’s been doing that longer than any other – Coca-Cola, whose ad this month is running on subway trains in the US. “Take The Express To Refreshment” runs the ad, and it shows a jolly Santa swigging from a bottle of Coke. Coke have a strong claim to have popularized the red-suited Santa we know and love, and it’s no wonder they use him prominently on their ad.

It’s also no wonder they land an Exceptional score on Fast Fluency – the proportion of viewers correctly identifying the brand within a couple of seconds of seeing the ad. Coca-Cola’s Christmas imagery is quite simply part of the culture – when we look at consumer verbatims for the ad in the Test Your Ad Pro report, the top scoring positive comment is simply “I love Coca Cola’s ads during holiday season”. The ad also gets a very good 3.6-Star Rating, putting it in the top 10% of Out Of Home ads in terms of long term effectiveness.

Starbucks are another brand with plenty of strong brand imagery, but they’re trying something a little different this Christmas, with a poster ad tying in to their “Together Is The Best Place To Be” campaign in the UK. The ad, created with agency Anomaly, shows the hand-drawn figures from the Starbucks cups in the TV commercial drawing a festive star on top of a scrumptious looking cup of seasonal coffee.

The combination of old assets and new – the strongly branded cups and the new cartoon figures – combine to make an ad that audiences have no problem identifying. Its Brand Fluency score was an exceptional 99%. Meanwhile the homespun feeling of the ad evoked surprise and happiness – people weren’t expecting something as simple as a drawing but they loved the cosy feeling Starbucks brought to the ad, with a good rating both on long-term Star Rating and short-term Spike Rating.

For our final ad we’re staying in the UK as Cadbury’s roll out its Secret Santa campaign with agency VCCP once again. For the last several years the chocolate brand has been running this promotion involving sending secret chocolates to loved ones, and it’s caught the British public’s imagination every time. It’s become one of Cadbury’s most effective and beloved assets, demonstrating the commercial virtue of creative consistency (as described in our Compound Creativity report). The poster has a magical feel, showing a secret Santa sorting office with chocolate waiting on the shelves to be delivered – all in that distinctive Cadbury purple, of course.

The Secret Santa poster is our most effective of the month. In fact it’s one of the most effective Out Of Home ads we’ve ever tested, landing our maximum 5.9-Star Rating on Test Your Ad, creating double the Happiness of the average UK outdoor image. People love the intrigue, the mystery and the generosity of the Secret Santa idea and the poster captures it perfectly. “It’s a great idea” and “I love the idea” are some of the highest scoring comments. All that purple also helps it to an exceptional Fast Fluency rating too, with near-instant recognition from 83% of viewers.

Christmas is a special time for emotional advertising, and these three ads prove that brands who invest in strong assets are perfectly placed to make the most of it. Of course, there’s no reason for brands not to pursue the OOH Factor all year round, and we wish all outdoor marketers a happy and effective New Year!

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