OOH Of The Month —November

 

OOH Of The Month: Consistency Wins the Holiday Race

The Holiday season is big news on every advertising platform, and Out Of Home is no exception. It may not get as much attention as the Christmas ad race on TV, but the nation’s billboards are a marketing battleground in the run-up to Christmas. Naturally, System1’s Test Your Ad Static – the most accurate way of predicting out-of-home effectiveness – has been rating some of the brands making new Out Of Home work this festive season. There’s a clear winner, and a clear lesson: creative consistency pays.

Before that, let’s have a look at a runner-up campaign from Coke – “Everybody Could Be Santa” – which also shows off consistent assets. On the System1 platform it got a Good 3-Star score, with heavy use of “Coke Red” in the color scheme giving it at-a-glance distinctiveness. Coke is the master of using assets consistently and well, especially its distinctive shade of red: while most of the attention this Christmas has been on its AI-enhanced “Holidays Are Coming” remix (which scored 5-Stars on Test Your Ad, despite the criticism) its Santa campaign is a reminder that its brand associations with Christmas go back decades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Santa also features very heavily in Cadbury’s Christmas campaigns, which are our two other Out Of Home winners this month. Both demonstrate consistency in different ways. The lower-scoring, Cadbury’s Advent campaign, has a Good out-of-home ad backing up a Strong, 4-Star digital campaign. “What Are You Counting Down To?” is the slogan, promoting the brand’s Advent Calendars while putting a personal spin on the season. It’s the strong cross-platform performance that makes this one stand out.

But the best Christmas Out Of Home campaign we’ve seen – also from Cadbury – is their Secret Santa campaign. For a lot of people this will be a familiar sight – they’ve run identical ads now for three years. But that hasn’t lessened its effectiveness. Quite the opposite – on System1’s Test Your Ad platform the Secret Santa Out Of Home ad gets an Exceptional 5.5-Star Rating for long-term business impact, as well as an Exceptional short-term Spike Rating and strong Brand Fluency.

The Out-Of-Home poster, showing a Cadbury Secret Santa delivery office, is backed up by a maximum 5.9-Star Rating TV ad showing the postmaster from the poster explaining how to activate the poster to send a Secret Santa chocolate gift. It’s an activation which needs both the Out Of Home poster and the explainer to work, and the 5-Star responses to both ads shows that “wear-in”, when audiences warm to an ad over time, is definitely a factor in making it such a success.

So why is creative consistency so important to building up that Ooh Factor which makes a great Out Of Home ad? System1’s latest report, Compound Creativity, goes into detail as to why it’s such a critical ingredient for ads across every media.

The report looks at over a dozen factors that indicate creative consistency, which it divides into three main building blocks.

looks at over a dozen factors that indicate creative consistency

There’s Consistent Creative Foundations, like a long-term brand-agency relationship: Cadbury’s agency VCCP has been behind their award winning campaigns since 2017.

There’s a Culture of Consistency – rejecting ideas like “wear-out” in favor of a recognition that the most effective campaigns embrace longer-term goals, aren’t afraid to reuse what works, and understand the value of entertaining the audience by putting on a show. In Cadbury’s case, repeating their creative each year for the successful Secret Santa campaign isn’t a lack of imagination – it’s an acknowledgement that when you have something brilliant, you stick with it.

And finally there’s Consistent Execution – keeping a commitment to brand assets, characters, slogans, songs, and other recurring elements. Both Coke and Cadbury are ultra-consistent in taking ownership of a color – red in Coke’s case, purple in Cadbury’s – and using it as the base for successful executions.

What the Compound Creativity report shows is that over the longer term, the most consistent brands are significantly more likely to create both branding and business effects via their campaigns. It’s a recipe for success that pays off at high-stakes times of the marketing calendar, like Christmas. Cadbury’s Secret Santa campaign has the OOH Factor this month – and we’d expect to see it next December too.

Credits
Brand: Cadbury
Agency: VCCP
Brand: Coca-Cola
Agency: VML