OOH OF THE MONTH SEPTEMBER 2025

In this month’s column we’ll look at three ads which use brand assets in simple but creative ways to get attention and create the OOH Factor. Two of them play visually on the packaging itself, one uses a celebrity to put the brand into an incongruous setting.

To start with, Burger King in the UK recruited celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay to advertise their new ultra-premium Wagyu burger. The poster is part of a wider “Not Made By Gordon” promotional push, the idea being that while Gordon Ramsay didn’t in fact create the £11 luxury burger, he wishes he had. On the poster, Burger King brings this idea to life by having a hungry Ramsay looking through a window at a Wagyu burger in all its glory, with a BK drink and its prominent logo alongside.

It’s a witty advert which inverts the codes of restaurant cuisine and fast food, with the top chef being shut out of this culinary experience. The surprise of Ramsay’s involvement is what makes it a memorable ad and a good use of the BK brand codes, which ensure an above average Star Rating on System1’s Test Your Ad Outdoor platform. The top associations for the ad are with the brand and burgers. On its own this isn’t the strongest Burger King outdoor performance, but it’s designed to work as part of an integrated campaign and a reminder of the limited edition Wagyu offer.

Our other ads keep things simpler, to more powerful effect. From the US we have an elegantly minimal poster for Dunkin, in which the Dunkin takeout package forms the shape of a small house – the message being simply a reminder that you can enjoy Dunkin coffee and donuts at home.

This kind of no-frills ad only gets an average score on long-term Star Rating, but that’s not where its effectiveness lies. It does better than average on the other key metrics on our Test Your Ad platform, short-term Spike Rating (predicting a sales boost from the ad) and Brand Fluency, our measure of rapid recognition. In fact, where the ad performs exceptionally well is on Fast Fluency, which is the proportion of viewers recognizing the ad in the first two seconds exposure. Dunkin gets an 87% score here, well into the top 10% of outdoor ads. Simplicity, and a very neat use of brand assets, is the key to scoring that level of instant recognition.

Finally, back to the UK for our top Outdoor ad of the month, for Walkers crisps. Walkers have created a very striking, simple but clever multi-colored billboard to advertise their three most popular flavours – Cheese and Onion, Ready Salted and Salt and Vinegar crisps. There’s a punning tagline – “Everyone Has A Flavourite” – but it’s the visual design that makes the ad stand out. The Walkers logo is created by the ingredients of each flavor laid over a crisp with a background representing the color of the packet. So there’s a strip of cheese with some sliced onion; a sprinkling of salt; and a stain of vinegar.

It’s a lovely bit of art direction which is making a bet that Walkers’ logo is so iconic people will recognize it just from the visuals without needing to look at the small print underneath. And the bet pays off. The ad scores well across the board, with above average Fast Fluency and short-term Spike Rating, as well as a long-term Star Rating score of 3.5-Stars, well into the top 30% of all UK Outdoor ads. So this ad is a jack of all trades, making audiences peckish in the short term while also reminding them of a brand they know and love.

Just as with the Dunkin ad, Walkers are taking a powerful brand asset and letting it do the work to create an ad that’s effective immediately. Burger King have a more complicated message to convey, but still use their assets well to twist viewer expectations. Cultivating a consistent visual identity is a major part of creative consistency, something we’ve studied in-depth at System1, as our The Creative Dividend report shows. Do it well and you have assets you can leverage in outdoor advertising to reliably deliver the OOH Factor.

Credits

Walkers
VCCP

Burger King
BBH

Dunkin
BBH USA
PSOne