System1 JCDecaux OOH of the Month

Welcome to System1 and JCDecaux UK’s OOH Of The Month!

Out Of Home advertising gives brands a chance to be playful. Our three ads this month rely on double meanings, some visual and some verbal. You might not get the point at first sight, but given longer attention or repeated exposure, you’ll understand. This kind of playfulness – meeting the audience halfway and letting them do a little of the work – can be a risk and obscure branding or messages – but the rewards are high. Engaging your audience’s brains as well as their senses increases the chance of making a longer-term impression.

Our first ad from Waitrose in the UK is built around a spicy World Cup pun – “It’s Cumin Home”, with the word “Cumin” replaced by picture of a jar of cumin from the brand’s Cooks’ Ingredients range. Obviously it’s a play on the “It’s coming home” chorus of Three Lions, but the audience response isn’t so much about the joke itself as its source. It’s surprising and refreshing for Waitrose to be making this kind of silly pun.

That shows in the Test Your Ad results, with both higher than normal Star Rating (showing long-term effectiveness) and a particular spike in Amusement. Amusement is one of the Types of Happiness we measure in Test Your Ad Outdoor, and it’s the one most associated with increased effectiveness. If you can make your audience smile with your poster, you’ve gone a long way down the road to an effective Out Of Home ad.

Our second ad, from Corona in South Africa, aims for different types of happiness – it scores particularly well on Excitement. This ad isn’t making a pun, but it’s engaging in visual playfulness, as a beautiful picture of a sunset is framed in such a way that the rays of the setting sun form the shape of a Corona bottle. The brand has overlaid that with the bottle’s label as a pattern in the shadows.

It’s an image which takes a moment to take in fully, with the tagline “It’s Sunset Time” setting up the sensory pleasure of a relaxing evening beer, and potentially nightlife to come. The ad’s 3-Star score beats our global norm on Test Your Ad Outdoor, and key associations like “relaxing” show the ad is hitting the right vibe. But Brand Fluency is low, showing the risks of visual playfulness, when you can’t be sure your audience is coming away knowing the ad is yours.

That’s not a problem for our third ad, from McDonalds in France, which scores an exceptional 97% Brand Fluency for its pictures of McFlurrys with a logo and slogan in the corner. It’s attention-getting and strongly branded. The ad is part of a wider campaign from TBWA/Paris, with identical products and captions whose meaning shifts 180 degrees with a simple change in language.

In this ad, in fact, there’s no change in the language at all. The ad is based on the double meaning of “echecs” in French – both the game of chess, but a general term for failure (echec). So the ad is saying a McFlurry is what you need when you’re the king of chess… but also when you’re the king of failures. Whatever the occasion, McDonalds is there. Whether people get the joke or not, that sky-high Fluency score means they certainly get the brand.

And that’s what playful language or visual puns can do for a brand – not just amuse people, but hold onto their attention for that second or two longer to help a brand get noticed and stick to the audience’s minds. For brands looking for that Out Of Home OOH factor, a playful attitude can be a powerful secret weapon.