The Billboard as New Social Media Catalyst
The Intersection of Social and Outdoor Advertising
The Billboard as New Social Media
Here is an alternative consideration on your next outdoor advertising pitch. Position OOH as the driver of your client’s social media. Forget store visits, ticket sales or anything directly attributable to the billboard. Create content online by driving social media as the primary purpose encouraging consumer participation via the Outdoor Advertising. A selfie is typically the encouragement of choice.
As more OOH advertisers are using the medium, what has become popular is using OOH for social media promotion, moving away from the traditional or conventional purposes of buying OOH.
The new purpose?
Creating content for your social media. The appearance of OOH in selfies as step one in creating greater social media following has become a trend which may be around for sometime. Part of the fan experience? Why not? KC Royals baseball encouraging fans to take a selfie with their billboard and posting it for prizes.
Delta Airlines, from Wieden + Kennedy New York (and Colossal Media, the hand-painter), put scenes from nine destinations on a wall in Brooklyn. NYC’ers can take selfies and post on their profiles.
Gino Sesto, the founder of Dash Two, a Culver City ad agency, has a unique ad agency strength in understanding and working in online digital and outdoor. Typically the two are strange bedfellows. But not at Dash Two. Dash Two has brought both together. Sesto and Dash Two have carefully constructed a team planning and buying OOH all the while closely tracking the direction OOH is trending.
Here are a few thoughts from Gino Sesto on OOH.
In reference to Los Angles and Netflix interest in purchasing Regency Outdoor, he says, “Out here, billboards are almost like a TV Guide for them.” It’s how Sesto and others in the marketing and entertainment business find out what’s next for the digital content giant, and who’s hot.
“Billboards are a thing on social media. Taking selfies and including OOH in social media.” “It’s how an intangible thing becomes a tangible thing,” Sesto says — “how the blur of a roadside sign somehow turns into a piece of user-generated marketing”.
Read the full on article by P.J. Bednarki in Media Post’s Marketing Daily,
click here⇒ The Trusty Old Billboard Becoming A New Social Media Hit
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The Trusty Old Billboard Becoming A New Social Media Hit
Talk about stranger things: It might seem unusual that Netflix is reportedly willing to pay as much as $300 million for a billboard company. But it might make some sense, too.
Reuters last week reported the Netflix bid for Regency Outdoor Advertising, a company that has a lock on billboards on the Sunset Strip and other prime see-and-be-seen locations in Los Angeles. Neither company is commenting.
Netflix has been a good Regency customer. Billboards last year that proclaimed “Netflix Is A Joke” in L.A. caused a lot of social media buzz. Then it became clear in a commercial aired on last year’s Emmys telecast that it was Netflix’s way of hyping some new comedy enterprises.
says, “If you’re a company like Netflix spending $3 billion a year on content, you might as well consider buying that company.”
In Los Angeles, the ultimate company town, the blanket of Netflix billboards might seem like vanity advertising. Netflix is only the most obvious brand that is making the intersection of social and outdoor advertising a trend.
Netflix is only the most obvious brand that is making the intersection of social and outdoor advertising a trend.
The growth of digital, and particularly social media and smartphones, is changing the outdoor business, and Dash Two has placed its emphasis on ads appealing to the youth culture and appearing giant sized.
“In the last two or three years, it’s become so much more obvious to us,” Sesto says, and his company evolved from a wider-focused ad agency to one to its current outdoor and digital model.
For current example: Dash Two put up 18 billboards on the 130-mile stretch of I-10 Freeway from Los Angeles to the Coachella Music Festival. Concertgoers stopped on the way to shoot videos or take selfies in front of the signs and then post them to their social media accounts. That was the whole idea.
“It’s how an intangible thing becomes a tangible thing,” Sesto says — how the blur of a roadside sign somehow turns into a piece of user-generated marketing. When that’s not happening, it’s musicians creating time-lapse videos to chronicle their new billboards.
“It’s how an intangible thing becomes a tangible thing,
Sesto says few recording artists spend enough money or erect enough billboards to market themselves in a conventional sense via outdoor advertising. “They’re all doing it as a part of their social strategy,” he says, creating more content for their sites and connecting with their fans. If along the way they get a 12-foot-by-48-foot memento of their careers, that’s just a plus.
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