Top 10 Creatives in OOH 2024: Mendi Robinson

 

“OBIEs are great and all, but lifelong clients are what we’re chasing.”

by Amber Larkins, OOH Today

This week and next, we are highlighting the Top 10 Creatives in Out-of-Home 2024!

Today’s spotlight is Mendi Robinson, Vice President of Creative at Lamar Advertising Company

Mendi Robinson’s personal work primarily revolves around helping to market Lamar and build its brand. She’s most proud of Lamar’s recent brand refresh. As a Creative leader, she spends a lot of time educating and training folks on creating effective OOH.

She’s had a hand in two recent OBIE Awards, one for a Lamar self-promotional campaign and another for Kraft Foods. Her in-house marketing design team has also won several ADDY Awards. The one her team is the proudest of is Best of Show for the branding and execution of one of their Lamar Art Conferences. But awards are not what is most important to her.

“Getting the sale is 100% more important than awards,” Robinson said. “OBIEs are great and all, but lifelong clients are what we’re chasing.”

She often finds herself involved in projects where a client asks for something unique. These projects may require some research and development. Her role is to get the right people involved to bring these ideas to life. One example is last year’s Kraft “glow in the dark” campaign.

“I am most proud of being a resource and a champion and helping others get their high-concept work sold and on the street,” Robinson said.

But how does her team go about great OOH creative? It is a daily struggle, especially for local clients.

“The ability to exercise restraint is key,” Robinson said. “It takes patience and education by the seller and a lot of trust from the client.”

Ultimately, she believes a great concept is what will win the day. They try to get their local clients to really embrace a creative concept. This is in lieu of displaying and organizing lots of information about a business, which can make a billboard look like a business card and dissuade users from ingesting the information.

“People are so distracted these days with all of the visual clutter in the world,” Robinson said. “OOH literally has to reach out and grab them. It has to make them look up!”

The best OOH executions do that with a high-impact design featuring attention-grabbing elements such as strong visuals, colors, or copy.

“As creative directors, we’re problem solvers. It’s our job to take the client’s main objective and create a design that will solve it. There are many ways to do so, but the fun part is trying to evoke the right type of emotion and make that brand memorable,” Robinson said.

An antiquated OAAA document from the 1950s still holds true: “An effective poster will not tolerate a lazy adjective, cannot afford the luxury of an extra freckle, a useless shadow, nor condone an unemployed strawberry.” Robinson loves this unattributed quote. 

“As creative directors, we’re problem solvers. It’s our job to take the client’s main objective and create a design that will solve it.

Robinson believes that OOH has a job to do. When done well, it has an objective and design that gets the job done. Although not every design will be an OBIE winner, certain fundamentals, such as hierarchy, make the OOH effective.

For example, a directional is likely the answer if the client wants to drive foot traffic to their location. In that case “EXIT NOW” on a highway sign would be the most important and dominant design element. Do not buy directionals in a bar across the billboard’s bottom.

“Everything should have a purpose and OOH designers have a great understanding of where the eye goes visually and in what order. Trust their expertise,” Robinson said.

Designer expertise includes the onboarding of new technologies, such as AI. Lamar is finding ways to embrace AI for efficiency, including functions in Adobe Photoshop, as thought starters for copy lines, and finding the perfect image for a campaign.

“With most campaigns we create, we don’t have the budget nor timeline to hire a photographer to shoot the perfect image,” Robinson said. “‘Our stock photography partner is now offering an AI solution, so if you don’t see the perfect image, you can enter a prompt and it can generate a new image from the images in its database.”

Someone will speak about AI at the upcoming Lamar Art Conference in April.

Robinson views her counterparts at the other OOH companies as true friends, that work together as a collective unit to promote the out-of-home industry. She also believes in the importance of creative mentorship. She carves out time at least twice a year to host a class of LSU students at the Lamar corporate office and get them excited about out-of-home. She also has always admired Rob Jackson.

“I always admired Rob Jackson in our OOH world and looked up to him and his passion for what we do. Now, I get the opportunity to collaborate with him and ECP on several projects throughout the year,” Robinson said.