Digital out of home (DOOH) is steadily proving its impact as a medium and finding its way into the media mix of more and more brands -- but there's still work to be done raising the overall quality of the creative work.
Done right, DOOH can have a massive impact in targeting, stopping power, media awareness, consumer influence, recall, sales lift, reach, and relevance. But getting the advertising spots right requires a lot of insight into the many unique characteristics and challenges of this fast-emerging new medium. Powerful, well-conceived creative is essential to this medium's continued growth.
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My company, Adcentricity, recently pulled together and released a multimedia reference guide that tapped industry experts, who've built up bodies of work and insight, for their thoughts and advice on designing and developing the best solutions for DOOH advertising.
In many respects, the challenges DOOH presents mirror those of online, going back a decade and more. Just like there were few standards and guidelines for ad banner shapes and formats, causing endless production headaches, DOOH networks are just starting to establish guidelines on ad and screen shapes, resolutions, and file formats. There are industry bodies such as POPAI that are making valiant efforts to outline and define a first-stage set of standards. We put this guide together to help add to the industry discussion and its body of knowledge.
Our findings while developing the guide confirm that network operators, planners, and creative people have learned the hard way that the medium is not TV. It's not digital posters. It's not a place-based version of the web. It is very much unique and idiosyncratic.
The first challenge is commonality -- because there's very little.
Digital screens are located on everything from gas pump tops and convenience store counters to office tower lobby walls and the corners of skyscraper elevators. In all, place-based and retail digital screens live in more than 70 consumer environments, within 14 different categories. Each of those environments has unique characteristics, and that can make the resulting creative matrix for a highly targeted national campaign very complex. Campaign creative tuned to the needs of audiences that are on the move won't necessarily work for different DOOH environments where there are tangible dwell times.
Getting DOOH advertising right requires a mix of practices and unique considerations. The medium is not static, and in most cases spots run as part of a loop or playlist, blended with contextually relevant content and venue-specific messages.
Successful creative work that shows a measurable impact relies on media agency and creative developers building an in-depth understanding of the environments where the creative is scheduled to run. Understanding "where" a consumer is and "what" they are doing at that moment is critical. That's a very new perspective to many on the creative side, particularly shops working mostly in digital. Knowing consumer environments, especially the retail environment, is typically a specialized discipline and requires new knowledge and new tools.
Getting DOOH creative right reads like a big challenge, but it can be easily navigated with a methodical approach. Leo Burnett once said great advertising could be boiled down to three simple messages: "Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it."
That was, and is, sound advice -- and a great foundation for DOOH ad creative.
''The approach isn't all that different from other types of creative development," says Jeremy Lockhorn, VP, emerging media, for creative shop Razorfish. "Understand the product, the audience, and the nature of the medium. DOOH, of course, requires some unique considerations: location, type of venue, availability of audio, etc. All of these factors can be very important to developing a successful DOOH ad."
The experts we tapped for the guide stressed the importance of collaboration between the agency and creative teams, and the need to get that dialogue happening early in the process. The profile of viewing audiences, by environment, also needs to be understood. Fortunately, there's usually data available to build that up. In some cases, sophisticated consumer analytic data -- like purchase intent profiling specific to a product or service -- are available. Such data are influential in shaping the style and approach of creative.
"Know who is in the venue, how long they are there, how long it takes them to move through the venue, through departments, where they stop, the traffic patterns, and so on. There is no such thing as too much information here," says Paul Flanigan, a partner with The Preset Group consultancy. "The more you know, the stronger and more appropriate the content will be for the environment."
Indeed, good creative execution requires consideration of factors including: environmental relevance; the number and frequency of spots; the impact of still and motion visuals; the clarity and conciseness of value propositions, service offers, and calls to action; the pros and cons of audio, copy size, and quantity; dwell times; loop lengths; and branding.
Brands and agencies are steadily increasing their level of activity in the DOOH sector -- something we're reliably seeing quarter by quarter. If the medium is to continue to grow and mature, great creative execution will need to evolve from the exception to the norm.
Jeff Atley is the co-founder and vice president of Adcentricity.
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