Outdoor advertising must embrace the power of context and emotion
Rob Atkinson, managing director at Clear Channel Outdoor UK, explains how the flexibility of outdoor advertising can achieve huge stand-out in the public space.
To take its rightful place as a lead medium, outdoor advertising must embrace the power of context and emotion. This was the message from leading creatives speaking at our seminar, Framing the message: Outdoor in the social space, held at The National Portrait Gallery in London earlier this month.
Ewan Paterson, managing partner at CHI & Partners, said outdoor should not be relegated to a support medium. “We have neglected what it can be – a brilliant way to make a brand famous.”
IPA president Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy Group UK, said the very best posters were “entertaining, enjoyable and beautiful” but also used “context and efficiency of messaging” to persuade and “nudge” consumers into action.
According to Sutherland, advertising has done “half the job” and we need to have a better understanding of human behaviour as an industry.
Sutherland said: “In advertising we’ve got to far better understand many of the things that actually tell us about how humans make decisions and how you can change behaviour and make it easy for them to act how we want them to act.
“You need them to realise that the second course of behaviour is more desirable than the first, and you need a trigger. The point of choosing is extraordinarily contextual. If you want someone to change behaviour, context has a ludicrously disproportionate effect.
“Posters, because of location specificity and digital outdoor’s time of day opportunities, have a huge part to play in this.”
At Clear Channel we have a national digital network which we will continue to grow in the UK this year. The flexibility offered by digital is enabling our industry to expand its pool of clients and take on other media.
The election season provided the backdrop to some innovative digital campaigns. Both the Labour and Conservative parties were quick to respond and adapt outdoor campaigns by message and location, while a consortium of independent creatives, led by Robin Wight of WCRS, incorporated Twitter feeds to drum up support for the Tories. One creative execution displayed the Tweet “Bigot Brown blunder: only the first of many in #Labour2015” only minutes after Gordon Brown’s bigot gaffe.
Right now, the technology is here to produce ever more sophisticated personalised campaigns. We are only really limited by investment, creative ideas and public buy-in. We must work together to deliver more interactive, opt-in campaigns that use dynamic and relevant copy.
In the UK, Beck’s took its Music Inspired Art campaign to another level on London’s streets through interactive, digital, plug and play 6-sheets that interpreted the music from consumers’ iPods on the bus shelter, then captured the image and automatically transferred it to a dedicated Flickr channel for all to view and share. A true example, like the election campaigns, of digital outdoor working in synergy with social media.
But it is not only digital outdoor that can provide flexible and timely solutions for clients. Outdoor provides the ultimate in location-based campaigns both at the point-of-sale and when using geo-demographic and lifestyle planning tools.
So outdoor can provide timely context, but it can also tap into the universal emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. An outdoor ad that employs emotional distinctivess can achieve huge stand-out in the public space.
At our Creative seminar, Rory Sutherland spoke about our medium’s “remarkable” ability to encapsulate the “big three” in terms of the creative proposition – Courtier (useful), Court Jester (funny) and Courtesan (sexy).
Paul Brazier, executive creative director at AMV BBDO, agreed, saying: “Everything is in play in a poster. They are there to be cherished and we should aim high to create the very best ones.”
As a media owner, we are committed to providing the highest quality sites, enhancing flexibility, interactivity and accountability, but most of all, working with clients and agencies to make their next big ideas happen.
It is not just about sharing what is possible, but working together to deliver the seemingly impossible.
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