Cracking the creativity code: how to win at The Art of Outdoor®
By Marie Le Hur, marketing director of Ocean Outdoor UK.
There’s something quite intoxicating about seeing your work in the public realm. How it can interact with audiences and the immediate surroundings. How it makes people feel, the environment often providing cues to deliver contextual relevance.
The choice about where your ad appears magnifies the meaning, relevance and the purity of the creative idea. Premium Out of Home has authority. It provides a service, both for the brand and the immediate community. It’s trusted and creates a lasting impression. And when people pause to look up and capture it on their phones, that work travels beyond the streets and across time.
Special builds, large format screens in high footfall areas, destinations that accommodate the wizardry of 3D DeepScreen® and other technology are all designed to surprise and entertain, elevating brands beyond the everyday.
The creative potential has always been Ocean’s starting point. At its most premium, DOOH is a great ‘signaller’ for what’s to follow. At its most fundamental, what we call The Art of Outdoor is about delivering quality advertising for brands and partners, quality being the key delivery pillar.
It’s a mindset, not just a brand proposition – and it’s what makes Ocean different.
The creative imperative
As a channel we continually evolve, a combination of better screens, new formats and locations, sophisticated technology and audience data providing even greater opportunities for brands, agencies and creatives to create focused, thoughtful work that delivers real world results.
Techniques like immersive 3D elevate DOOH advertising, taking work to the next level. DeepScreen® is one of the most significant creative leaps in recent years. Not only does it make more impactful advertising, but independent research has shown that audiences spend more time with it and quite often they will share it online too (source: Opinium study 2023). It’s creative priming, offering multiple benefits to brands in one go.
A point we continue to make is that large format, full motion DOOH primes pretty much every other media channel (not to mention small format DOOH), enhancing online activity, driving search and creating brand fame. Ultimately, having DOOH on your plan makes the rest of your campaign work harder, and multiple studies have proven how large format and full motion video deliver beyond standard static DOOH. As the advertising commentator Bob Hoffman recently observed, with the advantage of aesthetic distinction, everyday brands and products are elevated to surprising levels of success.
Automation is without question another benefit. But we firmly believe that not all impacts are equal, another reason why our clients Ask For it by Name. By that, we mean seeking out the most notable brand building city locations for their creative prowess, turning Spaces into Places.
Understanding the best OOH opportunities for your brand comes down to experience, trust and local knowledge that can’t be fully automated. We always say great OOH is planned on the streets, not the spreadsheets. I’d encourage all creatives to go on The Great ADventure, our series of guided city and site tours. Nothing beats that real life feeling, experiencing the environment and nuances of each screen and location.
Where creative problems are shared
In a recent WOO article, DOOH expert Dino Burbidge reminds us that creatives want wisdom and guidance – to be able to plug into savvy OOH experts. Ocean Labs and Ocean Studio are our incubators for the best creative thinking, offering deep understanding and practical steers about how to make ideas sing. They serve as both horizon scanners (looking for new innovation that we can apply to OOH in the future), and as technical producers, navigating OOH’s unique challenges.
This is where the real magic happens. Where immersive, live, programmable DOOH stages – like Ocean® Showcase and Ocean® Portal – are evolved to enhance the story.
Ocean Labs also derisks the process and project manages the end-to-end execution. New concepts and tech powered activations are test driven, ideas brainstormed, dilemmas addressed and niggles overcome.
Ocean Studio is our in-house creative production team, where DeepScreen was born. It’s also the place to troubleshoot the nitty gritty around site specs, sight lines, the best use of light and shade, and any other OOH design quirk. Alongside all this, Ocean Studio has built a burgeoning client base for filming and producing assets for integrated global campaigns, from social first content to showreels, working with brands like Versace and VW, Disney and HBO.
When Out of Home delivers
Here are three great examples:
Our annual Digital Creative Competition invites and then gives space to bold, new concepts which push the medium in new directions. Over the years, the most compelling ideas have made the chosen technology feel effortless. Winners like TBWA\MCR’s Dodge the Finger billboard for cancer charity Prost8 keep the message at the heart of the campaign, with interactive technology applied that doesn’t take over but facilitates the narrative perfectly.
With two retro arcade style billboard games hosted by Printworks Manchester and Westfield Stratford City, the interaction rate averaged 40 plays per hour. For a contactless, walk-up experience in busy public environments, this level of sustained engagement is significant. The real measure of impact came quickly. Within days of the Printworks activation, enquiries to Prost8’s patient triage service had increased fivefold, a direct and meaningful signal that the campaign was reaching and moving the people who needed to hear it the most.
A while back, the emergence of fake OOH caused a bit of commotion when some creators started posting random CGI content across social channels. Some borrowed the stature of real OOH, like the underground and well known poster sites, to share content which duped some followers into thinking it was real. For media owners, using the power of a medium they had not actually invested in, naturally did not sit well.
Ocean Creator, our new offering in partnership with Creator by Infinitum, pairs inherently shareable premium OOH locations with a roster of creators aligned to individual briefs, allowing brands to select partners based on style, target audience and specialist focus. The result is highly memorable content which puts outdoor at the centre of the story, thereby extending its reach.
The launch of Ocean Creator with Sky to mark its Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games coverage guaranteed a reach goal across both DOOH and social. In the end, the campaign, which matched Piccadilly Lights, Liverpool Media Wall and Westfield Stratford City with content creators Chemmy Alcott, The Berry Brothers and Blind Tobes, over delivered on socials by 21% and OOH by 15%. Most importantly, the on-screen campaign and creator appearances were 100% real.
Back in the real world, Disney + took over Ocean Showcase and Battersea Power Station’s vintage analogue photobooth as part of a guest screening for Raising Chelsea, its three part reality TV series starring Sophie Habboo and Jamie Laing. Content from the OOH activation was shared across the stars’ TikTok channel, generating a further 186,100 views, and visitors were invited to take their own spontaneous photobooth pictures.
Expand your horizons
New opportunities for the creative community this year include the UK launch of Ocean Portal (below), an immersive, interactive brand experience which debuted at London’s Battersea Power Station last week. Contact Ocean Studio or Ocean Labs for more information.
To get inspired by a guided site tour in one of our cities, email [email protected].
Recently called the “last level playing field of creative awards ” by one of our Gold award winners, anyone with a great idea can enter our annual Digital Creative Competition. And if you win, Ocean Labs will work with you to make it happen. You can find out more here.
Marie Le Hur is the marketing director of Ocean Outdoor UK.
