Winners of the 2015 Cannes Outdoor Lions highlighted not only the enduring power of a traditional poster with a strong image and killer tagline, but also how the category is now an arena for the dazzling evolution of creative tech, with billboards reacting in real time to mobile devices, the weather and even the gaze of the passer-by. When it comes to outdoor, Tim Cumming and Carol Cooper discover, space has no frontiers.
We inhabit an information landscape in which increasingly smart tech signals our position as we progress through a dense net of wi-fi, GPS, QR codes and Blippar, all overlaid on the great outdoors. Whether on the motorway, public transport or walking along the high street, the out-of-home experience is evolving and adapting quicker than perhaps any other. Across the globe, traditional outdoor sites – billboards, bus stops and train stations – are being revolutionised by augmented reality and real-time interactivity.
For example, this spring saw the arrival of posters that know when you’re looking at them [see box out, overleaf, for more on artificially intelligent billboards]. The spookily interactive Look At Me campaign was created by WCRS for Women’s Aid to highlight the importance of not turning a blind eye to domestic violence, picking up a gold Outdoor Lion at Cannes this year. A series of digital posters features images of models who have been beaten and bruised. If the posters are ignored, the faces remain unchanged, but once passers-by look at the screen, facial-recognition tech activates a reaction – the bruises begin to fade and the models’ faces are healed.
Train delays aid consumer gaze
Less high-tech but also eye-catching was Audi’s Waterloo Motion campaign, which saw a 40m x 3m HD screen dominating London’s Waterloo Station concourse for two weeks in February last year. Created by BBH London and produced by Grand Visual, it displayed dynamic content –interesting and unusual station facts plus useful info such as availability of seats on departing trains – to two million commuters a week, refreshing every two minutes to ensure audiences remained engaged. Waterloo Motion even benefited from train delays, delivering an estimated 17 minutes of dwell time as commuters awaited trains. “The challenge was to keep such a vast audience engaged,” says Matt Doman, then CD at BBH. “We came up with a dynamic concept where the data on the Audi Dashboard was never the same twice.” Also, live Twitter feed, #AudiWaterloo, allowed commuters to participate in the on-screen conversation. Mobile devices have of course allowed for a whole new world of posters and punters connecting. While things we used to do outside – meeting friends, shopping, exploring – can now be done wirelessly indoors – the hard data reveals most of us still like to get out and about: 90 per cent of Xmas 2014 sales shoppers, for example, went out to real shops. But we don’t leave home unconnected – 2015 figures from the Global Web Index show that 80 per cent of us use smartphones to access the internet, so the augmented reality of dynamic outdoor campaigns can hit a winning home run when it comes to consumers on the move.
The weather outside
While out-of-home campaigns find a fruitful pairing with mobile tech, another force to be harnessed is the weather; there is plenty of that outdoors. In 2013, digital OOH agency Posterscope created a campaign for Stella Artois Cidre featuring billboard spots triggered by weather data delivered via a real-time plug-in. A two-degree increase in local temperature activated the content. Last year, Nokia Glove Love employed the weather as its leading player on a heat-sensitive billboard. Working with Do The Green Thing (the folks behind Earth Hour), Nokia created a message that became clearer as the weather got colder. That message was that Nokia Lumia devices have screens so sensitive they can be used with gloves on. Tom Messet, digital director of travel tech start-up Eviivo, was head of digital Nokia Europe at the time and said: “To attract attention in today’s media landscape, we have to surprise and delight consumers. A static out-of-home placement is a bit too obvious. People don’t react to them in the same way anymore.”
The results of this year’s Outdoor Lions suggest otherwise – static ‘old-fashioned’ billboards have not had their day. The Apple iPhone 6 World Gallery, part of the Shot On iPhone 6 campaign, took home five gold Lions and the outdoor Grand Prix for a simple, low-tech concept of crowdsourcing images from the public sphere. Using images from 162 ordinary iPhone 6 users, in more than 10,000 installations in 75 cities in 25 countries, it created what Apple called “the largest mobile photography gallery in history”. Talking to Fast Company, Juan Carlos Ortiz, the Outdoor jury president, CEO/president of DDB Latina and creative chairman of DDB Americas, admired how it overturned traditional media strategies that rely on content from professional photographers. “It’s not just a great idea, it’s a game changer,” he said. “It’s really opening up a new way of doing things and changing behaviour.”
Merging magic with purity
Other Outdoor gold winners included traditional posters that packed a punch, such as Lew’LaraTBWA São Paulo’s campaign for Save the Children, which highlighted exploitation in clothing manufacturing with ‘fashion shots’ that on closer inspection revealed images of suffering children trapped in textiles’ patterns. Ogilvy & Mather London’s anti-FGM campaign for 28toomany.org brilliantly conveyed wince-inducing pain in images of stitched-up national flags paired with the line ‘Female genital mutilation doesn’t only happen in far away places,’ along with stats of the number of girls at risk in European countries.
This year’s Outdoor Lions attracted a whopping 5,037 entries, making it the festival’s most popular category. “We didn’t choose the Grand Prix, the Grand Prix chose us,” said Ortiz. “We were looking for work that merged the purity and simplicity of outdoor with the magic of innovation.”
Something that out-of-home platforms look set to achieve well into the future.
Membership
