Is OOH making a comeback while we WFH? OMG.
Georgia Humphrey explores how advertisers are utilising out-of-home advertising while everyone is still very much inside-of-home.
You might have seen this KitKat ad doing the rounds this week — tapping into our collective despair over endless Zoom meetings, and our desire to ‘have a break’ (regardless of whether or not you have a KitKat). While you’d think OOH would be out of the conversation right now, with people staying closer to home, according to The Drum, ‘people can’t get enough of billboards’.
The World Federation of Advertisers reported that out-of-home ad spend was down by 49% for the first half of 2020, but there were some standout campaigns making waves online for their innovative strategy.
This has been true throughout the pandemic. If we go back to March, Emily Snacks made headlines with their self-burn advertising, pointing out how poorly timed their first OOH advertising campaign was. ‘Our first ever poster, seen by one pigeon and a runner. Typical.’
Tom Fishburne spoke at the Festival of Marketing 2020 about the difficulties of lockdown advertising, in Emily Snacks case committing “to their first advertising campaign at the end of 2019, planning for an outdoor ad campaign, unfortunately not realising that it would run in the summer in the UK when everybody was sheltering. Rather than pull the ad or run completely generic advertising, they decided to have a bit of humour about the situation they were in.” The ad made significant waves, in no small part due to the ‘affiliate humor’ used here — linking the brand’s annoyance over their disrupted campaign to the collective annoyances of the viewer. It’s extremely relatable.
Wine company HUN tried a similar thing, putting a new billboard up at the precise spot that they would have had their launch party — if launch parties hadn’t become suddenly illegal. Ouch. This style of advertising serves as a welcome antidote to the endless ‘we’re all in this together’ happy smiley TVCs. Sometimes things are rubbish, and pointing that out is extremely cathartic.
In 2021 however, OOH is showing positive signs of getting back on its feet — according to VIOOH’s Jean-Christophe Conti. Now that advertisers have had a year to come up with new and innovative ways to promote products, to a largely captive audience, it’s no wonder that they’re upping the anti. Marmite has also made headlines this week with their… explosive new flavour.
Part billboard, part art installation, this piece by Adam&eveDDB, in partnership with Mindshare and Kinetic, features the new chilli flavour ‘Marmite Dynamite’ exploding out of the bounds of its billboard, popping the Marmite lid into an unfortunate nearby car — with companion ads featuring lids hooked on nearby trees, having been shot straight up into the air.
The fact is, the only leisure activity we have, in the UK at least, is wandering around outside. It stands to reason then, that after the initial lockdown shock, advertisers have now pivoted to giving us something special to look at while we try to make the walk to Tesco as interesting as possible.
For Sam Hennig, this meant an ad that isn’t even a real ad going viral and capturing the attention of the very brand it features. That’s right, the KitKat billboard is not official Nestle advertising, but in fact created by Hennig for Twitter challenge One Minute Briefs. I was disappointed too.
Speaking to The Drum this week, Hennig tells the story of the mockups creation; ‘I was scrolling through my calendar to have a look for when I could do the brief, and the idea came. ‘If I just block out that section there’ bingo. I just filled the space with a ‘block’ of KitKat. It was the perfect visual to show why we all love chocolate. It very quickly tells a story of that little moment of me-time and self-indulgence in an otherwise hectic day.’
Clearly, Hennig is on to something. One Minute Briefs gained 2,000 new followers, the original LinkedIn posts Hennig made have received over 80,000 likes, and the official KitKat twitter commended him on his excellent work.
Brands, take note!
