OPEN3 Open 3 Complete Book for OMA Website | Page 151

D I G I TA L O U T- O F - H O M E C R E AT I V I T Y
“A great site in a premium environment with
brilliant creative carries wonderful emotional
value.”
Neil Morris
Founder and CEO, Grand Visual
One of the unique things about Out-of-Home
(OOH) advertising is the profound, real-world
connection that a physical advertising site and
location can generate with an audience. A great
site in a premium environment with brilliant
creative carries wonderful emotional value;
comparatively, people rarely remember which
TV channel they saw a great advertisement on.

In 2005, I witnessed the world’s first digital
escalator panels being installed at Tottenham
Court Road tube station in London and saw the
potential of a digital canvas combined with a
premium location and a sophisticated audience.

For Grand Visual, this moment marked the
start of a journey in creative thinking, technology
expertise and production techniques for Digital
OOH (DOOH). Since then, the medium’s creative
evolution has come in phases. Looking back,
it is possible to see inflection points and the
campaigns that drove new modes of working and
greater creativity.
Our first foray into technology-driven

creativity featured the adoption of motion creative
as a rich storytelling device for the release of
the film Rocky Balboa. The creative mimicked
the film’s iconic sequence where Rocky runs to
the top of the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art. It took 22 separate panel executions to
create the impression that he was running up the
escalators and delivered a compelling narrative in
an immersive, emotive way.

As the platforms advanced, a handful of
media owners started to facilitate dynamic
content delivery. But with little standardisation,
each platform required different processes from
format specification through to file delivery,
limiting the ability to run multi-network, national
or international dynamic campaigns.

That’s why we developed OpenLoop: the first
dynamic DOOH campaign management platform
to allow advertisers to update creative across
multiple formats in one pass. Its road test came
during the 2010 World Cup with Nike’s Write
the future campaign, which tracked England’s
progress during the tournament. The activity
saw Nike’s brand team publish live post-match
commentary to multiple networks, targeting fans
on their way home from the game.

Instead of different networks and formats
working in silos, DOOH could now react in real
time with relevant copy to a broadcast audience
— an important milestone for the industry.

The next phase of creative development for
DOOH featured greater interaction. Smarter
technology allowed brands to surprise and delight
consumers in immersive experiences using a
range of techniques such as touch, gesture, face
and gender detection, Augmented Reality (AR),
near-field communications and beacons.

In 2011, Lynx’s Angel Ambush featured
members of the public using AR to interact with
virtual angels that miraculously fell from the
sky. The effect in situ was huge; but the real
audience came when online footage of the angel
encounters went viral. A one-off event was turned
into a campaign with global reach and generated
significant earned media worldwide.

Then came DOOH plus mobile – the perfect
marriage that works on so many levels – mobile as
remote control, user-generated content conduit,
integration via beacons, WiFi – the list goes on.

For the release of the film Despicable Me 2 in
2013, a mobile-controlled DOOH campaign was
rolled out that was personalised, geo-targeted
and multi-market. Passers-by interacted with on-
screen Minions by texting commands to see them
dance, wrestle, or pl