The industry’s favourite OOH campaigns
Opinion – Week in focus
For Future of OOH Week, The Media Leader will be spotlighting OOH campaigns chosen by you, our readers. To kick things off, Nick Manning looks back at some football favourites.
As everyone knows, this is a special year for football.
Eric Cantona was born sixty years ago on 24 May, so it’s slightly too late to celebrate his actual birthday, but it is a good time to celebrate this poster.
It appeared just before the 1996 Euros that began on 8 June that year.
It was one of a series of outdoor executions for Nike that Simons Palmer created and Manning Gottlieb Media (as we were known then) placed.
The media work involved Colin Gottlieb handpicking 96- and 48-sheet sites linked to the tournament and/or generating mass anticipation.
At the time, this approach to Outdoor was highly original, and the work was unlike anything seen before.
There have been many similar uses of posters since, such were the successes of Nike’s use of OOH at that time.
Some of the other posters in the series created a similar reaction, thanks to their visual effect and location, but perhaps the greatest tribute was the poster created by Manchester City to welcome Carlos Tevez in 2009.
He was transferred from Manchester United to City, causing all manner of ructions. The poster poked fun at the fact that United are not really in Manchester (don’t write in).
The poster execution predictably sparked a reaction, but this time with a massive social media component.
Predictably enough, this execution spawned copycats, including the Mary Earps gable end below.
All of this goes to prove that the world’s oldest medium can be incredibly powerful when there is a highly impactful creative execution and great placement, usually as part of a multi-platform strategy. Those social feeds get buzzing.
Let’s see if AI can ever beat the NI * that can produce work this powerful.
*Natural Intelligence.
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, which offers strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industries, and is the non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance.