Digital innovation has revolutionised outdoor advertising
Nicky Cheshire, sales director at Alive, talks about technological innovation in the outdoor space…
The complexity of life has been steadily increasing since the end of the Second World War but we have become adept at dealing with it. The number of people who say they don’t mind living with the increasing complexity of life is also increasing and we are now in a stage where being busy is seen as a badge of honour.
Consumer habits have changed in a generation. There are more people spending more time out of home, doubling since the 1960s. This is partly due to the rise in house prices in urban centres, which has forced people to move further out and subsequently led to more hours commuting. The UK average is now 45 minutes, which is a 20% rise over the last decade.
With this in mind, a new space has emerged. The two old spaces of home and work are now joined by this third space out of home. Space between home and work was always considered dead or down time; time to relax, read the newspaper, listen to the radio, and look out of a window. But more time out of home combined with technological advances means old dead time spaces are being used in entirely new ways. Do we really ever have any time to kill anymore?
Travelling longer distances for longer periods in theory should be increasing our dead time but as consumers we no longer see it as dead time. Blackberrys and global mobile penetration are making this space hugely productive. In the post war years, technological advances were all seen as being labour saving and freeing up time, however, they have had the opposite effect and keep us up to date in a 24 hour world. This has led to a new media currency; the mobile consumer is worth a lot more than an immobile consumer. Mobile consumers are more likely to spend spontaneously.
The context is blurring on the definitions of what people are doing while out and about, for example, people are ‘meeting’ socially online while at work. As these lines start to blur it becomes more difficult to engage consumers with a straight forward broadcast message anymore. We are moving increasingly from a broadcast to narrow cast, from push to pull advertising. User generated content is becoming the norm. Digital innovations have revolutionised how content is delivered to consumers in this Outdoor space.
One of the more interesting campaigns we’ve seen this year was work for Intel, which moved from video to HTML on Cross Track Projection screens and saw them publish web-pages on to screens in real time, directly merging online and out of home content for the first time.
Digital Outdoor is also excellent at driving consumers online. A recent campaign for a fake brand called Computer Tan.com, which implied that you could get a tan from looking at your computer screen ran on Cross Track projection on the Underground. By the end of the first week over 400,000 had visited the website, which actually warned about the dangers of skin cancer. The engaging content and the fact that consumers are in an environment where they welcome content proves that digital Outdoor works well. But content needs to be engaging.
One of the biggest challenges is that digital outdoor is an entirely new channel. It draws on elements of TV, online and traditional posters but a straight transfer of TV assets on to a screen just doesn’t work for the consumer. Recent research done in conjunction with University College London showed that consumers are engaged by what they termed ‘reality-ness’ in digital screen advertising. The consumer naturally expects more from digital screens due to the exposure they have had to high end computer and gaming consoles.
New clients have been able to harness this and it has brought new spenders to out of home who can take advantage of being able to change copy instantly; but this is still an area that is yet to be exploited to the full. Consumers are in a constant ‘ready to know’ state of mind. They don’t expect to have to search too hard or too long for information any longer. Instant news, holiday availability, online purchases, all things we expect to be able to do and get now; and we will lose patience quickly if this doesn’t happen. This year we have seen advertisers tap in to this and have run campaigns that have realised the power of the here and now for the consumer. British Airways and The Evening Standard have run ‘live’ campaigns with continually updating copy; Camelot have played out instant jackpot messages and Marks and Spencer ran a countdown to lunch.
We are also seeing more combined uses of digital and static sites together. A recent campaign for the re-brand of Five USA saw a whole platform at Oxford Circus turned into a replica of a New York subway station. Cross track projection within this was feeding a direct live feed from a New York street, in real time, to capture the essence of the city. Going forward it is imperative that digital outdoor media owners can show advertisers that it is not just about context in terms of placement of screens but that content plays an equal part. Time to kill may be dead but have we created time to thrill instead?
CBS Outdoor will be exhibiting at Media Playground on 4th June 2009 – for more information and to book your place at one of the seminars, visit www.media-playground.co.uk