Think your DOOH creative stands out? Here is how to know for sure

Opinion

Motion in DOOH is a powerful tool. Vista Media’s Martine Hammink explains how to ensure it enhances the campaign’s creative.

Knowing that motion improves digital out-of-home (DOOH) performance is one thing. Ensuring your motion creative is genuinely delivering is another, and, in my experience, that second part is where most campaigns quietly underperform. Impactful DOOH creative is ultimately where success lies, and adding motion with attention tool analysis can strengthen it further.

Our recent research report ‘Science in Motion’, in partnership with Omnicom and JCDecaux, shows that motion (short 2D or 3D videos on digital outdoor screens) could boost brand awareness significantly.

Testing 3D, full-motion, limited-motion, and static creatives showed that adding motion yields an average 33% uplift in ad recall and a 50% increase in brand awareness compared to static assets.

However, we must also be realistic. Sometimes motion is not permitted due to local regulations, and at other times there is a lack of time or budget for complex animations. Moreover, static creatives are not ‘lesser’ ads; they delivered a massive 38% uplift in aided ad recall, underscoring that the DOOH medium itself is highly effective for reach and recognition.

Three D’s of DOOH

At Vistar Media, we talk about the three D’s of DOOH: distinctiveness, dwell time and distance.

Distinctiveness is about whether your ad can stand out in a busy environment. Motion and moving 3D creative help enormously here. In fact, motion is one of the most powerful attentional triggers available to advertisers and is distinctive by design. So powerful, in fact, that screens in some locations do not allow for motion as it could potentially be distracting.

Yet, distinctiveness alone is not enough. Dwell time asks whether a viewer passing by at speed can actually read your message, see your product and register your brand in the seconds they have. The variable duration of the audience’s attention is typically dictated by the interplay between loop length, viewer velocity and environmental distractions.

And distance, which is the physical gap between the screen and the eye that determines the required scale and legibility of all design elements, is about whether your creative creates a convincing enough visual experience to hold attention and communicate clearly. All three must work together, but often they don’t.

When motion is not enough

We recently ran a creative ad analysis for a DOOH brand campaign, from a fresh poultry producer, that was below benchmark. Motion was used, so it made a strong creative choice. But when we applied our AI-powered attention tool, which predicts where viewer attention will land across the elements of an ad in a real environment, it measured only a few seconds to show the brand elements, receiving measurable attention only in the final frame.

For most of the ad’s duration, the logo was either absent or too small to register. Thanks to motion, the creative was standing out in its environment, but it simply was not building brand recall.

This matters because creative accounts for around 50% of a campaign’s overall impact, according to Nielsen research. Nielsen also finds that 56% of sales lift comes from creative digital ads; Kantar says it’s 49%, and Google says it’s 70%.

So, if results are disappointing, the creative is the logical first place to look. In this case, our recommendation was clear: make the logo larger and keep it in frame throughout the entire execution, not just at the end. The brand applied that feedback to its next campaign, and performance improved materially.

What struck me about this example is how simple it was to fix. A bigger logo, present throughout. It sounds almost reductive. DOOH has its own rules that are fundamentally different from those of other media channels. People are not sitting with it; they are passing by, often at speed, in environments full of competing stimuli. The rules that work for social ad campaigns, TV, or cinema don’t automatically transfer.

The same brand ran a further campaign the following Christmas season. It applied the logo guidance but introduced a lot of new messaging. The text left the frame partway through, and a campaign line appeared inconsistently across frames. We flagged this before the campaign went live. They made some adjustments, and the awareness results showed a meaningful uplift quarter-on-quarter.

The lesson is not that every detail needs to be perfect before you go live; it’s that iterating, with clear creative principles in mind, produces compound gains.

Making motion work for your brand

For subtle motion specifically, the key is to make movement salient enough to register. Subtle animation refers to gentle motion graphics or visual effects used in DOOH advertising and is a creative approach prescribed when abrupt, full-motion effects are restricted for public safety.

The ‘Science of Motion’ research indicates that minimal movement is enough to drive brand awareness (+8% TOMA), which is surprisingly similar to full motion. This suggests that when it comes to cementing a brand in consumers’ minds, you don’t necessarily need abrupt, complex, high-budget video productions to achieve high impact.

However, there’s a fine line between subtle and invisible. A subtle animation, such as a spinning product or animating your logo, could work well. Especially because the motion is applied to key information.

However, we’ve also seen cases where the movement is so restrained that most viewers will not detect it, for example, it’s not distinctive or salient enough. Think of slow zooms of background images or pulsing of small buttons or shapes. Advertisers must think carefully about speed and the relationship between motion and the other elements in the frame.

For 3D motion, the discipline is almost the reverse: you have a powerful tool, and the temptation is to use it to maximum effect. But effective 3D in DOOH requires thinking inside the screen rather than just outside of it.

The panel’s borders need to be designed to create genuine optical depth within the space. The hero of your ad, the product or the element you want people to remember, is what the illusion serves.

Three-dimensional creative is not only for brands with physical, tangible products. We have created effective 3D executions for apps, services and even event organisations that have no product to show. We’ve discovered that the key is to find what can be made tangible and then build the 3D creative around that. That single exercise, identifying the element that can be modelled, brought forward and made to occupy space, is the foundation of any 3D execution that works well in the real world.

These principles are not complicated. Keep your brand visible throughout a moving DOOH ad, make your product the hero of your campaign and design for the environment your audience is actually in.

Motion is a powerful instrument, but it’s important to ask a simple question for every execution: is it working hard enough? In DOOH, the brands that answer that question honestly, and act on it, are the ones that see tangible results.

Martine Hammink is VP, creative studio and creative solutions at Vistar Media.