‘We Must DOOH Better’

Addressing the 1^st in-person WOO Africa Forum, organised in Cape Town on March 11-13, on the theme of ‘We must DOOH better’, Jay Young, Managing Director, Grand Visual emphasised the importance of creativity in the DOOH field as it takes up 47% of the focus with reach, brand and targeting making up the rest.

The hierarchy of DOOH, constructed by Jay Young himself, starts off with ‘Let’s make an impact’, moving on with ‘Let’s get that creative’ and ‘Let’s get the artwork — the basics correct’.

The base of the hierarchy, ‘Let’s make an impact’ is based on focusing on how the billboard can talk to individuals and not everyone all together. As to date, the statistics say that full motion billboards attract 60% of the people’s attention. Jay suggests to the DOOH media owners to make use of full motion billboards whenever and wherever the opportunity. 

Jay shared two points he learnt along the way. One, you don’t have to do something super creative and best on every single site. And two, have the confidence to do something unique in one or two locations, and then run global creative in other locations.

3D graphics advertising increases the impact and audience attention by a lot more as it is exciting to watch and one individual could be suggesting another individual to check it out. Just the way Ocean captured audience with big impact curve screens, he cites.

Jay spoke about his work done with Warner Brothers, which was to create a piece of creative art that could then adapt very quickly and with very little budget “to be used on lots of other screens in lots of different locations. It went live in 17 different markets, but they didn’t have to charge a client hundreds of thousands of pounds to do that on those markets. It was one single project with lots of 3D in lots of different locations on lots of different kinds of screens. Some were flat, some of them on traditional portraits, and those sticks that you might find at a shopping mall.”

Next step, he explained, was to drive relevancy. The creative needs to capture the audience one-to-one and make it speak to them instead of everyone together. 

Jay shared an example of the Budweiser billboard stage that caught a lot of attention, with billboard turned into a stage for everyone to perform and dance on. “Unique ideas that would’ve never been performed before always spark interest globally. Creating digital out-of-home solutions that actually are designed to tell the story, craft of the brand being showcased and project mapping is another important task,” he asserted.

Jay concluded by pointing out the ways the hierarchy can be made to perform better. This is done by making an impact, driving relevancy, encouraging interactions. “And then, when your brands are really at that point where they’re ready to break out of the current boundaries, that’s when you can break out of the hurdle into doing something even more interesting.”