Dynamic is the bedrock of DOOH

Digital out of home has come a long way since its inception.

As a young media planner, I loved not only the creative potential OOH offered, but there has always been something rewarding about seeing your campaigns as tangible posters in the real world.

I planned one of the first campaigns on DOOH in the UK back in 2005; the film launch for Mr & Mrs Smith was a campaign on the first DEPs at Tottenham Ct Road Tube. Whilst the animation in the ad was pretty basic, it made me appreciate how attention-grabbing OOH creative can be.

The growth of Digital OOH

Dynamic campaigns first appeared on DOOH screens some six years later. 2011 saw campaigns using live news for C4 that made the industry sit up and realise the new creative potential that DOOH could offer. No longer purely relying on animations, data and creativity fused to produce something far even more engaging.

DOOH has grown significantly since its launch. From a mere 1% of DOOH in 2005, now over 66% of all OOH spend in the UK is on Digital formats. In fact, over 70% of the UK population will see a DOOH screen each week and an average frequency of 18. DOOH is well and truly everywhere, and in all shapes and sizes. From D6 (small portrait screens) in shopping malls, rail and underground stations and high streets, through to large digital billboards on roadside and in city centres, you cannot miss seeing digital OOH.

Introducing Dynamic DOOH

In order to make your DOOH campaign work to its full potential, it’s simply not enough to just run one ad execution. Dynamic brings your creative to life. It lets brands change their message so it’s always relevant, regardless of the moment. Dynamic OOH can provide consumers with more reactive and relevant content, enabling advertisers to tailor their story or message to a moment in time, specific to the location and the context. 

It captivates, grabs attention, ultimately increasing the effectiveness of the campaign by, on average, 17%.

The key, like most good work, is in collaboration. The best dynamic work comes with the client, creative agency, media agency and dynamic partner working together at the point the creative direction is being set.

Almost all of the best, and award-winning campaigns, we’ve done have involved early collaboration among all key stakeholders. This ensures that the creative is designed from the outset with the dynamic concept in mind, rather than trying to shoehorn in a dynamic angle to a creative that is already determined.

A great example of this is our recent campaign for IKEA; to drive both online sales and instore visitation we used time of day, day of week, weather, temperature and location data to trigger the presentation of a variety of creatives featuring different products, each one accompanied by contextually relevant copy.

Another brilliant use of data sitting at the centre of the creative concept of a campaign is our recent work for the NHS.  The campaign was designed to help increase the number of blood donations given, by highlighting the fact that they need one donation a minute to keep up with demand. By using train departure data, the NHS was able to call out the next departing train, capturing the attention of commuters, and use this to explain how many life saving donations the NHS would need in the time before their train departs. A simple idea but spot on for the campaign, which ultimately drove an extra 19k donations in its first week of running!

Dynamic DOOH is for everyone

Common misconceptions that dynamic campaigns take additional time and investment are simply no longer true – it’s available and appropriate for all briefs and budgets. And it doesn’t have to be just for one-off campaigns. Increasingly, advertisers are adopting an always-ready approach to DOOH. This approach sees advertisers create a bank of stored poster creatives that can be activated at short notice based upon triggers such as extra media value being released, an advertiser shifting priorities and even real-time data such as the weather.

Dynamic shouldn’t be viewed as a piece of tech innovation to potentially bolt on to a plan, it should be a strategic media consideration, planned in at the outset of preparing any campaign. It is the gold standard of doing Digital OOH right, driving awareness, engagement and action.

Adam Cherry - Digital Development Director