Out-of-home has been having a global moment in 2024, it’s safe to say. Spend in the channel continues to grow, as does its sophistication with presentation.
With the end of the year rapidly approaching, B&T has enlisted the services of Josh Gurgiel, head of oOh!media’s creative and content innovation hub to pick the finest work from 2024 for your delectation and inspiration.
“This year saw a trend towards blending CGI and real-world elements, minimalist designs that engage audiences’ imagination, and impactful digital displays,” Gurgiel said.
“The campaigns that stood out were those that leveraged these trends, drawing attention and encouraging social sharing through creativity and innovation.”
British Airways – ‘A British Original’
As the great Don Draper perfectly articulated: “The greatest thing you have working for you? It’s the imagination of the consumer.” British Airways, in partnership with Uncommon Creative Studio are steadily becoming a formidable force in activating this creative philosophy, as demonstrated by their ‘windows’ campaign.
The beauty of this campaign is in its restraint and understated charm. Leveraging the iconic nature of the BA logo and brand, the imagery gives just enough to activate the audience’s memory structures whilst inviting them in to fill in the blanks. This mechanic is further accentuated by the emotion evoked by the execution – rather than focusing on the inside of the cabin, the sense of wonder elicited by the faces peering out of the windows celebrates the majesty of the world around us, arguably the core benefit of British Airways’ offering. Sometimes, less is so much more.
Charli XCX BRAT-boards
There’s a powerful cognitive effect that occurs when we see a celebrity IRL. We feel a combination of familiarity and dissonance, having consumed their image at an arms-length through multi-media channels, our minds flooded with dopamine as the barriers between us are broken. But this same reaction can occur whenever we encounter any previously consumed media assets out in the wild.
Charli XCX and Warner Music understood the power of placing such revered and meaningful imagery in the public domain, tapping into the social equity of the BRAT cover in all its lo-fi glory and causing an online frenzy in the process. What underpins this audience reaction is the natural interplay between online x offline channels; the ability for brands to use OOH placements as a creative canvas to drive online social sharing. Warner even started to use social channels to drive their audience to these placements, prompting further social sharing – this is goddamn omni-channel inception! By integrating a beloved media asset into the physical (and literal) fabric of society, Warner amplified the BRAT summer zeitgeist whilst further blurring the lines between audience and artist.
Deadpool and Wolverine and Heinz – Ketchup and Mustard
Much like the Hamilton classic, I’d love to have been in the room where it happened. In this case, the specific room I’m referencing is the boardroom at Heinz HQ where someone (ingeniously) identified that their Ketchup and Mustard bottles kinda, sorta, maybe, definitely look like the Deadpool and Wolverine characters, and that pairing these iconic duos side-by-side in OOH would effortlessly communicate the products’ complimentary nature whilst setting the internet alight.
But the true beauty of this execution is in its full-blown commitment to the concept. The fact that Heinz has not just leveraged the character comparison but have completely mirrored every aspect of the Deadpool and Wolverine poster – down to the typefaces used and text placements – cements this comparison as unmissable and truly un-unseeable. By borrowing from the equity inherent in the Marvel campaign, Heinz tells us everything we need to know without needing to say all that much.
Telstra – ‘Bars’
It’s fair to say Telstra have been on a creative hot streak—at least in OOH—since signing Brent Smart as CMO and consolidating media and creative into their +61 model. The stand-out execution has to be their ‘Bars’ campaign, if for nothing more than its sheer chutzpah in using OOH as a leading broadcast channel to prompt conversation and debate – arguably the whole darn point of the medium (aka ‘public space art sponsored by a brand’).
What made this campaign so effective was not just its militant adherence to fundamental OOH design principles—weaponising simplicity, impactful colour and creative curiosity—but the way Telstra have understood the passive nature of OOH, the natural in-built frequency and the relationship that exists between consumer and advertiser – if you want our attention, you have to give us something in return.
Rather than a short burst, they ran this campaign over multiple months, continually updating this ingeniously simple creative territory with a myriad of creative iterations, giving it the space to percolate and resonate in consumers’ minds whilst priming them with each delightful (or divisive) exposure.
Specsavers – ‘Welcome to…’
Let’s be clear: if these ads were placed in the markets referenced in the creative, they would be pretty sh*t ads. But that’s not how Specsavers roll. One of the GOAT OOH advertisers when it comes to harnessing tone and irreverence, Speccys have done it again with this cheeky, smart and brave creative execution. Naturally prompting huge social sharing, Specsavers showed how a great piece of OOH creative, however seemingly rudimentary, can cut through and cause some LOLs when matched to location and context.
Netflix – 3 Body Problem ‘You Are Bugs’
There’s a moment in Netflix’s sci-fi blockbuster, 3 Body Problem, that I’m about to spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it. As the son-to-be invading aliens turn on the human race, they project the words ‘You Are Bugs’ across a cacophony of visual media touchpoints, most notably OOH assets.
Being the OOH nerd (read: obsessive tragic) that I am, I immediately turned to my wife and exclaimed: “Netflix should totally do this IRL!” And guess what, they totally did! Blurring the lines between art and reality is nothing new – paper company, Quill, created Dunder Mifflin paper for goodness sake – but the scale and magnitude with which Netflix deployed their ‘You Are Bugs’ message globally was something to behold.
Whether you first had your curiosity activated IRL and then contextualised the reference whilst watching the show; or watched the show and then experienced life imitating art through OOH media, this execution stands as a powerful example of a company messing with the minds of their audience for the sake of an extremely satisfying payoff.
Binge – ‘Burning Billboard’ House of the Dragon season two launch
And finally, if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to toot POLY’s own horn for the final example. One of the most evident emerging media trends of 2024 was the proliferation of Faux OOH (FOOH): the ability to use public places as the creative canvas to blur the lines between physical and digital media through the use of CGI technology. These videos provide a spike of salience for the brands online, but are quickly replaced by equally eye-catching content through the endless social scroll.
When POLY were briefed by BINGE to help launch season two of House of the Dragon, we wanted to create a FOOH execution that could endure and iterate; this led us to the creation of the world’s first ‘FOOH / REAL’ campaign. In this groundbreaking campaign, we started by running BINGE creative on a classic billboard; we then used that billboard as the basis for a fake OOH social video; we then updated the real life OOH creative with special builds to reflect the aftermath of the CGI-dragon, whilst amplifying the FOOH content across our digital OOH assets. This helped create a sense of omni-channel episodic storytelling through the creative execution, further blurring the lines between reality and fiction, online and IRL.
