Key points
- Jay Young predicts AI will give everyone high-quality ad production within 12 to 24 months, pushing brands toward programmed, flexible creative.
- Grand Visual is inviting apparent competitors to co-fund effectiveness studies because out-of-home competes with other channels, not itself.
- Jay Young says the industry is obsessed with attention alone, but campaigns need attention, emotion and delivery to land.
Out-of-home creative must interrupt, then prove it worked
Out-of-home advertising reaches people by accident, on journeys their brains have stopped processing. Grand Visual, a UK studio that makes creative for the channel, treats interruption as the job, then works to land an emotion and a message before the viewer walks past. Its answer to the funding problem is measurement, and shared research with rivals, since outdoor competes with other channels rather than with itself.
Takeaways
- Attention alone does not deliver a message. Young describes a three-step sequence of attention, emotion and delivery and is frustrated by an industry that talks about attention alone. Because the brain builds schemas and skips the familiar commute, the creative job is to surprise and interrupt.
- One idea serves three audiences. Every idea is built for the people who interact on the day, the passive audience across the street, and the audience that meets it later as a social film or PR coverage. Social and PR teams join brainstorms from the start.
- Ambitious creative needs objectives and metrics. Young tells clients to agree a primary and secondary objective, then use basic numbers on how many people see and engage with an activation and for how long. He brings emotional-response evidence from effectiveness studies and will take a hit on margin to prove impact.
- Outdoor competes with other channels. Grand Visual is inviting apparent competitors to fund effectiveness studies together, because the medium competes with other channels rather than itself. Carlson says such research moves spend into out-of-home and wants more campaign-based studies in Africa by 2027.
- Contextualised dynamic creative is spreading fast. A few years ago less than 1% of digital out-of-home was contextualised. Programmatic adoption in the UK and the US has driven a significant rise in demand, and some brands lay down a year of out-of-home with dynamic creative overlaid for a period.
- AI will make ad production universal. Young predicts AI will give everyone high-quality ad production within 12 to 24 months, so brands will need to be creative again to cut through. Relevancy and audience mindset become the next frontier, with creative that flexes by environment and time of day.
Campaigns that carried the idea
- The Traitors. Eliminated contestants appeared on the billboard and were updated as they were voted off, and a choir performed at the launch.
- Argos. Household items were packaged as toy-box products to show Argos sells far more than toys. A creative agency brought the idea, and the version that ran stayed close to it.
- Hiscox. To launch cyber-attack insurance for small and medium-sized businesses, Grand Visual set up a honeypot media server with no firewalls or virus detection and waited to be hacked.