Beyond The Billboard
00:01:34 · Jay Young, Livia Brown
[00:01:34] S0: Thank you so much for having me. It's exciting. I love any opportunity to talk creative out of home. Let's do it. [00:01:41] S1: Let's do it. As I mentioned in the intro, every single episode we've discussed creativity, we've discussed creative in out of home, and it's so great to have you with us today. Before we get into the detail of today's episode, and just to give some context for anyone who's not familiar with Grand Visual, can you let us know what Grand Visual do and what you offer in the out of home space?
00:02:01 · Jay Young
[00:02:01] S0: Sure. So Grand Visual are a global creative out of home studio. Our job, as I said, is to is to play in the playground of outdoor day in, day out, which I feel very privileged to do. Our work spans everything from brand experience and experiential as kind of standalone events through to creative solutions and media innovations on existing sites and screens. But then I think what's become really interesting is that in the last, five years, our studio has grown. So there's an increasing demand for brands coming to us to create out of home artwork, and designs and assets specific for the channel, which is music to my ears because we we all know that out of home is so different to every other Like, there's so... You've got a far greater scale. You've gotta consider so many more things to make sure that that creative works. So we're spending a lot of time doing that for some really exciting brands. And then we've got a creative tech studio on the side who work in I suppose the more of the innovation space. So it's how can we push, our use of AI or augmented reality, or even just making sure that our dynamic out of home campaigns connect perfectly with the media owners globally, particularly given the increasing adoption of programmatic.
00:03:25 · Kirsty Carlson
[00:03:25] S2: Thank you for that context, Jay. It's very interesting that you were speaking about almost like this increased growth and focus around the medium, obviously, with the expansion of the creative studio at Grand Visual. And, you know, the conversations we've been having, we had Full Blonde recently on the podcast as well. And we were talking about almost and I think you also posted about this recently was out of home has these two lives, right? It has this life that's existing in the real world and you happen to see it on your way to work or on your day to day. And then you have this other life where it lives virally online. And then I think over the most recent years, it's almost like social media, LinkedIn, all the other platforms have almost given a resurgence because out of home was never completely gone. But it's given this that reignited a lot more focus around out of home and a lot more passion around being creative and innovative in the space and pushing the boundaries. And I think that probably has fed straight into this expansion and growth of Grand Visual of clients looking to do stuff that really moves the needle, that creates an impact, that evokes an emotion, that causes an action and just really is quite innovative and impactful and sourcing companies that are experienced in that and are executing work at that level, such as Grand Visual. I'm not sure what your take is on that, like this kind of shift with out of home having these these two lives.
00:04:45 · Jay Young
[00:04:45] S0: Ever since I started Grand Visual, I think it was always important to consider the different outputs of the work that we did. It it was never can we create this amazing experience or this special execution and leave it in place and hope that it does its job. We kind of look at multiple audiences across every idea. And it's the first is who's gonna interact with all of those. Was that a great experience and they interact on the day? You've then got the passive audience, which I think we often forget is the people that might be across the street and they don't directly interact or engage if it is something interactive, but actually they still look at it and go, that's cool. I'm not gonna give it a huge amount of time, but it's really interesting. And that's landing in their brains. Third, it's then what happens with that when it goes into other channels? And as you said, it's thinking from the very start, what do we need to do with this idea to make it perfect for a social film or a film in another channel? Two, how do we make sure that we get best PR coverage of this activity too? And then how do we make sure that social is covering it in advance and after? So whereas we kind of we are a kind of day in day out of home company, actually we're now regularly calling on the social teams and the PR teams to come into the the brainstorm room with us and go, let's draw you guys in because ultimately without them, they're doing their jobs. You're leaving a whole lot of value on the table. It's not to say there isn't already a value, but it's about making it work even harder. I think when you're working with big production budgets and you're being kind of pushed on ROI always then that's absolutely imperative. And I think the brands that let us in and give us access to their wider teams, they're the ones that see exponentially far greater, impact.
00:06:44 · Livia Brown
[00:06:44] S1: You've touched on so much that I wanna build on. I love that you have highlighted how, you know, often out of home is looked at a piece within the media mix, right? You're doing TV, radio and out of home. But within out of home, there's so many layers in there that I often don't think we're seeing enough work where they're discussing the out of home but then they're saying, okay, with relation to, like, the social out of home, how's that gonna be managed? The filming and the PR around the out of home, how does that fit within the bigger mix? You need to manage, like, almost like a mini micro ecosystem around the out of home to make sure that are amplifying what you're doing in relation to the full campaign picture too. Because often the full campaign is amplified through social and on digital, not a zoom in on out of home unless you've done something very specific. You know, you've done something in the faux out of home space, for example, then often you see the socials been built around that. But even just your general out of home campaign should be well supported by the other media channels to get the most impact. That was the one thing I wanted to mention. You touched on ROI and I think it's such an important piece especially when you're discussing innovation. And you you guys have executed some amazing work and we all know that these conversations around budgets for OHO are sometimes tricky when you are discussing mixed media modeling and ROI and what is the measurement. Those conversations are becoming more difficult to motivate for standard OHO campaigns, let alone when you're looking at doing some bold innovation or asking the client, We want to put all the budget into out of home to do this. Those conversations can be really hard. A recent campaign that Grand Visual executed was for the Traitors TV show. And I absolutely love that campaign because you had set up the different people or the contestants. And then as they were eliminated, you were able to kind of interact or update the billboard to show that that person was no longer on.
00:08:38 · Livia Brown
Part of the launch was that you had an actual choir singing at the event and it just there were so many elements that came into this one kind of event and it made me think imagine the budget that had to get approved imagine the work the team had to do to get the budget to approve something like this And I wanted to ask you, when you and your team are executing these exceptional campaigns, what advice do you have for anyone who's trying to motivate for these budgets? Because sometimes you can't measure, like, what is the impact of the campaign going to be? Well, the stunt that you're doing in out of home, how are we going to put that into the mixed modeling machine and get an answer for it? So how can agencies and media owners navigate that conversation when it comes to motivating for budgets from clients?