Beyond The Billboard
00:26:38 · Livia Brown
[00:26:38] S1: Jay, I love what you've shared. I think in our market, I don't think we're seeing dynamic enough. And I think this kind of big picture prediction you painted for us, I think is going to give everybody quite a lot to think about, about how they're approaching out of home and they should be doing if this when. I'm not sure that's happening enough from a programmatic perspective. I think people are just excited about automating the buying. And I don't think the dynamic piece and the programmatic piece are happening close enough together often enough in our market. But it's great to hear from your perspective, a market that is further along from a programmatic perspective, how it should actually be doing and what's coming in the future for a market that is more advanced versus our market that although we are doing programmatic, and I do think there's still a lot of gaps that need to be closed. I wanted to switch gears for a second and take us to our closing question for the episode. You know, there's so many amazing pieces of work that you and your team have done. One I specifically want to reference and then I want to ask you a favourite campaign that you have done. And maybe if you can share some behind the scenes with us that we might not have seen once we saw the campaign up. But recently I saw you guys did some amazing work for Argos and Argos is similar to a Takealot in South Africa. It's an online retailer. And what you did is you actually packaged up almost everyday household items like a fridge or a couch or a TV into a huge box that looked like a toy box. So we've all seen those toy boxes that have got a cardboard backing and they're plastic on the front and they hook onto the little hook inside the retailer. And you put everyday items almost outside of the toy category, but made them look like toys and placed them onto billboards. I thought it was executed exceptionally well. The work was beautiful to look at. But it was very, like almost striking to see you looked at the shape of the box and expected to see a toy and the point was it wasn't a toy. Argos can sell any kind of a product, not only toys, which I thought was really creative. So I wanted to ask you if there any of campaigns you guys have done that stand out as your favorites and if you can give us some behind the scenes.
00:28:42 · Jay Young
[00:28:42] S0: Yeah, absolutely. Argos, I absolutely love that campaign. It's interesting because the idea in its original form wasn't quite how you saw it, but it was relatively close. And actually it was one of the ideas that was brought to us by a creative agency. And they said, look, we love this concept, but we don't know how to make... How to bring it to life. And so it was it was a challenging one to actually make happen, but kind of it was one of those ideas where you know in your gut, the minute you see it, you just go, ah, yes. Like, this is it. I felt some nostalgia for the brand from when I was young. It it just was simple and it told the story, which I loved. I think one of my favorites, I'm not sure if you guys would have heard about this campaign, but there was there's an insurance brand in The UK called Hiscox. And the brief to us was that they were launching a cyber attack insurance for small to medium sized businesses. And the agency came to us and said, look, we found this amazing website that shows live attacks going from country a to country b in real time. And you saw the map and they were flying over and I were like, wow, this is fascinating. Can you bring that to life and out of home? And we went away and after doing some kind of deep scope of work, we read on this actually, it was entirely fake. It was a visualization. It wasn't real data. And if we weren't working on behalf of insurance company, we need to make sure that the data we use was real and it felt really authentic. So we created a honeypot media server. So effectively set up our own computer system, didn't apply your proper firewalls and virus detection software and cyber attack software. And we just waited and waited to see would it get hacked. And surprisingly every ten minutes a hack started flying in. So overnight we suddenly realized we now have our data. And so that then made kind of the campaign super easy because now we then we created a dynamic campaign that went live across multiple cities and multiple digital screens in The UK. And the billboard would blink red, these red dots every time a real cyber attack came into the server. And there was a live counter in the bottom right hand corner saying how many attacks had happened that day.
00:31:02 · Jay Young, Kirsty Carlson
And so it taking some numbers, let's face it, insurance can be a little bit boring to talk about, but suddenly you just looked at this billboard and you're like, oh wow, the threat is there and I'm seeing it live in the moment. Emotional response told the story, pushed straight to Hiscox, and it it did incredibly well at award seasons. It it was incredibly effective for them as well. And I think it's just one of those great examples of certainly here at GV is if we can't do something in a particular way, we just love trying to find that creative solution and to wiggle around and find it another way to do it because ultimately we're a creative production house. So our main value is in taking a great idea and actually making it happen and finding a feasible way to do it. That's the hard bit in Out of Home. The ideas are increasingly getting slightly easier, but actually it's the bring it to life in the real world. I'd say that was my favorite. [00:32:01] S2: I really enjoy the example you gave us and what it made me think about was how out of home has really been pushing the envelope recently over the last couple of years. But I wanted to ask you, where do you think the future of out of home or the opportunity for the for growth for the future of out of home exists as a medium? For
00:32:21 · Jay Young
[00:32:21] S0: me, I think it's getting the foundations right. It's it's back to the relevancy piece and and the and creative performance. So I think we spent a lot of time in the industry working with data to make sure that we've got the very best panels in front of the right audience. We've now spent kind of the years after that going, okay, how can you make sure the plan, the actual buying process is nice and simple? And that leads you to a space where you can buy it easier and you can put it in the right location but that only gives you the opportunity to engage and deliver the message. And I think what I'd now like to see and why certainly in working with the talent team to do is to take those systems and work out how can we now help marketers when they get an out of home plan make and drive them to make sure that the creative works on each of the different screens in the right location. How can we give the best opportunity to maximize, the opportunity? Because I think if we do that, we then start driving the performance and the power of the medium and the medium then continues to grow and sell itself. And it feels like the natural next step in the process that we're, as we were going on this like optimization process of the channel, aren't we? And I think that for me is the exciting next place.
00:33:36 · Livia Brown, Jay Young, Kirsty Carlson
[00:33:36] S1: I'm loving this relevancy piece. It keeps on staying with me. And I like how you've almost painted the picture of the evolution of where we come from, where we are and where we were going. Jay, it's been absolutely amazing to sit down as you've given us so much creative inspiration, so much to think about. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been really lovely having you on the podcast with us today. [00:33:56] S0: Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed it. [00:33:58] S1: Thank you to the sponsor of today's episode. Your support helps make Beyond The Billboard possible and helps us to bring you the first and only out of home podcast in South Africa. [00:34:08] S2: Thanks for joining us today to go beyond the Billboard. Subscribe to our podcast to ensure you don't miss out on our exciting content. [00:34:15] S1: Join us again to go beyond the Billboard. One two three four.