OPEN 2
The OPEN series was born from the desire to create a forum for applauding and interrogating strong creative design within the Out of Home (OOH) industry. Illustrating how OOH is part of our cityscape, our commute, our weekend and our shopping and holiday experiences, OOH is ‘the original tweet’ and it cannot be switched off, ignored or fast forwarded. Big, bold, cheeky, simple, clever and controversial, OOH is the ultimate creative stage, allowing brands to be unique, contextually relevant and targeted while reaching mass audiences.
The OPEN series was born from the desire to create a forum for applauding and interrogating strong creative design within the Out of Home (OOH) industry. Illustrating how OOH is part of our cityscape, our commute, our weekend and our shopping and holiday experiences, OOH is ‘the original tweet’ and it cannot be switched off, ignored or fast forwarded. Big, bold, cheeky, simple, clever and controversial, OOH is the ultimate creative stage, allowing brands to be unique, contextually relevant and targeted while reaching mass audiences.
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INTERACT WITH ME | CONTINUED<br />
...<br />
ABOVE<br />
Smart ideas for smarter cities, see<br />
full campaign on pages 114–115.<br />
geo-targeted coupon offers embedded into<br />
your ‘Words With Friends’ games on your<br />
smartphone: “Hey, you’re in the area, why<br />
not pop in?”<br />
Adidas Japan, promoting a World Cup<br />
qualifier, encouraged people to ‘throw in’<br />
a soccer ball to star player Shinji Kagawa,<br />
with the action played out on a giant screen<br />
in Tokyo. The resultant goal was credited<br />
to Kagawa and the thrower, using the latter’s<br />
Facebook profile.<br />
Of course, OOH interactivity isn’t limited<br />
to your smartphone. It can involve bespoke<br />
technology of the highest level, such as when<br />
Coca-Cola created a high-tech eye-to-eye video<br />
link between India and Pakistan to help the<br />
citizens of these international rivals share<br />
a human moment (and a Coke) (pp. 156–157).<br />
Or, it can involve lo-tech smarts, like IBM’s<br />
French billboards that can function as a seat,<br />
a shelter or an accessibility ramp (pp. 114–115).<br />
Clearly, the challenges that growing<br />
magnitudes of interactivity present are not paid<br />
media’s alone. Spare a thought (but only a very<br />
small thought) for the organisers of the world’s<br />
advertising and design award shows, such<br />
as Cannes Lions. Their categories are eating<br />
each other. OOH ideas are also promotional<br />
ideas are also mobile ideas are also PR ideas<br />
are also design ideas… so an increased number<br />
of categories is resulting not in more winners,<br />
but often in the same winners across multiple<br />
categories.<br />
This reflects the desire of marketers and<br />
their agencies to find ever newer and fresher<br />
ways to interact with people, and to be first<br />
to market with them. This, in turn, reflects<br />
people’s desire to interact in interesting new<br />
ways, not the same old ones.<br />
Hence, today’s successful marketers<br />
look to build experiences that cut across the<br />
arbitrary intersections of ‘media’, ‘digital’, ‘PR’,<br />
‘advertising’ and ‘design,’ visualising brands<br />
not as a series of discrete media campaigns, but<br />
rather as ongoing stories that people can and<br />
will dip in and out of. Ultimately, the desired<br />
result for a brand, outdoors and elsewhere,<br />
must be meaningful interaction.<br />
A prime OOH site gives a brand<br />
a desirable and prominent seat at the table.<br />
But it’s what a brand does, on that site and<br />
in the rest of the world, which determines<br />
whether it actually participates in any<br />
conversation.<br />
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