Alasdair Muller
28 October . 7 min read . Opinion
When asked to contribute to the “best OOH campaigns of the last 10 years” I must say, I found it a very challenging prospect.
OOH as a category is incredibly diverse, not only diverse in terms of environments, but also in terms of application. Even more so when you consider the spread of OOH formats across this amazing continent of Africa.
I started in the OOH industry in 2009, having come across from the broadcast side of media, working in radio specifically. And over the last 15 years of my OOH career, I have had the opportunity to work across 15 Markets in Africa, and I have learned that far from being a ubiquitous platform, OOH is different in every single country I have worked in. The market is distinctive, the formats are diverse, the environments are complex and the approach from media strategists and advertisers is unique to each market. And finally, the campaign application and activation is different in each market. So, it’s tough to select a best OOH campaign when you consider all that is out there.
I am also wary of interpreting the brief as “the best creative” execution, or most notable “innovation” because innovation is in itself a subjective concept. If you put 4 people in a room together you quickly find 4 separate descriptions of innovation, and that’s why innovation briefs and innovation discussions can often bring a lot of frustration to media owners and agencies a like.
Further to that, the measurement of a campaigns success while often centered around a creative concept, very rarely lives and dies based on a single creative execution in an isolated environment. As marketers we can forget this as we search for the new shiny thing disguised as “innovation”.
For example. It’s all good and well having a 3D floating margarine tub on a digital screen if that is in fact the best thing for your brands growth, but I see that often the desire for innovation can lead to blowing ad budget on “innovation” resulting in underspending on the fundamental reach and frequency benefits of the medium for the sake of “innovation”.
If for the sake of innovation, you find yourself spending your ad ZAR’s on a FAUX energy drink pouring into a FAUX stadium, when the better option would be selecting a powerful physical OOH campaign driving awareness close to POP (Point of Purchase) I think there is a potential problem there.
This is not a unique challenge to OOH. The same concept would apply to a 5 minute long incredibly wonderfully produced TVC ad that consumers only watch for the first 5 seconds.
So, in my mind the best OOH campaign doesn’t necessarily mean best creative execution. To paraphrase Mark Ritson: “we are learning is that creativity is not enough”
“Creativity” is not the miraculous road to business growth that is so abundantly claimed to be.
Too often “creativity” is understood to mean great, original ideas. The emphasis is almost always focussed on the creative ideas themselves.
But it is important as marketers to consider the many other factors contributing to advertising success, and how they fit into the bigger picture of marketing effectiveness.
Moreover, an innovative idea is often judged more by its originality and its “wow factor” than by its potential effectiveness, either to consumers or to the company that is advertising.
In Ritson’s recent rant at the Cannes Lions Awards 2024, he showed that out of the 30 points of available impact for a brand, creativity represents only 12 of them, which is +- 40%.
So if at the peak of its powers creativity only delivers up to 40% of a campaigns success, that means 60% of a campaigns effectiveness still relies heavily on selecting the right channels and mediums to deliver the message to the correct audience. It also means that you need to leverage the innate qualities of the medium itself, in our case OOH, to do the heavy lifting for a campaign to drive effectiveness. The best campaigns use each medium effectively to do the job it was created to do. That in itself is innovation.
Ultimately creativity alone will not drive the long term success of a brand across the “4 P’s” Price , product , place and promotion.
So I aim in this article to celebrate the campaign that managed to deliver a holistic campaign integrated across multiple channels rather than focussing on a singular fantastic creative OOH execution.
If I was to focus on great creative only, we would be here forever! I have seen flaming billboards, floating cars, giant moulded KONG Skulls, custom built Universal Studios Spheres, billboards made of socks and shoes, phenomenal projection mapping, giant sharks, 3D holograms , digital potatoes that smell… well , smell like potatoes. You get my drift.
There is no shortage of amazing creative execution in OOH. And that is why OOH remains such a valuable medium for advertisers.
With all that said , without question the most memorable of all the campaigns I have seen and had the pleasure of working on, is the global award-winning campaign “Share a Coke” by the Coca Cola Company. Few campaigns have ever stirred the same level of interest, controversy, and excitement as the “Share a Coke” campaign.
The campaign began in Australia in 2011 and made its way across the globe to more than 80 countries, hitting the shores of Africa in 2014/2015. At that time I was Head of Sales for Continental Outdoor Africa (now JCDecaux).
Prior to campaign launch, Coke bottles with names on them began appearing in fridges across the markets, allowing consumers to discover the names on-pack themselves, which immediately sparked online conversations and media interest.
The campaign then launched with a big bang across multiple media channels.
TV, radio ,online and mobile which was supported by the powerful OOH component.
Participation and mass sharing was achieved through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and through the Coca Cola website, which provided consumers with the tools to connect and ‘Share a Coke’ by:
- creating a personalised virtual ‘Coke’ can to share with a Facebook friend, and
- making their own TVC, featuring their friends’ profile pictures.
The OOH campaign brought the TV and digital campaign to life in the Real world.
The campaign had a mixture of OOH elements, including brand elements which drove the “always on” effectiveness to the campaign, and the static and tactical lifestyle OOH elements were then supported by the DOOH campaign which allowed consumers to interact directly with the digital screens themselves and share a Coke with a friend live in traffic or on their daily commute.
As the team formerly known as Continental Outdoor Africa (Yes I am old enough to put in a reference to the artist formerly known as Price), we were tasked by Coca Cola Kenya to do something that had never been done before on the African Continent. To create a truly interactive campaign where consumers were able to “Share a Coke” in near real time by messaging the name of a friend, a colleague or anyone that they wanted to share a coke with, to a number on the digital billboards. The Coke bottle on the screen would then change names in response to the audience interaction.
Without question this was a tough challenge , but as any good sales team will do … we said “Yes sure we can do it” and then proceeded to figure out the complexities as we progressed.
The process of identifying the appropriate digital and static locations was refreshingly simple.
We then we rallied with the creative agency and technical partners to build creative templates which could be easily changed as well as a very stringent “grey list” and “white list” which ensured that every name submission to the board was vetted in a stringent back end so that no naughty words made it onto the billboard.
Importantly , we had to take into consideration local languages as “swear” words also vary from country to country and language to language. Tasking all our local sales managers with building the biggest list of profanity was quite funny I must say! We may even have had the biggest African dictionary of profanity ever collected !
Simply put. You could share a coke with Nuno , but you could not share a coke with Uncle F*****r.
But thank goodness we took that element seriously, because the public did not let us down! To much hysterics, there were many requests to share Coke with *insertyournaughtywordhere!
Fortunately nothing got past and onto the screens themselves.
The DOOH campaign went live in Angola, Tanzania and Mozambique where we had recently expanded the DOOH network.
We leveraged multiple screens in the 3m x 6m DOOH network to communicate to thousands of consumers on a daily basis.
And in order to ensure campaign effectiveness we implemented a complete screen takeover, which meant that Coca Cola had 100% Share of Voice (SOV) and was the only ad playing on the screen. This allowed consumers to interact with the screen without the interruption of other advertising.
In addition to that, leveraging all the technology available to us , we ran the campaign in specifically selected day parts, based on the highest traffic flows but also insights from the Coca Cola team around consumer consumption and purchasing habits.
Overall the campaign was a massive success. We had thousands of engagements across the screens and many names even ended up on the physical Coca Cola bottles in stores.
So why do I love this campaign? Well … simply put. It worked.
Globally the Share a Coke Campaign became a multi award winning campaign and ran for 7+ Years reversing a decade of declining revenue for Coca Cola. Talk about continuity!
The campaign, which started with 150 names in Australia, expanded to 500,000+ names globally and reached 80+ countries.
More than 500,000 photos were posted in Instagram using the #ShareaCoke hashtag, increasing user engagement. Coca-Cola generated 998 million Twitter impressions, driving significant social media engagement.
76,000 virtual Coke cans were shared online, and 378,000 personalized cans were printed at kiosks. More than 150 million personalized bottles were sold globally, making it one of Coca-Cola’s most successful marketing efforts. Coca-Cola’s market value increased by $1.8 billion during the campaign’s most successful year.
Alasdair Muller is a 3rd Generation Media Man Leading the team @ EVOLV Outdoor (Pty) Ltd, one of South Africa’s fastest growing DOOH specialist media owners.
With over 17 years in media and experience in management across 15 countries in Sub Sahara Africa.
Passionate about #ChangingTheWayYouViewOOH
Superpower – Eating Lasagne by the boat load
#GetInvolved #GetEVOLVd