Does your Outdoor Advertising Make Audiences Do a Double Take?
All around us, from billboards on the highway to posters at bus shelters and subway stations to large-scale creative on the sides of buildings, Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising makes a statement for brands. But does it make an impact?
At System1, we set out to explore the answer of whether OOH creative was living up to its potential.
We did so with the help of JCDecaux, the world’s leading OOH company, taking a global sample of 150 OOH campaigns from 7 markets and testing the creative with 22,000 people using System1’s Test Your Ad tool. We combined a subset of these results with JCDecaux’s extensive database of campaign effectiveness results, spanning brand lift, consideration, and sales metrics.
In our forthcoming report, Double Take, we will explore the creative disconnect in OOH while also showcasing the creative opportunity, giving marketers a global playbook for OOH effectiveness.
Outdoor Creative’s Ups and Downs
Our analysis revealed both good and bad news for marketers. First, the good: when OOH creative sparks emotion and is clearly branded, it does not just stand out. It delivers stronger business outcomes. The very best creative can deliver twice the commercial impact.
OOH is a channel worth investing in – it’s highly visible, trusted and powerful.
But marketers must also contend with the bad news: 3 in 5 OOH ads are not working hard enough.
What’s holding so many of these ads back?
In our testing, a third of global OOH exposures resulted in incorrect brand recall by viewers after 2 seconds. You might be thinking, “well, 2 seconds isn’t nearly long enough to look at an ad and correctly identify the brand!”
But the reality is that OOH is a 2-second medium. Attention studies from Lumen and TVision show that the average dwell time on a static poster is just 2 seconds. That is the reality marketers are working with.
Branding needs to be instant and obvious. Without it, the opportunity to build memory is lost.
Beyond the brand problem, there’s also an emotion problem.
For the exposures where the brand was correctly identified, most campaigns did not create sufficient emotional engagement to change behavior. In fact, almost 40% of ads scored just 1 Star in System1’s testing, the lowest level of predicted long-term effectiveness.
That’s right – the bad news isn’t just for ads that people can’t remember. The ones they do recall don’t elicit emotions that will support brand building.
Put these two problems together, and the reality is hard to ignore: 3 in 5 OOH ads are not doing what they are supposed to do.
The Solution
So, what’s a marketer to do? Especially those who want to sell the C-suite on maintaining their OOH investment or adding it to the media mix.
In Double Take, we have laid out the five creative behaviors that separate forgettable OOH from impactful OOH: the behaviors that earn attention, emotion, and memory. These are:
- Be Realistic: Respect the 2-second window.
- Be Distinctive: Stand out from the noise and stand out as yourself.
- Be Consistent: Make memory formation easier, faster and stronger.
- Don’t Be Dull: Trigger emotion if you want to change minds.
- Bend the Rules: Find fresh ways to surprise while staying clear.
The report offers a deeper dive into each behavior, with plenty of practical tips for making these a reality in OOH creative. Additionally, Double Take highlights how, compared to lower-scoring OOH ads (1- and 2-Star ads), ads that score more than 3 Stars on System1’s 5-Star scale deliver:
- Double the commercial impact
- Over 3x stronger brand sentiment
- Nearly 3x better message recall
- More than twice the unaided awareness
- A 50% higher chance of driving consumer action
Create with Confidence
With Double Take and ad testing from System1, marketers can Create with Confidence when building out OOH creative. Register for the forthcoming whitepaper and contact us if you’d like to leverage pre-testing to predict and improve the commercial impact of your OOH advertising.