Fee Fi FAUX Fum: I Smell The Blood of an OOH Disruptor

I was recently asked by an advertising industry publication to share what I thought about the developing world of Faux OOH (FOOH). Unfortunately, due to my poor time management, I missed the deadline.?

Once the guilt and self-loathing had subsided I decided to have a proper think about what I indeed thought about the developing world of FOOH. My thoughts are as follows:

FOOH is incredibly awesome, and incredibly terrible, depending on who you’re asking.?

Anyone who has worked in media and/or creative advertising over the past fifteen years has invariably heard the following seven words in direct succession:

“We want this campaign to go viral”.?

Whilst I would rather contract an actual virus than hear this request one more time, I hate to admit that the thinking is sound, at least from an efficiency perspective. We know from Binet & Field’s seminal book, The Long and the Short of It,? that “fame campaigns” (aka “those that inspire people to share their enthusiasm on and offline”) are four times more effective at generating Excess Share of Voice. Which makes perfect sense, because the only thing cooler than paying for advertising…is not paying for advertising.??????

We also know that Social video reigns supreme, fuelled by advertisers’ and consumers’ unquenchable thirst for content; brands can’t create enough of it and humans can’t consume enough of it. It’s an interrelated addiction that fuels itself. So any content created by brands that stands out from the infinite scroll of doom and offers something a little different can capture the imagination of the scroller and stop the almighty thumb of escapism.?

But why FOOH? Why invest potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fake OOH ads?

This is actually where the ‘OOH’ in ‘FOOH’ comes in...

The fact is, people (and particularly young people) f*cking love OOH. Research from Harris Poll/OAAA in 2022 showed that a staggering "82% of TikTok users say they frequently notice photos of OOH ads posted in their feeds." The reason for this is not solely due to the creative potential and capabilities of the OOH medium, but because of what it represents. Today, virtually anyone can become famous online, all you need is a mobile phone, and there are more than 8.6B of them on the planet. ‘Virality’ is a commodity accessible by the masses, with ‘fame’ democratically distributed by the public as opposed to exclusively guarded by the elite. But billboards and other ‘traditional’ media can’t be accessed by the public so easily, and so retain an air of credibility and unattainability that fuels a heightened regard for the medium as well as the brands / people that can access its power. It’s why we see celebrities sharing photos of themselves in front of billboards featuring ads for their creative output, and it’s why non-celebrities (aka the rest of us plebs) share photos of OOH executions that we have noticed IRL (more on that later). OOH taps into our collective subconscious obsession with fame by placing it in plain view in our conscious worlds, and this dichotomous relationship with fame is only further fuelled when OOH content is amplified and shared online.???

But more than anything, OOH is just f*cking fun.

The creative possibilities are immense, which is where the ‘F’ in ‘FOOH’ comes in. For brands trying to leverage the credibility and mystique of the medium, ‘FOOH’ provides a way to push their creativity to the furthest degree whilst unrestrained by the potential infrastructure and council restrictions of activating in public spaces. It offers an added sense of magic and wonder that transcends physical space, representing a creative nirvana that brings together the unattainable and the impossible.?The problem is, it’s a lie by its very definition.?

The question is, does that actually matter??

The answer is, it depends on who you’re asking...

We, the people, as consumers of media are incredibly used to being lied to. We’re deceived, tricked and teased on a regular basis, and we love it. We sign up for it. Imagine the Harry Potter films if there were no CGI? It would just be Daniel Radcliffe pointing a stick at a bald, noseless Ralph Fines. Lord of the Rings would just be Elijah Wood and the guy from Encino Man walking around New Zealand. Spider Man would just be Toby Maguire unable to cry. You get my point. There is nothing ‘unethical’ or problematic about FOOH because it’s essentially what good advertising should be: entertainment, underpinned by a sense of suspended reality. Whether the bus or train actually have eye-lashes, and the (subsequent) realisation that this bus and train didn’t actually have eyelashes, is irrelevant. We care about how the content makes us feel, not how it was made.

For OOH companies on the other hand, it’s an entirely different story…????????????

Naturally, the proliferation of ‘fakable’ OOH ads scares the pants off OOH suppliers. They are breeding unrealistic expectations of the creative capabilities of OOH assets from clients who are actually unaware that certain executions are actually CGI generated. They can also be seen to pose an existential threat to the medium itself, with the common line of thinking being that advertisers will opt for artificial CGI-generated OOH ads in place of actual real-life OOH placements, effectively killing the industry.?

But this fear could not be more unjustified, as the adoption of such an approach by clients would not only be dumb, stupid and f*cking dumb, it would be entirely at odds with everything we know about how brands grow.??

To replace traditional OOH activity with online video stunts would fundamentally ignore the inverse effect of ‘virality’. By its very nature, a viral, shareable moment is just that - a moment. It captures attention, quickly, spreading like its namesake through earned media (whether organic social or through broadcast channels via PR uptake) but is replaced almost immediately as the insatiable cycle of content curation and consumption marches on. Whilst this finite episode can infiltrate the consciousness of the public and capture attention while the moment lasts, it can just as easily be replaced by the next viral moment. And the next. And the one after that.??

As per Professor Byron Sharp’s equally seminal marketing science bible, How Brands Grow, mental availability (aka “the chance of [that brand] being noticed or thought of in the variety of buying situations”) increases the “more extensive and fresher the network of memory associations” of that brand. This longer-term brand building simply cannot be driven by FOOH alone, and needs support from powerful media channels like OOH to reinforce brand cues through broadcast reach and repeated exposures.?

Which is why I think the OOH industry needs to embrace and weaponise FOOH for its own benefit.?

FOOH pushes creativity in public spaces (whether real or fake) further than we’ve ever seen before. This is a bloody good thing and something to be lauded by the OOH market, not loathed. FOOH is inadvertently selling the medium and building deeper appreciation and exposure of public space creativity. But it only tells half of the story. People don’t just share FOOH videos on their Social channels; they also notice, photograph, share and reshare OOH executions that live in the real world. We’ve seen this with the accelerated growth of 3Da and how these executions are being amplified online to reach an even broader audience. We’ve seen the same concept adopted by Netflix for years through their ‘marquee’ billboard, specifically designed for social sharing and recently activated in Australia at Taronga Zoo in Sydney.

Whilst OOH's core competency has traditionally been its broadcast reach, we are seeing more brands treat OOH as an artistic canvas that can be used to fuel social appreciation. The very fact that OOH is integrated within our earthly environment encourages (and implores)?advertisers to more powerfully leverage the ‘human’ aspect of advertising: Emotion. There is an?unspoken social contract that exists between brands and humans that entrenches an important value exchange through OOH - we’ll give you our attention, but you better make us feel something if you’re going to form part of our daily intake of information. The brands that do just that are subsequently rewarded with our attention, and by extension, our intrinsic instinct to capture, document and share the moments that matter to us. ??

For this reason, I believe the entire advertising industry needs to use the rise in popularity of FOOH to drive a heightened level of creativity in traditional OOH and leverage the power of Digital amplification. We need to strive to push the creative boundaries to their limit in real life in the same way that they are being bent and reshaped online, whilst leveraging the credibility, longevity, brand building and unrivalled fame-driving power of the OOH medium. Like all great innovation, the disruption that FOOH brings must not be feared, it must be revered. OOH and Digital play different yet completely complementary roles in securing mental availability, but the OOH industry must adopt the same FOOH ‘virality’ principles to inform the design and execution of eye-catching and heart-stopping OOH creative in the real world, prompting greater noticeability, cut-through and ultimate sharing online. This will further feed the content loop with content that actually cuts through, whilst harnessing the mindset and impact of broadcast reach and real-life exposure.????????

Faux OOH is not the enemy of traditional OOH.

It is its greatest champion, and harshest critic.