Obie Awards hosts say out-of-home is becoming an experience, not just a billboard

Out-of-home advertising is increasingly about what people do when they encounter it, not just what they see, according to the hosts of this year's OAAA Obie Awards.

Australian futurist David ‘Shingy’ Shing cited examples such as Spotify posters designed for music fans to ‘steal’ and Jeep painting parking bays in unlikely places around Copenhagen, including on staircases, steep kerbs and uneven ground.

“Out of home is the new experiential, or experiential is the new out of home,” he said.

Shing will co-host the Obie Awards on 15 October with creative leader Susan Credle. They were joined in conversation by Anna Bager, who leads the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) as president and CEO, in a discussion that covered physical installations and AI but kept coming back to how people experience ads in public.

Micro-experiential

“I’m actually starting to call a lot of outdoor ‘micro experiential,’” Credle said. Big events may attract crowds, but an outdoor execution placed inside one can offer a closer encounter with a brand, which photos and videos can then carry to people who were not there.

Shing pointed to Ikea setting up miniature living spaces in cities around the world for passers-by to stop and look at. “Once you’re inside the brand, the three dimensions of it, it creates a different type of meaning than the digital stuff that we have,” he said.

Bager said the location is part of the creative opportunity. “You’re not monetizing or selling advertising in a media, you are doing it in an environment with a certain context.” In the Jeep example, the staircase was the idea: a parking space marked there implied the Jeep could reach places a normal car never could.

Credle said Ogilvy's ‘Meet Marina Prieto’ campaign for JCDecaux changed her view of OOH's reach. The campaign put up pictures of a 100-year-old woman, little known at the time, throughout Madrid's subway system, prompting people to look up her Instagram account, which made Credle rethink how she thought physical ads and social media interact.

“Your perception of how these things work and how they actually work might be a little different,” she said.

Bager said technology can help OOH respond to place and moment, citing Knicks games streamed live on subway screens and LinkNYC units across New York, which gave people around the city a shared experience. “It’s personal, yet it’s mass media,” she said.

When it is not real

Digital production has also created a type of outdoor ad that appears to occupy public space but exists only on video. Bager mentioned Maybelline's CGI mascara train, which seemed to show giant eyelashes brushing a London Underground station as a train pulled in. Some viewers went looking for the installation, she said, and were disappointed to find it was not real.

For Credle, part of OOH's appeal is knowing the work exists somewhere people can actually come across it. “There’s no hiding,” she said. “You’re out there. You’re proud. You’re saying it in public.”

Credle uses AI to explore ideas and to give others a sense of how a finished execution could look. AI companies are also buying outdoor space, and OpenAI's ChatGPT billboard campaign is on this year's Obie shortlist. “The oldest medium is promoting the newest,” Bager said.

Bager also expects AI to help teams with campaign measurement. Yet the examples the three returned to were about how people responded to ads, whether by stopping to watch, looking someone up online or carrying a poster away with them. Shing summed it up: “Measurement doesn’t equal meaning.”