Interview with Kevin Henry, our Head of Content and Sponsorships, originally published in More About Advertising.

1/Ocean has become, in part, a free to air sports broadcaster in recent years with its large screen coverage of events including the Euros, Olympics, Paralympics and Wimbledon. Why, how and when did you decide to do this? Was it a case of beginning small and growing?

Our first venture into this type of live ‘rights holder’ content was when we joined forces with the British Fashion Council in 2016. We broadcast live catwalk shows from London Fashion Week across our full motion screen network, sponsored by L’Oreal.

With the rapidly evolving technology of Digital out of home screens, we realised that there would be an opportunity for our ‘on the go’ audiences to be shown more than just commercial content, working with landlords and agencies in some of the best available outdoor spaces.

The crucial element was securing official associations with the content rights holders. In the summer of 2016, we broadcast highlights from the Rio Olympics across our network as an official partner of Team GB, and in 2021 we followed this with our first Team GB fan zone at Westfield London.

Fast forward eight years and we now have four Olympic partnerships in place including ParalympicsGB, Special Olympics GB and DeaflympicsGB. We are also an official fan zone host for Paris 2024 with nine Team GB fan zones and six ParalympicsGB fan zones, all managed by Ocean Labs.

We continue our exclusive agreement with The All England Club to broadcast highlights and live coverage of The Wimbledon Championships, presenting seven official Wimbledon Experiences for fans across the UK this year.

Read more about our partnerships here.

2/What are the main benefits for brands?

Ocean has the unique ability to extend the association of official partners into Out of home spaces, thereby reaching valuable, light TV viewing audiences while they are on the go.

From our proprietary Neuroscience research carried out during the 2019 Wimbledon Championships, we established that Out of home (OOH) advertising messages positioned immediately adjacent to Wimbledon content were viewed over four times longer. They also had a higher emotional engagement than a standard commercial loop where no content was present.

Ocean is now in a position to offer official brand partners access to multiple fan zones around the UK, allowing them to create immersive experiences for new and existing consumers, bringing them much closer to the brand. Aldi, NatWest, GetPRO and TikTok (below) are just some of the brands doing this to great effect in our flagship fan experiences.

3/How do you measure the public’s response?

The 22 official fan zones we are hosting this year have been specifically selected as hybrid environments with high organic footfall. Fans choose to watch these global sporting events together with their colleagues, family and friends in enhanced outdoor settings which are free to enter and enjoy.

The increased footfall we have seen in these OOH environments demonstrates an increased demand from fans for these kind of experiences, something we are now measuring with new consumer research which builds on our 2019 study.

4/There has been an increasing interactive element in your campaigns and fan experiences. How has this developed and what’s in store for the future? What role does technology play?

Technology has always played a significant role in the success of DOOH campaigns, and it will continue to play a key role in enhancing the fan experience, whether it’s playing games on a big screen against fans in competing cities, uploading your own experiences to the big screen via personal devices, or sending good luck messages to screens around the country as you watch your favourite athletes compete.

This year we are experimenting further with different formats. At Team GB House in Paris, we are presenting a fun, mixed reality experience with activity centred around a digital six sheet. It taps into the spirit and enthusiasm of the Games by transforming visitors into medal winning athletes.

5/Out of home has been described as the last broadcast medium in parallel with the decline of linear TV and Ocean, of course, is a broadcaster in the traditional sense when it comes to big sporting events. Do you think the medium as a whole makes the most of this capability? Do you think the global OOH industry makes enough of its impact as a broadcast medium? We hear much about measurement, not so much about impact.

I think that the lack of uniformity across the Out of home industry means brands do not consider DOOH in a comparable way to linear TV. Ocean’s strategy is to develop an integrated digital screen experience that provides both visual and audience impact. We now offer brands a unique channel in the “screen universe” to associate with premium rights holder content at scale.

This benefits all key stakeholders because it provides increased reach and exposure for rights holders and broadcasters and extends the association for official sponsors to a valuable, hard to reach audience with an active mind set. Most importantly, it also provides outdoor audiences with the sort of immersive and increasingly interactive experiences that they expect and enjoy.