By Tim Bleakley, Chairman of Ocean Outdoor and creativity lead at the World Out of Home Organization

As programmatic, data and the spectre of AI sucks the creativity out of online advertising, could Digital Out of Home be the final frontier for great work. The last great hope for human artistry in advertising.

Growth wise, Out of Home is at an inflection point. As a channel, the medium can scale much faster if we become easier to purchase, easier to measure, and more connected to the broader media ecosystem. But that shouldn’t come at the expense of creativity; the disenfranchising of the very people who are producing the best work in the real world.

Modern outdoor audiences may well be on our side.

Humans apparently spend 1.5 trillion hours a year consuming social media and digital content. Smartphone users apparently check their devices every 10 minutes. And yet 78% of millennials say they much prefer to spend time in the real world. 

As innovation and tech director Dino Burbidge reminded us at the World Out of Home (WOO) London summit earlier this month, customers are not as excited by AI as the industry is. And research shows that AI generated ads are less trusted by the public. Programmatic online has pretty much been a race to the bottom for the past 20 years whereas “a functional sort of moat” has been built around OOH, says Dino.

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Creativity is fundamental to the future success of OOH. It’s the reasoning behind #MOCA, our Make Outdoor Creative Again global movement. But we must use tech and data well. By all means use the available tools to test and optimise but apply guard rails. Yes, tech like AI will give us increasingly different ways to play with the physical spaces in people’s worlds. The real magic happens when you invite the human in.

#MOCA part 1

It’s not as if any of this is falling on deaf ears. At WOO London, the endorsements flowed. 

• Creativity is more important to brands than the media buy – leave that to the specialists, we heard. 
• Sweat the trust. No other media is as powerful as OOH so promote the competitive advantage.
• Trust has replaced data as the new oil – and that’s a powerful differentiator.
• In Real Life wins.

Creative director Katy Hopkins sees OOH as “a brand’s secret weapon”. It’s funny, disruptive. It creates a spectacle, joy, fear. All the emotions that build a memory. 

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Birds Eye’s oversized 3D cracked fish finger; Channel 4’s The Fountain of Filth; Selley’s liquid nails which stuck a kayak, an arcade machine, and a 2.8 metre mounted marlinto billboards. Wild cards like these become pieces of art. 

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“In an attention crisis, safe ideas are the real risk. Disruptive creativity is the only way to be remembered,” she says. 

Or, as System 1’s Orlando Wood observes, at its cleverest, OOH makes audiences complicit with the message. The satire of The Economist ads in this respect is hard to beat. Ads that insert themselves into our cultural fabric are the winners. This is the craft that builds brands. Great ads are more emotive, and that’s what System 1 tests.

James Murphy and Matthew Straker-Taylor from New Commercial Arts were briefed by WOO to demonstrate the simple, reductive, and very viral, potential of DOOH by getting a new word to trend. ‘Eyezegging’ has since found its way from OOH screens into the Urban Dictionary.

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OOH gives brands a way to speak with stature and conviction, something that isn’t present in other channels that do generate traffic but don’t have the gravitas, said Murphy. 
 
#MOCA part 2: Make Outdoor Creative Art
 
Whatever comes next, creativity remains the silver bullet. Right now, there’s better understanding about the need to maintain high standards of design, and this plays to the whole wider concept about trust, one of the pillars of OOH. 
 
As brands recognise the need to balance their advertising plans, and not just think and go short term, OOH has a big opportunity, but it can’t allow AI to dilute creative standards. 
 
To quote the World Federation of Advertisers’ survey, “as brands we find that the more a system is optimised the more difficult it is for an original idea to develop.”
 
The best creative work on our medium travels. Perhaps we could be the last place for human artisanship in advertising in the real world. 
 
Listen to Behind the Billboard hosts Dan Dawson and Hugh Todd who discuss real world creative insights with the industry’s creative thinkers in their fortnightly podcast. Episode 110 is available now on Spotify and Apple iTunes.

Listen here.