There’s interesting reading and research available that delve into the importance of characters in advertising to spark emotion. A type of fluent device as Orlando Wood has labeled them. He says they can be several things but in this text we center around a human, an animal or another character created by a brand. 

System1 together with Peter Field and the IPA have done research on fluent devices and found that campaigns featuring a fluent device are much more likely to achieve market share and profit gain. 

These characters or maskots can be hard workers for brands trying to build emotional connections with an audience. They can entertain and facilitate magic. Especially if featured consistently over time. They can be used to animate and drive an ad story forward and link campaigns to each other. 

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Tony the Tiger, Kevin the Carrot, Colonel Sanders or Ronald McDonald are not putting on a show on Piccadilly Lights or at the Halo after all. The use of them has declined overall and in the OOH realm they never seem to have made the cut at the audition.

A wasted opportunity 

The question we could or perhaps should ask ourselves though: if the benefit of using characters for creative effectiveness is already proven, isn’t it a wasted opportunity not to use them on the big DOOH impact stages more? 

With a strong character driven idea, technology and full motion impact screens serve as perfect facilitators and showmanship stages. 

From Ocean’s neuroscience research we know that full motion DOOH has 2.5x memory encoding effect compared to static OOH. We also know that DOOH primes traditional OOH so using characters on static within the same campaign is logical. Including a brand character can most likely add even more value to these DOOH benefits. 

I for one would love to see the M&M siblings (?) put on an animated show on the DOOH stage. 

Read more about our Neuroscience research here.

-Jesper Albansson, Nordic CMO