With the huge investments in Digital OOH by media owners and landlords, we are spending vast amounts of energy working with the DOOH creative community, keeping them up to date with the latest screen capabilities so they have the option to incorporate and realise new ideas into these all that these all singing, all dancing screens that can deliver targeted communications.
So Trivago’s latest OOH campaign only reinforces the view that we’ve taken giant steps backwards with this uninspiring, repetitive, ill-informed creative, currently running in the gallery along the corridors at London Underground station....although it's achieved much comment.
This lazy approach rarely falls at the feet of the creative teams, who are often planning or adapting exiting creative on desktops having never seen the final location or environment. Without visiting the location or seeing a recreation, how are they meant to understand the elevation, the customer’s visual lead-in, or the potential for storytelling, as well as the architecture in which it’s intended?
The commuting audience are a savvy bunch, they expect intelligent messaging, engagement and at the very least, a vague attempt at entertainment, not "…same again, same again, same again “
one placement is at Oxford Circus underground station along the 5 exit corridors, the gallery execution bought as a ‘spectacular’, so with time allowed it can deliver a really impressive immersive execution. Trivago’s repetition of the same copy frame after frame, presented with a fairly bored looking model, though in real life a well regarded Berlin-based actor. We are only left to assume it was a late purchase, in which case it probably wasn’t worth it….
Now, I am not in agreement that we are in the era of the “shit 48 sheet” a phrase that seems to be gaining momentum. There is some fantastic static creative out there, which is usually produced by creative teams who are briefed in tandem with the media team, with a budget and an adventurous client. They’re not handed a media schedule after it’s bought, something I’ve seen many times. We have a plethora of award ceremony & festival furnishing ECD’s with gongs & lions galore, so it can’t be all bad, but those that are, gain columns of comment for all the wrong reasons.
Our focus should be in bringing together our digital screen capabilities with the imaginations, ambitions, and innovative thinking from both the creative community and clients, to optimise the opportunities in contextual messaging. Whether by environment, audience segmentation, location based, time, weather, event etc, more & more media owners, are at long last moving away from analogue systems and 2 week buying processes, with investment in automated systems offers the flexibility for immediacy, consumer generated content in near real time, audio, AI and much more …….