bottled it
It’s widely reported that 98% of people in the UK see OOH advertising every week. This isn’t hard to believe as one of the fundamental strengths of the medium is wide reach and high visibility.
During my own journey to the office this morning, my encounters with OOH taught me that EDF Energy are capping their prices, that there’s a new series of House of the Dragon, Maynards sweets are a thing, Starling Bank was apparently ‘made for me’, and that Cheez-its have a very large ad budget.
There was one advertiser that eluded me however. Getting in the car at 5.40am unfortunately means that my morning journey is now shrouded in darkness. That isn’t a problem though, as this advertiser made the wise decision to use vibrant, high-definition screens in their quest to engage the person who commutes into the city at an ungodly hour on a Thursday – me. I suspect great thought was put into the positioning of their ads, the one I saw was a D6 sitting directly to the left of the busiest road in Manchester, a decent position that should have delivered a decent impression.
It didn’t though. From what I can tell the ad was for a chilli sauce… or a drink, it was something in a bottle. I couldn’t really tell because the creative had a strange border that reduced the display space, and the copy was long and small - far too small for the distance at which the ad is consumed. It may seem like nitpicking, but a majority of eyeballs that pass that site do so at 20-30mph, so there’s a maximum 3 second exposure time of this ad for most. This campaign will realistically only deliver a fraction of the worthwhile impact it should have (regardless of the quality of the media plan) and questions around any poor result, will very likely be directed at their media agency.
This is not unique to the mystery bottle ad I saw this morning and it isn’t exclusive to new OOH advertisers. There are household names that run unsuitable copy all the time, which is shocking when you consider how easy it is to avoid.
Our clients are fortunate in that our media production team have artwork optimisation tools, intricate first-hand knowledge of the way that different formats, positions and environments are consumed, and they are always happy to help with design, best practice guides and common-sense advice. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it’s incredibly important and crucial to the success of a campaign. A brand can have the greatest plan in the world but copy that doesn’t fit, compromises lots of work and more importantly, your precious marketing budget.
It’s a real shame for the mystery bottle advertiser too as I like buying things in bottles and am a sucker for OOH ads.