The last 12 months have seen some huge changes for everyone, from work life to our personal lives and everything in between. And there’s no exception to this within the marketing world. The past year has seen some big changes to how people have been using some of your favourite digital channels too.
A channel that has accelerated its growth further during the pandemic is social media. With users spending more time per day scrolling the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, capturing the audience via social has never been more important. The flip side to this is that other forms of advertising have been affected in a negative manner, such as Out Of Home. With society locked up for the past year, fewer people will have seen your message on a billboard…or so you’d think.
Over the last year, a number of fantastic Out Of Home campaigns have been seen, shared, and loved on numerous social platforms due to their brilliant creativity. The most recent of which was actually designed by creative strategist, Sam Henning, whose one-minute brief design went viral, and eventually got picked up by the brand in question, KitKat.
The creative shows the all too familiar look of a calendar that’s been booked up with Zoom calls, something we’ve all become accustomed to the last year. The afternoon slot of 3–4 pm is blocked out with the 2 traditional KitKat fingers, which also brilliantly incorporates KitKat’s slogan of ‘take a break’ without actually saying those words. The simplistic genius of this creative meant, as well as me, it caught the attention of many and has gone viral, with the likes of AdWeek and The Drum reporting on it.
The concept of OOH and social media being a powerful, effective duo isn’t a new concept, but their love affair may have been inflated somewhat during the recent lockdowns. Brands and creatives have had to ensure that their advert has the potential to go viral to really ensure their OOH creative gets seen as it was intended. The magic of social media has enabled adverts that you’d usually only see in the moment, to be seen by everyone.
Another great example of social and OOH working together is a more recent campaign from Gymshark in Times Square. Gymshark posted on their channel that the Tweet with the most likes would be the message posted on the billboard.
With over 144k likes, 2,000 retweets, and 500 quoted tweets, it was Gymshark’s most engaged tweet of all time. The winning response came from American YouTuber and Musician, Corpse Husband, with over a million likes!
True to their word, Gymshark posted the tweet on the screen in Times Square which resulted in the campaign trending at number 2 on Twitter in America, and number 45 worldwide!
If you need your message to be seen by your target audience then get in touch — https://planb.thisisorb.com/
Written by Matt Bubb
