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As other forms of media become more interactive, outdoor media has been struggling to shake off its ‘broadcast’ tag. But recent innovations demonstrate that the medium has potential to remain relevant to advertisers who increasingly expect to be able to deliver highly targeted and engaging ads via rival media.
The most interesting development in outdoor in this regard is the harnessing of facial recognition software – a technology developed in Israel to identify terror suspects but now being experimented with by outdoor owners.
In research conducted earlier this year at the Royal Victoria Place Shopping Mall in Tunbridge Wells, facial recognition cameras placed behind posters measured how often shoppers checked out the posters, what age and sex they were and what mood they were in, based on their facial expression.
On a very basic level, this gives outdoor owners more detailed information on who’s walking by which sites and when, meaning relevant ads can be served to the right audience. At a more extreme level, it allows data to be fed back to a central server, processed and then sent back to serve, if not ‘Minority Report’ style personalised advertising, then at least ’segmented’ advertising (e.g. the perfume ad for the women, the aftershave ad for the men).
In the UK, this development is in the very early stages of trial, but in Japan this technology is already being rolled out across shopping malls, including a vending machine which makes drinks recommendations to consumers based on age and gender.
Whether, given privacy concerns, facial recognition digital poster sites ever become widespread in the UK, it’s clear that the digital industry is doing it’s upmost to deliver a more impactful, relevant and interactive experience for consumers.
HD screens, as deployed in bus shelters for Twentieth Century Fox’s ‘Percy Jackson & The Lightening Thief’ campaign, and JC Decaux’s revamp of their flagship ‘M4 Torch’ site show that outdoor can now deliver highly impactful creative that helps advertisers to stand out from the surrounding clutter.
And many, smaller digital ad formats are now offering touch screen interactivity. Even now it’s plausible to imagine a branded digital outdoor site in a shopping mall allowing a user to send a discount voucher to their email address, Facebook page or phone which can then be used in store. Plus the ability to centrally control and almost instantenously change creative allows advertisers to tailor their message based on a wide range of criteria including daypart or some other external stimulus, such as Nike’s ads that responded to England results during the recent world cup campaign.
And of course, it’s not just the technology that’s built into the site that’s important, but those technologies that have been built complement them. If and when augmented reality applications gain more traction in the market, it will be possible to make even traditional print poster sites interactive or, using technology such as Click2C, connect them almost seamlessly with other content streamed directly to consumers phones using the mobile web.
Whichever of these technologies reach the mainstream, what is for sure is that outdoor advertising is set to deliver much higher impact creative in a much more targeted and personalised way than at present, and that can only be good news for premium and luxury advertisers.
