People today have learnt to indulge themselves. At any given point of time, malls are flooded, restaurants are full; all this only indicates that your target audience is out of home and thus OOH as a medium surfaces to be a winning bet. But to make these entertainment hungry, out of home audience stop and take a look at your advertisement is a huge task at hand. And this is where creative idea becomes the make or break ingredient.
Outdoor as a medium has often been mistaken to be the big brother of print. Creatives designed for print are plastered onto hoardings and then the medium is blamed for inefficiency. Now just for a moment let’s assume the role of being the passerby and think, will we read the elaborated story that has pictures, and paragraphs up there? No right? Sounds quite a task. This is where the need for creatives, specially tailored for Outdoor as a medium dawn.
So what would an effective OOH creative be like? "A good Out-of-Home creative is the one, which holds on to the consumer at various touch points away from his home. It’s the one that tells him/her the larger story using minimum words and puts the point across very strongly which only remains in the individuals memory for a long time to come." says Karan Rawat, Executive Creative Director, Grey. While Karan defines the ingredients of a winning Outdoor creative, Sajan Raj Kurup, Founder & Creative Chariman, Creativeland Asia etches the hygiene factors of an outdoor creative "Clutter breaking, novel in its ways and relevant to the brand are must when it comes to ideating creatives for Outdoor." The 7 words, 7 seconds medium requires crisp creatives, and your audience looks out for out-of-the-box ideas that will make them stop and engage.
But the medium is expanding from Outdoor to being Out-of-home, thus the creative possibilities with the medium are multiple. Use Drama, teaser, story, humor, engagement the options are plenty; symbiotic to the consumers’ life the medium ventures way beyond the billboards and thus today brands are also zeroing on OOH as one of the lead medium to launch campaigns and products. Highlighting this varied spread of options Karan says "Out-of-home as a category is just not hoardings. Though 60% is hoardings, we also have transit (trains, bus, cabs etc.), which is about another 20%, and alternative outdoor like event, street act, and any other form of creative activation is around 19% and growing still." Each of these touch points come with their own ways of attention seeking rules and each of them are completely different from the other; hence the same creative can’t be applied to every OOH variation. "The simplicity of a billboard may not work for a mall kiosk since the time spent on reading a kiosk in a mall is more than looking at a billboard while driving a car. Similarly bus panels are even more difficult as the medium itself is moving. So the creative on that has to be altered accordingly," Karan points out.
A good Out-of-Home creative is the one, which holds on to the consumer at various touch points away from his home.It's the one that tells him/her the larger story using minimum words and puts the point across very strongly which only remains in the individuals memory for a long time to come - Karan Rawat
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And this multi-format nature of OOH as for Sajan is nothing but multiple opportunities and choices and in his view the key is to plan the creatives depending upon what the core idea demands. It is a unique and relevant idea that can be morphed into any kind of outdoor that is what being creative is all about.
This ‘one idea and many manifestations’ philosophy also is reflected in the way Creativeland Asia processes OOH creatives, "We are a creative company which is media neutral, be it a physical billboard or a web banner the team that works on each of these is the same," says Sajan. While at Grey Karan indicates that they have a separate team working on activation for brands that the agency handles. "But we like to work as an integrated team on all accounts to see that the same line of thought gets carried forward in all executions. Like we have experts from all departments in the creative, we have the finest people working on activation and each one of us is encouraged to think in all directions and for all mediums." Karan says.
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The OOH space in Karan’s view has truly witnessed some creative excellence, for him the Economist campaign that had a bulb light up when somebody passed by was brilliant piece of OOH, also the Cadbury silk campaign with its simple visuals drove the point home. Also Grey Mumbai’s recent campaign for Akshara – The begging groom against dowry done by a young creative team from Grey, Pallavi Chakravarty and Goral Ajmera achieved success. And for the same Pallavi Chakravarty won the Copy Writer of the Year award at Young Guns by ACB. While the exclusive OOH creative thought and talent exists, there are times when these thoughts and ideas don’t reach their full potential due to some obvious limitations of the way the medium is maintained. "I am not convinced with the quality and finishing of the OOH work we do in India. Most of the hoardings in our country look shabby, unfinished, the colors are not right and they are mounted very badly. We haven’t yet reached the level of quality the countries in west and other Asian counterparts possess. We definitely need to improve on this area," Karan highlights.
In all simplicity, strong imagery and relevance are what every OOH creative needs, and to ensure the campaign is effective it’s essential that strategy backs the creative idea. As a creative without strategy is art, but creative with strategy is what we call advertising. "Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad" Howard Gossage once said. This line is like a prick in every advertiser’s shoes, which clearly implies that creative craftsmanship in advertising is your permission to pitch
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