Astral Out-of-Home’s Toronto transit shelter ads for the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM’s) Forbidden City exhibit invited passersby to submit ‘selfies’ to receive a discount on admission.
Connected consumers
Canada has one of the world’s highest adoption rates of smartphones at
75 per cent. Smartphones have allowed people to live more of their lives on the move, particularly in terms of researching products and then planning and making purchases. Research shows smartphone owners who recall OOH ads are more likely to use their devices to locate stores, prepare shopping lists, research specific products and compare prices. And with Canadians reportedly spending an average of more than 70 per cent of their daily time outside the home, OOH ads can engage them more frequently than TV commercials or many other forms of paid media.
The Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM’s) Forbidden City exhibit OOH campaign, by way of example, successfully positioned its brand as innovative by reaching potential customers in new ways. A completely redesigned Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) shelter invited passengers and passersby to take selfies with their smartphones and submit them to the ROM to receive a discount on their admission to the exhibition.
In another example of tying in with smartphone culture, Yellow Pages promoted its mobile app with geolocation ads on various billboards, transit shelters and digital screens, as well as in fitness clubs, restaurants and bar patios. The ads highlighted—and directed consumers to—specific products, services and cultural attractions available in each neighbourhood, based in part on what people in that neighbourhood had been looking for online.
A Scotiabank campaign for an American Express card, meanwhile, focused on transit passengers to emphasize the card’s travel rewards program. This effort included transit station billboards and posters, streetcar interior dominations and both bus and light-rail transit (LRT) vehicle wraps. Notably, the interior dominations incorporated vinyl strips on the streetcars’ windows with both Near Field Communication (NFC) and Quick Response (QR) code technologies. When passengers tapped the vinyl strip with a compatible smartphone or other mobile device, they were taken to an online contest page where they could win a prize.
This type of campaign is expected to become more popular in the future as wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi) services are rolled out across transit systems, allowing more passengers to connect to the Internet while on the go and, thus, providing a greater opportunity for advertisers to engage a captive audience.
Further, Apple’s adoption of NFC technology in its latest iPhones will help make such applications mainstream. And whereas with NFC, the consumer needs to make a choice to engage with an ad, Apple’s iBeacons can ‘push’ a message to every connected device within a wireless range of 50 m (164 ft).
The OOH environment acts as a stimulus to promote mobile device use, sparking online searches and social media conversations that can lead to greater brand interest and purchases. Studies show 42 per cent of Canadian mobile-device users express interest in interacting with OOH ads, with the highest interest seen among 18- to 34-year-olds, followed by 35- to 54-year-olds. Meanwhile, almost one-third of mobile subscribers— 32 per cent—say they would be interested in redeeming an online coupon at a retail location; and 29 per cent say they would be interested in scanning a bar code or QR code on an OOH ad.
Digital opportunities in context
With more than 10,000 DOOH screens in various venues, outdoors at street level and mounted throughout rapid transit systems, the public’s awareness of digital signage continues to grow. On a weekly basis, recall of DOOH ads among Canadian shoppers who own a smartphone is highest in Toronto at 41 per cent, followed by Montreal at 36 per cent and Vancouver at 32 per cent.
The DOOH medium is expected to grow as advertisers exploit the creative flexibility of the technology to deliver real-time content, geotargeting and interactive experiences. One of the reasons marketers are attracted to DOOH media is the technology’s emerging capabilities for measuring the effectiveness of different content and offers, in the interest of providing valuable campaign metrics back to the advertisers.
Working with CBS Outdoor (now renamed Outfront Media), Yellow Pages promoted its mobile app with location-specific ads across Canada.
Indoor DOOH networks, especially, at places like restaurants, airports, gyms, shopping malls and bars can take advantage of unique contextual opportunities to connect with the public, based on a specific environment and lifestyle. Quebec’s Commission de la Santé et de la Sécurité du Travail (CSST), for example, used a combination of interactive digital signage terminals and static posters at colleges and universities across the province to create greater awareness among young people—the elusive under-24 age group—of the dangers of work-related accidents (see Sign Media Canada, September 2014, page 16).
Each terminal’s screen displayed the image of a young injured person lying in a hospital bed, but when a student approached the terminal, the system took a photo of him/her to replace the one on the screen. In this way, the campaign used digital signage technology to bring to life the real possibility of a young university or college student becoming the victim of an accident at work.
