Aaron Poole, marketing executive, PML Group with this week’s Out \ Look on Out of Home.
Effective OOH at Christmas time
‘Christmas’ is the leading word on everyone’s mind.
For brands, the scope of the season provides ample opportunity for engagement with customers new and old. Christmas stirs emotive behaviour; consumers crave acts of kindness and instances of connection, so it is important for brands to leverage this behaviour.
As a visual medium, OOH is the perfect vehicle to convey brand storytelling. In alignment with a broader multimedia campaign, it can be the perfect prompt to ensure brands are top of minds when it comes to purchase-making decisions. Here’s how some brands are effectively bringing their stories to life on OOH this Christmas.
Humanising your brand
It has already been recorded at length – including PML Group’s Impact Research – how humanising a brand can be an effective tool for engaging your audience. For Christmas, in a world that is embracing diversity, inclusion, and personalisation, it is important to have your audience represented in your messaging.
Displaying across 48 Sheets, Digipoles & Digipanels, Kildare Village’s ‘Where Wishes Come True’ campaign evokes a sense of relatable, ritual shopping between the pictured friends while planning for Christmas, accompanied by campaign messaging set to festive green backdrop atop the Kildare Village logo.
Dunnes Stores ‘Make Christmas for Everyone’ campaign adds a lighter tone to the seasonal faire. Running across classic and digital formats from Metropoles to the Green Screen @ Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, the campaign evokes a sense of youthful innocence that reminds consumers Christmas is ‘for everyone’, focusing on the children who experience the wonder of the season as opposed to any individual product.
On DXScreens and dPods, Brown Thomas’ ‘Out of this World’ campaign contrasts by doing away with the traditional feel of the season in favour of a more contemporary setting. With the consumer at the heart of the creative, there is a prevailing sense of individualism being evoked that adds a much cooler temperament to the season.
Create something eye-catching
For many brands, crafting a Christmas story comes second to brand identity. For many value-driven and competitor brands, displaying their value or USP is at the forefront of strategy, with Christmas offering an opportunity to push this through a seasonal lens. In such cases the creative has the task of carrying both the Christmas message and value proposition in a way that is reinforces brand value, without being convoluted or confusing to the consumer.
Pepsi MAX, running across a combination of classic and digital formats on Adshel Live, Tesco Live, 48 Sheets, 6 Sheets, and Golden Squares, exemplifies this. The copy is characteristic of the cola brand featuring highly stylised text and the product front and centre, being grounded in the season by subtle to Christmas carols in the lower third. The inclusion of a product shot in-copy has been proven to be a driver of effectiveness in terms of recall and understanding and works effectively here as a contrasting component to the mix that will drive memorability.
Displaying on classic formats including bus sides, metro squares, 6 Sheets and 48 Sheets, Currys are once again running their Black Tag Sale campaign with their signature holiday sale black and yellow colour scheme, departing from the usual purple on white. With short, punchy copy, clarity in colour, and their logo featured flanking the promotional copy, the creative is strong and to the point, conveying the messaging to the consumer in a succinct manner.
Centra’s Christmas messaging adopts a more all-encompassing creative approach. Running across classic format 6, 48 and 96 Sheets, the copy bears the relatedly Irish quote, ‘Ah go on, it’s Christmas’, featuring enticing imagery that captures the more lucrative side of the season. This cleverly drives memorability and brand effects, historically leading to more recall. The inclusion of the brand logo and social tags reinforce this recall and potential further consideration through eWOM.
Less can be more
The strength of a brand may be enough to inspire recognition based on key identifiers alone. For more recognisable brands colour schemes, fonts, and minimal contextual creative that has a seasonal ‘flavour’ may be all that is required is to ground a campaign in the Christmas messaging.
Following on from last year, the iconic black and white pantones that identify the Guinness brand return, as the now-classic ‘footprint’ creative returns across large formats, 6 Sheets and Digital OOH. It was noted in 2021 that the campaign scored well in our iQ research, which is expected to be the case once again given its simple yet relatable and identifiable messaging.
Similarly, the 7UP brand returns across classic and digital 6 Sheets, 48 Sheets, Bus Shelters, and Digital 6s. Most impressively is the brands gallery display with a play on its recent ‘taste that lifts you up’ slogan. ‘Christmas Uplifted’ sets to remind consumers of various considerations to ‘Up’ for Christmas: not only the tree and the lights, but also social considerations like meeting up, dressing up, catching up and, of course, eating up.
For more information on how to employ effective creative in your campaigns, please contact the PML Group CREATE team.
