Blacklist Creative Is Helping to Helm the Return of OOH

Before digital advertising took over as the primary way of reaching consumers, out of home (OOH) advertising was one of the main ways to draw that attention. It never fell away exactly, but it went through an evolution while marketers adjusted to the new role it could play in the advertising ecosystem. Then covid happened and not many people ventured out of their homes at all. Yet today, OOH-ready locations like Piccadilly Circus in London and Times Square in New York, are busier than ever while brands are thinking big to make a splash with audiences. 

Blacklist Creative, the full-service creative agency, is no stranger to impactful OOH advertising that gets people talking. With roots in production, streaming, and audio-visual production, the agency organically followed their strengths, handling an increasing number of elements for their clients’ campaigns - including OOH - over the last few years. “ Anything from basic design and production, through to simple billboards and posters and all the way to more complex experiential builds that involve multiple assets and elements. We’re doing the production and the actual build of a physical experience, but also the integration of any AV or digital out of home assets that we may pull along the way,” says Kate Els, creative services director. 

OOH is now one of Blacklist’s specialisms and the agency has brought on multiple skilled creatives to be able to offer the full package in house. Keeping ahead of the technological advancements is key to the team and their expertise in making recommendations about OOH and experimental to clients. “We are looking at various new technologies, like using live location data, and seeing how we can integrate them into our planning and campaigns. Things like 3D or anamorphic billboards that can interact with a person through a simple QR code or change according to the weather or the data that we can pull from the local area.”

Designed to be shared, Blacklist is focused on “creating social opportunities and social moments that people organically want to talk about,” Kate adds. As OOH projects are often massive in scale, requiring hundreds if not thousands of assets, Kate points that the team is looking at how AI can help to streamline some of the repetitive and tedious processes, allowing creatives to focus on what they do best.

Kate notes that anamorphic and deep screen technologies are what’s used in some of the most exciting OOH campaigns today, like the Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton billboard in Tokyo that got anyone who saw it talking and sharing. Currently, there are not a lot of sites that can support this tech though more are coming into existence and the cost can be prohibitive too. “A trend we’ve spotted is clients booking traditional digital OOH screens with a desire to create deep screen effects within that compared to the usual flat appearance. We’re now working on creating that illusion on more standardised screens which opens up a host of possibilities.” 

One of Blacklist’s OOH success stories is the work the agency did with SkyShowtime (SST), helping the marketing team with the launch in 22 markets in a period of five months. The new streaming service was launching into a noisy marketplace with no prior awareness or established equity, so all subsequent OOH activity was vital to building impactful and lasting brand awareness. As a new team, “an early-stage start-up” in their own words, SST relied heavily on Blacklist’s expertise and additional support to help get them over the initial line.

Kate adds that “it was about understanding what titles would appeal to their consumers across different regions, what they have the rights to lead with, and how we work with them to showcase those priority titles. Because of the sheer scale of everything, we created master templates for each particular region. Then those were adapted according to all of the bookings that were made by the media company.” 

Some sites were simple and standardised, though SkyShowtime also booked a lot of big bespoke sites to really make an impact, including station dominations and high impact placements such as bush shelters and vehicle wraps in major cities. “While we had a mock toolkit, because a lot of assets were very bespoke and very big, we redesigned working to the specs meaning that each asset needed its own creative approach,” explains Kate. 

To give an idea of the scale of the project we don’t need to look further than one hotel foil Blacklist designed. “We had to create 900 individual files and provide them to the media vendor. That was an exercise in production perfection - just the export of files took around nine days to get right,” Kate recalls. “Over the five months we had 30 designers and about eight production people maintaining and rolling everything out at the same time.”

The Blacklist team were instrumental with the creative strategy side alongside the execution with the SkyShowtime team highlighting how Blacklist helped them to “really find a loud and distinctive creative vehicle to stand out from the competition and maximise attribution to SST.”

Achieving the task at hand and pulling off the launches over a period of five months was a true challenge and Blacklist took a proactive approach to education, ensuring that the production team were all on board with the creative execution due to the high level of quality assurance that each asset required. Extreme organisation from the production team was, Kate tells us, essential to managing the required 200 to 300 assets daily. “An impressive feat from the team,” she notes. 

Bigger and better OOH campaigns are here to stay, according to Kate, considering the impact of SkyShowtime’s rollout and the general reactions from audiences to creative and thoughtful OOH ads. “It’s not a typical ad that’s just shouting at someone, you’re creating something unique and interesting that requires a different approach to storytelling.”