If you live in a city, out-of-home (OOH) advertising is unavoidable. Done well, a billboard, poster or even a bumper sticker has the potential not only to capture the attention and imagination of tens of thousands of commuters, but it can offer a moment of art-like surprise, delight or intrigue. Nils Eberhardt, group creative director at Special,  is on a mission to simplify OOH one billboard at a time. Eberhardt talks to Marketing Mag about why the medium makes so much sense for brands in today’s online era.

At the moment, you’d be hard-pressed to log in to LinkedIn without seeing some great out-of-home ads coming from places like Uncommon, BBH, Bear Meets Eagle on Fire or new startup Wieden + Kennedy. 

I do have some suspicions as to why that is, but before I go any further, I have a confession to make: I’ve always loved out-of-home ads. 

Billboards. Posters. Bumper stickers. You name them, I love them. Because when done right, outdoor ads are a delightful surprise. They brighten up boring commutes with a little laugh when you’re least expecting it, or surprise you with a beautiful image where there’d previously been a very boring one. And if you’re a brand looking to stand out, those moments of attention are a powerful thing. 

But why are billboards having a moment right now? I suspect it’s a perfect storm of ad-related factors.

In a world of hyper-functional, hyper-targeted performance advertising, a simple, clever poster feels like a relief. It’s a break from the digital cacophony of discounted linen bed sheets chasing you around the internet after you decided not to purchase them two weeks ago. Rather than an annoying intrusion, great out-of-home feels like a quick and fair value exchange; a bit of entertainment for a little bit of attention. 

It’s also (almost) unmissable. Short of wearing a highly impractical blindfold, there’s no ad blocker for out-of-home. And while other forms of ad targeting have gotten smarter and smarter, people are working harder and paying more to avoid them all. So until people can pay $10 a month to live in the premium version of their cities that come with no ads, billboards are a guaranteed way to get brands’ messages in front of people.  

On top of the fact that it’s hard to avoid in the real world, great out-of-home isn’t just out-of-home, it’s great social too. Nike’s recent ads dotted along marathon routes were insightful and charming and 100 percent made to be photographed by people keen to share their boast-y “I’m doing a marathon” posts. So they were twofers. 

Via @audreyybbrownn on TikTok

And it makes sense. Great out-of-home and social images share a lot of DNA. Both call for something short, sharp and visually striking that can stop people in their tracks whether strolling or scrolling (rhyme unfortunately intended). 

This OOH-to-social trajectory has happened a few times on projects that my creative partner Simon Gibson and I have worked on at Special. Local campaigns like the recent Kitchen Warehouse Black Friday Sale or our Pepsi ‘Tastes OK’ work have gathered millions of impressions online in places and countries far beyond the initial media buy because they were simple, graphic and out of the ordinary. This is thanks, in large part, to some fantastic clients who backed out of the box thinking. Some even let us slice, blend and blur their logo.

Keeping work simple and graphic might be something I have picked up living in three different countries and continents with very different languages. A simple, graphic idea that explains itself can sometimes help in overcoming language barriers. Not the worst approach to OOH given that it can travel across the globe with the speed of one post.

While we’ve seen some great work coming out lately, good outdoor is still far from the norm. Because out-of-home ads are deceptively hard to do well. You have a split second to get attention and only get to keep it for a few more seconds after that. So you have to say less and make it count. And that takes confident clients and a sharp brief. When we worked on the Uber Eats ‘Get Almost Almost Anything’ No/Yes OOH, it felt a bit like building a sportscar, we all kept shaving off superfluous bits to make it sharper and tighter and now it’s a brutally simple, very fun campaign running around the world. 

So yes, it seems like out-of-home is having a creative renaissance because it’s big, in your face, unavoidable and when you get it right, it spreads. That means it’s a huge opportunity for brands to reach people, and it’s a huge responsibility for creatives. We have to make it interesting, otherwise we’re just creating visual pollution. 

Now I’m going to go outside and enjoy some nice fresh ads. 

Nils Eberhardt is a group creative director at Special, who is on a mission to make OOH simpler one billboard at a time*. 

*Except this one that listed all of the things Uber Eats couldn’t deliver and had about 1238 more words than ‘best practice’ recommendations.

Photography supplied by Special.

Read about the psychology behind boosting sales with digital signage.