Outdoor advertising

Posted by Jane Toohey on 20 January 2012 | 0 Comments

Tags: outdoor advertising, brand message, creative

Creative billboards used in outdoor advertising can be a very effective medium to get your message heard by a targeted audience.

The best thing about outdoor advertising is the ability to capture the attention of your audience and keep reinforcing your message on a daily basis for a specific period of time. Of course in order to do that you need to have researched the positioning of your billboard to ensure it’s located on a busy route that’s used regularly by your target audience. Then you need maximum creativity and a great idea, only then will you attract maximum attention and ensure brand recall.

The single most important thing is the product or service you want to communicate. How often have you remembered a billboard for the overall image but can’t for the life of you remember what the product or brand was! Whatever you’re advertising should be the biggest image or text on the billboard. Remember that a billboard used for outdoor advertising, is viewed for a few seconds only.

To ensure your outdoor advertising captures the reader’s attention quickly, use no more than 7 words in the key message, with a simple font that is super easy to read. The more simple the message the better, and try to include a call to action somewhere on the page.

The imagery has to stand out. It needs to be out-of-the-ordinary, something that has the audience think differently. Choose only the most important things that need to be on the billboard, as trying to fit your whole story onto one board is a mistake. Remember, although it’s a large space, it’s viewed from a distance and often at speed. The simpler the design, the easier it’ll be remembered. The key is a simple yet creative design that leaves the audience thinking.

One-off unique billboards make people turn around, but outdoor advertising can be used to tell a story. Digital billboards enable marketers to build a message over a number of weeks as the billboard can change easily and cost effectively. With digital billboards you can have 4 or 5 different messages, one each week, that build on each other and leave the reader wondering what’s going to happen next. outdoor advertising.

Either way outdoor advertising is a balance between impactful creative and strong messaging delivered to a captive audience in a few short moments, and as you can see from the examples we found above, they have to make you go ‘wow’!