AdWeek called me last week to ask my opinion about the use of Vine in OOH. I had been involved in a recent Tide social media OOH campaign, so could I comment on Tide using Twitter’s new Vine video format for a broad-based OOH campaign?

I didn’t know about the details of the campaign and thought it both interesting but also puzzling as Vine does not have an open API (Application Programming Interface) yet. I assumed (correctly in hindsight) that it would be unlikely that multiple OOH markets (especially including roadside billboards) would be able to display these videos.

I gave AdWeek a quote to the effect that I had not seen a broad-based social video campaign in OHH and that this sounded very innovative.

So what’s the story here, what’s it’s impact and what did get reported?

The AdWeek story includes links to some of the videos which are fun but these are NOT being displayed on OHH screens. The Tide campaign uses stills taken from Vines for roadside billboards (roadside regulations stipulate that each 8 sec spot is static).

I’m misquoted in the article but the campaign is really innovative and I haven’t seen Vine leveraged on billboards yet so anything like this that pushes the envelope is great for everyone.

Although Vines do not officially have an open API for developers including OOH applications, we can only hope that will change and attention to this campaign might help accelerate that.

Congrats to the team at Digitas and Tide for continuing to innovate around social and OOH.

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I’m speaking at the Location Based Marketing Association Amsterdam - Out Of Home Innovation tomorrow (Oct 30th).

For those who can’t be there in person (me included - I’ll be using Adobe Connect to present from US), my presentation is on slideshare here

I’ve been told there will be a case study on Playboy’s augmented reality OOH campaign in Europe. Now that’s one campaign that put the OOH in Out of Home :)

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A few weeks ago I wrote that the OAAA published a standard and guidelines for the use of social media in Out of Home. That post is here.

As part of it’s efforts to promote the impact of social in OOH, the OAAA then launched a campaign using the call to action/hashtag #everyWhereUR. The campaign ran for two weeks from September 16 on OOH signage across the US and users’ tweeted photos would end up on a large screen in Times Square.

The results of this effort came out last week. The campaign only attracted 450 tweets and of those, less than 200 photos were posted in Times Square.

So what tactics could have been been used to get better results?

Well, the point of using social media to AMPLIFY engagement. Sorry, but we don’t get amplification simply by plugging in to Twitter, we have to “go where the party is”.

ONE thing that I would have thought would have been a better approach would have been to partner with a brand that has a large following on Twitter and Facebook and then leverage our screens as the reward. (When we did that with Paramount for Twitter, we got over 2,000,000 engagements.)

As I’ve said before, it’s not enough to have a beautiful Gibson Les Paul - you need to plug it in something LOUD to be heard.

I’m talking about how social amplification improves OHH engagement at a Location Based Marketing Association’s event on Wednesday 30th My deck is here.

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It might be old news (after all it did happen last week!) but Jimmy Fallon’s and Justin Timberlake’s sketch on the overuse of hashtags is a funnier distraction than your average YouTube cat video. #Hashtag Go on click on the link below - it’s justifiable business research. #research #whynot #whocares

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A client recently designed an innovative social Out-of-Home campaign requiring the end user to tweet using two hashtags.

We advised them to simplify the campaign’s Call To Action (CTA) to one hashtag.

The rule with CTAs is THE SIMPLER THE BETTER. And for Out-of-Home campaigns requiring engagement, a simple CTA is even more critical. The user isn’t sitting in front of a screen, they are probably walking past it in a matter of seconds. So the CTA not only needs to motivative the user into action, it also has to be easy to comprehend in seconds.

Here’s a link to a presentation I gave at DSE2011 around Out-of-Home engagement and what I call “The 3 Fs” Fun, Fame and Fortune.

In this case, asking the user to type in two specific hashtags is akin to a website requiring the user to click on two separate buttons when they would typically click on one. Many web designers know that every such click loses users - up to 25% each time - i.e. if your website requires two clicks to perform an action that can be done in one, you will probably halve your audience. (Amazon is the master of getting this right.)

From our experience, we know an out-of-home campaign can lose 90% of its potential audience engagement for every additional hashtag in a CTA.

The client told us that they although they understood our recommendation to simplify their CTA, they felt that their innovative design demanded the two hashtags. So the campaign went ahead with two hashtags.

And the result?

The number of tweets containing either hashtag was 74,000. The number of tweets containing BOTH hashtags was only 260, around 0.35% of the total audience.

In a similarly structured campaign using one hashtag, the number of tweets around the campaign was 375,000 of which over 41,000 users responded to the CTA, 10.9%.

The K.I.S.S principle is a good one to live by :)

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