EYE Global Interview

Chris Sheldrake

Our Editor-in-Chief Adrian Cotterill was recently interviewed by the folks at EYE Corp down in Sydney for their eye reporter quarterly magazine – which if you don’t receive it by the way is seriously the BEST put together industry magazine out there.

It’s an in-house magazine sent to EYE’s customers, suppliers, friends and family BUT we think it puts to shame nearly all the commercial titles covering our sector.

Here’s the interview Q+A: –

Digital Out-of-Home (OOH) is a hot topic at the moment, why do you think this is?

It helps that out-of-home in general is a hot topic. We all know, pretty much worldwide, that out-of-home growth is second only to online advertising.

So, think about it a different way, if it was easy, cheap and cost-effective for every traditional billboard, poster or lightbox to be digital, to be on-line and have a TCP/IP address wouldn’t the whole industry be DOOH?

Cost is fast becoming a non-issue with the proven revenue gains that a number of digital faces has over a single traditional face. In a few years OOH will be DOOH and we probably won’t differentiate too much between them.

What do you forecast as important elements for the next phase of growth in the digital OOH sector?

Unfortunately many of the digital startups we have seen crop up globally have in many instances spoiled the party for traditional advertisers and made many brands and media planners wary of this new digital medium – which in essence isn’t really a new medium at all of course!

We are now seeing the established out of home contractors really get to grips with digital and we firmly believe that this is what will now drive the industry further.

Great content can also drive growth but the industry needs to be careful with this – we typically see a 50 / 50 split between great content and very poor content.

What are some inspiring digital OOH executions that you have recently seen?

Our favourite execution anywhere in the world is the J / L shaped screen which was in the window of Harrods in London earlier this year. We seriously think that the next phase of growth, especially in Retail and in some areas of the High Impact sector non-traditional screen shapes and sizes will really attract consumer interest – we will see all sorts of new and compelling content to handle weird shapes screens!

Whilst that was a retail execution if you like, we expect non traditional screen shapes to take off in outdoor as well.

Do you believe that audiences are more drawn to digital executions than to static? Why/ why not?

Movement attracts the eye (no pun intended) but good creative is good creative whether it is static or animated. Done well though a digital execution will win hands down every time.

Good digital executions are more ‘animated poster’ than TV though and far too often we see too much video and generally not enough thought having been put into how the consumer will see (and indeed often walk up to or drive past) what is created. Far too much creative is overly complicated, simple is often best.


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