Think about the last ad you actually remembered.
For me, this is JCDecaux’s “Meet Marina Prieto” campaign.
JCDecaux is an outdoor advertising company in Spain that wanted to revive interest in subway advertising. The campaign turned an ordinary grandmother with 28 followers on Instagram into a local face by putting 54 of her photos on the empty ad spaces across Madrid’s subway stations. The photos showed her in her everyday life, and the question on everyone’s mind became “Who is Marina Prieto?”, demonstrating in a moment that went viral online that people pay attention to the ads they encounter in transit spaces.
Attention, trust and tapping into culture is exactly what Wilkins Elevate kept circling back to, session after session. Wilkins Media is the largest independently owned out-of-home company in the country, and Elevate is the conference they run every year to get the industry in one room.
This year’s sessions covered emerging media, experiential marketing, guerrilla tactics, and, of course, AI, but almost all of them landed on the same points: out-of-home advertising is effective because it captures attention in unexpected ways, and people trust it. Let’s talk about some of my biggest takeaways from the two-day paid media marketing event.
Trust + Attention = Effectiveness
Throughout the event, speakers kept returning to one reason out-of-home (OOH) advertising works: people trust it.
- 73% of consumers express a favorable view of digital out-of-home (DOOH), compared to 50% for TV and video, 48% for social, and 37% for online (The Effectiveness of DOOH Advertising).
- 69% also said OOH feels more human (New OAAA Research: OOH turns Attention Into Action Across the Consumer Retail Journey).
For a channel that is often underutilized or deprioritized in favor of direct response channels, those numbers caught my attention.
At Noble, we talk about moving people and moving the needle, and OOH does both when the execution earns it.
A Harris Poll found that 76% of consumers took a device action after seeing a Digital OOH ad (Harris Poll). For local businesses, directional ads raise the chance someone walks through the door. The same poll also found that 93% of consumers who visit a business after seeing a directional ad go on to make a purchase (Harris Poll).
This insight reinforces creative choices we already make. For our destination and attraction clients, our OOH creative builds in wayfinding, such as pin markers and other distance callouts.
Removing Inventory Limitations with Guerrilla Marketing
Another topic covered at Elevate was guerrilla marketing.
If you’re not familiar with this tactic, Wilkins defines it as “guerrilla marketing is the use of unexpected, unconventional and highly targeted media tactics to reach people in the environments where they live, work, play and move.” It starts by asking where the message will have the most impact and is a strategic solution for markets that have limited OOH inventory.
Pulling off guerrilla marketing effectively requires consideration across several factors:
- Know the Market. What works in one market can be completely inappropriate in another. Each market has its own tolerance, regulations, aesthetics and culture.
- Pick Your Spots. More isn’t always better, so activating in fewer places, with greater intent, is an effective approach. Blanketing a city can dilute the impact, create visual clutter, spark negative sentiment or make your brand look careless.
- Work With the Space. Guerrilla marketing gives brands the ability to create interaction with the environment, something traditional media simply can’t do. Don’t just put an ad on the sidewalk. Understand the environment, push creativity and build around the medium instead of on top of it.
Beyond the tactical sessions, Wilkins also hosted several keynote speakers, including AI experts, published authors and an Olympic champion. Two of them left me with lessons I keep coming back to.
Transfer the Sense of an Idea
Tamsen Webster’s session on persuasion reminded us that ideas live and die in other people’s minds. Her philosophy on message design centers on the idea that people decide using three kinds of sense: emotional, rational and gut. Each one kicks in at a different speed, so if you speak to all three at the pace they activate and stay consistent with what your audience already believes, you can transfer the sense of an idea. This is why trying to support an idea with more data points rarely works because it only addresses one type of sense. Using Webster’s approach (which I’m not going to spoil here) increases the likelihood that they not only agree with you, but can defend the idea without you in the room.
Recognize your patterns of success
Olympic Gold Medalist and author Nikki Stone closed the week with a powerhouse speech that earned a standing ovation (and more than a few watery eyes in the crowd, including my own). Sharing insights from her book When Turtles Fly, she spent an hour talking to us about the habits and rituals that create success. Stone’s Turtle Effect states that “To be successful you need to: be soft on the inside, have a hard shell and be willing to stick your neck out.”
While there were several incredible takeaways, which again I won’t spoil for you, but one of my biggest was around understanding patterns of success.
Stone asked the audience to stand up and then recall our personal most successful day. Once we locked in, she asked us to keep standing if we remembered the details of that day, but not the ones you’d expect. She asked if we remembered our energy level that day, our confidence level that day, how we slept the day before, who we were with and what we ate for breakfast. Most of us (including me) couldn’t.
Only one person was left standing, a former athlete, and that proved her point. She’s found this is especially true of athletes: the high achievers remember and study those details, then build the conditions needed to do it again. Her advice was to write down the details of our most successful (and unsuccessful) days. Doing so gives us the data we can use to analyze and spot our own patterns of success and find things we may not expect.
Bringing the Lessons Home
The two keynotes are changing how I work and how I think about leading.
Webster’s sensemaking lesson is now a step in how I think about planning and positioning ideas internally and externally. Before taking a recommendation to a client, I want to know what their team already believes and what would have to be true for the idea to make sense to them. Internally, it means understanding where people are starting before I consider asking them to move. When an idea isn’t landing, stop searching for more data and ask whether it makes sense to the person in front of me.
Stone’s lesson is more personal. I’ve started to think about my own best days the way she described, with attention to the conditions around them: how I slept, my energy level, my confidence level, who I was with, what I ate that day. Her point that high achievers study these details and build environments to repeat them is useful for leading a team. Helping our team know what their best work looks like lets us build the conditions for it, instead of only measuring the results.
OOH works because people trust it, and the two-day event provided practical ways to build on that trust. If you’re planning OOH or experiential next year and want to compare notes, I’d love to talk.
