3 OOH Campaigns That Went Viral
What was the first viral piece of content that you saw? Was it “Charlie bit my finger?” Or perhaps it was the dreaded chain mails threatening bad luck that landed in your inbox? The term “viral” is no longer just a term about sickness. It’s about moments and posts that circulate rapidly and widely online, dominating the internet.
Although nobody can predict what content will achieve viral status, it’s completely different when it comes to out-of-home (OOH) campaigns. Behind most OOH campaigns that ‘go viral’, there’s a dedicated PR & Media team supporting the promotion of content online. It is not enough to rely on impressive creative if the ambition is to make an OOH campaign go viral.
We’ve taken a look at the campaigns we’ve worked on that have gone viral. These campaigns are a great testament to what the result can be when all the right elements come together.
Unveiling Viral OOH Campaigns: Creative Secrets Revealed
BBC Dracula
When the eerie Dracula campaign was unveiled in December 2019, the social media blow up that would soon follow was huge. In just one week, the time-lapsed video of the special-build had amassed over 7 million views across social media and appeared in over 40 articles. Most of these articles came from sites outside of the advertising industry, including “All Hallows Geek,” a website that is dedicated to all things horror.
This BBC advertising for Dracula is genius. A series of bloody stakes protruding from a billboard. Seemingly random, until darkness falls and they begin to cast a shadow. Fabulous. pic.twitter.com/84aIl7o97r
– Alex Andreou (@sturdyAlex) January 3, 2020
The Oreo Eclipse
When the Moon is about to cross the Sun in an almost total Solar Eclipse but has the potential to be spoiled by the British weather, what is a biscuit brand to do? Make sure nobody misses out and create its own #OreoEclipse of course! With some clever leveraging of this natural event, this campaign became a huge success. In just two hours, the DOOH campaign generated more than 6,000 tweets that day from 40 different countries. The social film of the campaign also went on to be viewed over 20 million times in the UK.
The #eclipse2015 sucked where I was at least I had the #oreoeclipse to cheer me up! pic.twitter.com/gCOav9bYtD
– The Geek Factory (@thegeek_factory) March 20, 2015
Pepsi MAX Unbelievable Bus Shelter
And finally, we conclude with the masterpiece that is Pepsi Max Unbelievable Bus Shelter. The social film from the Augmented Reality experience garnered over 8 million views on YouTube, with 3 million of these views reached in just 5 days. The campaign went on to spark a PR frenzy with news coverage worldwide, reaching over 385 million people. Still to this day, almost six years later, this epic campaign still gets our phone rung!
From investigating these campaigns, there are some clear indicators as to why they went viral:
Sharing the offline, online
Whether it was a short time lapse or a three-minute long video, each campaign had some type of digital content that could be shared online. The ability to share videos such as these, with an instant click on social media, can cause a frenzy that spreads quicker than word of mouth. For a campaign to have the opportunity to achieve virality online, it needs to be easily shareable.
Creativity that stands out
Each campaign also had a unique and creative take on OOH. From ominous shadows created by bloody stakes, to UFOs and biscuits in the sky, each campaign really took the creative potential of OOH by its horns. And although we can’t guarantee that these features will make every single OOH campaign go viral, we can conclude that they play an important role!
