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Yours sincerely, Ellie Reeves, Effectiveness Executive.

We’re all familiar with the fact that once you work in Out of Home, you can no longer enjoy being out of your home. Each bus shelter, tube car panel, and taxi wrap are a reminder of emails unsent and decks awaiting. For me, as someone who lives and breathes campaign effectiveness in their day job, the sight of each OOH ad renews a deep-seated rage, as I question why is every brand logo hidden in the bottom right corner? 

What is an advert without a brand logo? Wasted space, wasted money, and fundamentally an ad for your competitors if consumers can’t attribute it to you. Over the 8 years we’ve run creative testing – 575 campaigns to be exact – Talon have produced one truly illuminating statistic: brand logos are only noticed by viewers 42% of the time. 

Our creative testing relies on an online sample, who have nothing to do but stare at an image on a screen for five seconds. That means that even if we remove the chaos of the outside world, limit anything else that could be grabbing their attention, and put a creative right in front of them, less than half of the general public end up noticing the logo on a creative. When they do notice it, it takes 2.34 seconds for their eyeballs to actually hit the logo. Now that may work when we’re looking at commuters waiting a few minutes on a platform, but when roadside D6s see an average dwell time of 1.1 seconds, that 42% starts to look a lot smaller.   

This doesn’t mean that media investment is pointless – far from it. But it does mean that we can sometimes forget the fundamental rules for creative effectiveness when designing for OOH. Learnings from our creative testing aren’t particularly sophisticated – they reflect essential guidelines for creativity to simplify and centralise. They’re common sensical, but also anecdotal, and when we can provide bespoke, quantitative data to our clients to show what’s not working, it’s much easier to fix. Giving clear advice on what needs to be altered, we’re able to optimise creatives pre-campaign or mid-flight to ensure the strongest impact for our clients.

Rule one: keep it simple. The more features that are added to an ad, the more fragmented viewer’s attention is, and the less likely people are to notice a logo. We see that when creatives include 3 key features (i.e. a headline, image, logo), attention rates for logos are +15% stronger than creatives that include 4 key features. 

Rule two: people look at the centre of a creative first. Portrait creatives see gaze go from centre, to top to bottom, while landscape inevitably see gaze shift centre, to left to right. Using common sense, we can therefore imagine that the lowest levels of attention are in the bottom right corner of any given creative. Thankfully, we also have the data to back it up. Alignment on the left means logos over index by about +3%, while placement on the right under indexes by -17%. When placed in the centre, brand logos over index by +33%.

Now some good news for FMCG brands, automotive brands, and anyone who can showcase their brand logo within a product image. Though typically placed in the centre of a creative, we see that even when product images are hidden to one side, brand logos integrated into the product see much higher levels of attention – +24% above average, in fact.

So, what does this all mean? For the sake of your ad spend (and my sanity), make sure your brand logo is placed where people will see it. When we work day in and day out on the same creatives, we can forget the bigger picture – and that’s that everything on the picture needs to be bigger.

Keep it simple, keep it central, keep it seen. And most importantly, prove that you’re doing that.

As marketers begin to adjust to a post-cookie world, we’re appreciating that measurement is important and should be done right – but it can’t just be done at the end. Pre-campaign testing allows us invaluable insight into what’s not working, so that we can optimise both creative and impact. For years, we’ve used Talon Canvas to inform and drive creative effectiveness in OOH  – get in touch with the Talon Effectiveness Team if you want to find out how we can help you maximise attention in OOH.

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BBC Studios uses the power of Creative Out of Home to create a Gladiators immersive experience in Manchester with Talon and Grand Visual 

The BBC, with global independent Out of Home (OOH) agency Talon and its award-winning OOH production arm, Grand Visual, has brought the Gladiator experience to Manchester’s Trafford Centre in The Gladiators Inflatable Duel.

The experiential activation, which took place on Saturday 9th of March, featured an inflatable immersive experience for nine hours to stir excitement around the highly anticipated semi-finals and finals of the iconic television show. As part of the experience, shoppers at The Trafford Centre were invited to experience a part of the show and engage with the cast themselves by taking part in two to three rounds of battles.

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Leveraging Talon’s expertise in outdoor media, Grand Visual’s world class creative experience and BBC’s unrivalled entertainment legacy, this execution gave audiences the opportunity to experience the adrenaline-filled world of Gladiators action and competition for themselves.

Gladiators returned to screens for the first time this year since 2008 and has reignited fresh enthusiasm for the ultimate test of strength and speed with 9.8 million viewers tuning in to the first episode of the new series. The next generation of Gladiators has proven particularly popular with the younger audience, with 1.9m under 15s tuning in to episode one.

To support the activation, Talon planned a Digital Out of Home campaign that took over the shopping centre to drive consumers to the activity. The creative focused particularly on capturing the attention of Gladiators’ core demographic of 16-34-year-olds, designed to entice them to the adrenaline-pumped atmosphere of the replica Gladiator arena, transporting viewers into the heart of action.

Jay Young, Managing Director at Grand Visual, part of Talon, comments: “We were thrilled to partner with BBC Studios to bring the exhilarating world of Gladiators to Manchester. Through creative use of the Digital Out of Home screens positioned  throughout the centre, we drove excited crowds to put their strength to the test. Audience appetite for in-person events is fully back in swing, and this presents an exciting opportunity for brands to experiment with new ways to engage with audiences.”

Niki Carr, Senior Head of Marketing at BBC, said: “Gladiators holds a special place in people’s hearts. Talon and Grand Visual helped us bring the experience to life, creating ways for people to enjoy and interact with the show, generating excitement around the Semi final and Grand Finale. This collaboration demonstrates the power of creativity to captivate audiences and drive engagement. We were thrilled to bring such a fun experience to the Trafford Centre and loved watching our audience battling it out!”

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Credits:

Client: BBC 

Advertising Agency: BBC Creative  

Associate Mx Director: Debbie Yuen 

Planning Manager: Pegi Jones  

Planner: Lucy Lyth  

Business Director: Sandra Hernadez  

Senior Client Manager: Georgia Harrison 

Senior Producer: Fran Betts 

Media Company: Havas 

Production Company: Ann Squared 

Production Manager: Charlotte Boag 

Event Producer: Caroline Osbourne