Generative AI applications stand poised to transform Out-of-Home (OOH) and Digital OOH [DOOH] media, marking what could be deemed a new golden age of creativity. The potential creative impact is far-reaching, but below we outline how we’re looking at it from a creative perspective.

DCO – or Dynamic Creative Optimization for DOOH

One significant area is updateable content creation, where Generative AI analyses extensive datasets to discern audience preferences, behaviors, and demographics. This data-driven approach enables the generation of personalised, context-aware content, ensuring that OOH campaigns resonate more deeply with individuals, thereby enhancing overall engagement and impact. Dynamic and responsive campaigns represent another frontier. Generative AI empowers the creation of dynamic content capable of adapting in real-time to changing conditions, such as weather, time of day, or audience dynamics. This responsiveness ensures that our DOOH campaigns remain not only timely but also contextually relevant, heightening their effectiveness.

OOH media can capitalise on this capability to create highly targeted campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments, effectively driving engagement and conversion. Predictive analytics, powered by Generative AI, involves the analysis of historical data to anticipate future trends and audience behaviours. OOH campaigns can proactively adapt content strategies to align with anticipated shifts in consumer preferences, staying ahead of the curve. During my time at Grand Visual we used this to help define our creative matricies and perfect Dynamic content in real-time. In 2016 we baked Predictive analytics into our OpenLoop system to aid our real-time campaigns, which enabled us to react quicker that live data tells us. A great example of this can be seen in these McDonalds ads where we not only took live traffic data, but analysed known traffic hotspots as they began to show signs of early traffic problems. Our predictive analytics software looked at weather patterns, times of data, average speeds, google traffic and busy times to help predict when to change our creative to the traffic focused messages, before the traffic came to a standstill.

In another advancement for DCO, cross-channel integration can be facilitated as AI enables seamless collaboration with other digital channels, fostering cohesive cross-channel campaigns. The combination of OOH media with other digital platforms through generative AI creates synergies that enhance the overall impact and effectiveness of a brands advertising efforts. Generative AI also allows for measurable impact, integrating advanced analytics to gauge the effectiveness of OOH campaigns more accurately. This data-driven approach enables marketers to refine strategies based on real-time performance metrics, ensuring ongoing improvement in campaign effectiveness. An example of this in action is here, where we integrated not only with the first-party data from inside Google Maps, but shared our latest playout stats back to Google for both geo targeted display ads, and geoprompts back in the Google Maps app itself.  Imagine producing an omnichannel digital campaign that would self-diagnose, react, optimise, update, create and deliver in real-time based on live performance metrics. This truly is the holy grail for modern digital advertising…

Ideation and Concepting

Generative AI’s influence extends to fostering creative innovation by providing novel insights and generating unique ideas. This encouragement of creative exploration enables campaigns to break away from conventional approaches, fostering innovation and pushing the boundaries of what is achievable in OOH advertising. Using AI tools in our creativity, brainstorms and thought starters has helped us deliver quickly, efficiently and moreover more creative ideas in response to brief. For years we’ve used Oblique Strategies to help us answer briefs in novel ways. AI is helping us on that journey by thinking outside of our usual processes and challenging us to prove it wrong. For a business fueled by interagency creative collaboration it’s imperative that we stay abreast of develops in AI Tech and it’s implementations. We’re seeing enhanced creativity and collaboration emerge as AI tools foster collaboration between creative teams and AI algorithms. This collaborative approach results in campaigns that leverage both human intuition and AI-driven data analysis, offering a fusion of creativity and technological insights.

Rapidversioning and Iterative Creative

The cost-effectiveness of production can be heightened through AI-driven automation, streamlining content creation and reducing the time and resources traditionally required for manual design. This efficiency facilitates more frequent updates and variations in OOH campaigns, maximizing the impact of advertising efforts. OOH and DOOH in particular, has long suffered from a lack of standardised specs and formats, so having the ability to create and format ads quickly is imperative to help the short term and global OOH media market moving in the right direction… and helps protect media $. During my time at Grand Visual we developed the RapidVersioning system using AI generative processes to aid the creation of thousands of files at different specifications during the COVID 19 pandemic. Having now launched the system, we’re able to deliver thousands of pieces of digital OOH creative in hours to over 70 markets around the globe.

And finally, as we head into the future of creative and generative AI’s role in the process, we are exploring ways to safely train our own AI engines with Brand knowledge into writing campaigns on the fly as conditions change. By combining creative input, quality data, and a thoughtful training process, generative AI can learn to write brand headlines and creative content for advertising campaigns that align with a brand’s unique voice and objectives. Continuous monitoring, feedback loops, and periodic fine-tuning are crucial for maintaining the effectiveness and relevance of the AI-generated content…. but it certainly is the future…

In conclusion, the potential of Generative AI to revolutionize the OOH media landscape is underscored by its introduction of unprecedented levels of personalization, responsiveness, and efficiency. This synergy of technology and creativity holds the promise of propelling OOH media to the forefront of advertising effectiveness in the digital age, marking the dawn of a new era of creativity, innovation, speed and growth.