Challenge

Get media buyers to get real.

In a world dominated by digital, out of home advertising was quickly getting left behind. OOH had a reputation as traditional, inflexible, expensive, and hard to measure. To earn a bigger slice of more media plans, we needed to show media buyers that OOH not only amplifies digital, it’s one of the most powerful advertising mediums in existence.

Approach

Our target has trust issues.

Bots, non-viewable ads, and outright fraud waste billions of ad dollars each year. We saw an opportunity to lean into media buyers’ fear: just how real are digital media impressions?

We turned digital natives into lab rats.

We launched our OOH experiment at Advertising Week in NYC with a simple, unbranded message: THIS AD IS REAL. Using donated space from OAAA member companies, we placed 1,400 OOH ads in 20 major cities across the country.

Let’s get physical.

Over 280 of those ads were tailored to target markets, landmarks, physical locations, media agencies, and even 50 influential media executives — effectively using a channel traditionally known as mass media for hyper-targeted 1:1 communication. All ads drove curious viewers in the real world to visit our online campaign hub, proving the effectiveness of OOH.

Results

Getting real drove real results.

We sparked an unprecedented acceleration in OOH, driving $48 million in incremental sales and delivering 16X ROI. Feel The Real secured $2.2M in earned media in its first week, and was named one of Advertising Week’s Top Five Stories and a Creativity Editor’s Pick.