Sports events provide the perfect backdrop for increased creative relevance in pDOOH

This year’s 'summer of sport’ saw many advertisers turn to programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) to increase contextual relevance with sport-themed creative. In this piece, Philippa Evans (associate director, programmatic at JCDecaux) reflects on some of the best campaigns of the summer to inspire you to up your game with contextually relevant pDOOH during future sporting occasions.

Tap into national pride

First up we have Chase Bank, official banking partner of the English National football teams, with a simple, yet highly effective, campaign that tapped into national pride with their creative featuring key players, positive messaging calling out the next Euros match, and their logo.

Agency: EssenceMediacom

DSP: Hivestack

This is a great option for brands with either an official partnership or strong affiliation with sporting events. Additionally, while Chase’s campaign was a one off during the Euros, there’s a longer-term, season long opportunity for brands just around the corner with the English football and rugby leagues kicking off in the coming months.

JCDecaux has several options for brands looking to take advantage of our proprietary audience data and reach sports fans on match days. Furthermore, this strategy is proven to drive brand awareness and consideration – read our case study with Cinch here.

Incorporate sporting language into your creative

Bellway produced an eye-catching creative which capitalized on the spike in interest in football during the Euros by using the word ‘score’ and replacing the letter ‘o’ with a football. Programmatically activated, this campaign benefitted from precision targeting designed to maximize footfall to Bellway’s key locations.

Agency: Thinkmedia Communications Ltd

DSP: Hawk

Another brilliant example of how this strategy can come to life can be seen in Lee Kum Kee’s creative live during the Olympic games. The language used here - ‘Sauce for Champions’, ‘land tasty tricks’, and ‘SK8 over to LKK.com’ combined with the image of a jar of LKK’s Char Siu sauce on a skateboard creates a humorous link with the highly popular Olympic skateboarding events helping to increase contextual relevance and potentially capture the imagination of new, previously untapped, audiences.

Agency: MIQ

DSP: Hivestack

This kind of clever creative adaptation is an option for a wide range of brands, not just those with a close affinity to sporting events. If your audience is interested in specific sports, why not try adding sporting words or images to your creative and use JCDecaux’s creative testing tools to see if predicted attention increases? Then set your strongest creatives live via our programmatic solutions and optimize in real time based on your goals. From footfall to sales, we’ll work with you and your DSP to ensure that you have the metrics that matter at your fingertips for rapid, accurate, cross-channel optimization.

Link your product to specific needs

Sporting events elicit high levels of emotion among fans – often prompting a need to relax after the event itself! If your product or service helps consumers to manage this then take advantage of sporting events to capture attention at the optimum time. 

Added points go to Garmin for the creative below which ran over the weekend of England’s appearance in the Euros final for their use of luscious green grass as the background for their ad. We love this because it does three very important things: 1) it makes the creative stand out against urban backgrounds, 2) it provides a visual link to the sport, and 3) it provides an additional emotive link, the watch placed on the grass makes you think of being surrounded by nature – a well-known way to relax!

Agency: Skyrise

DSP: Sage & Archer (Now Vistar)

Enhance the reach and effectiveness of collaborations

Research shows that OOH advertising increases consumers’ trust in brands more than any other media channel which makes it a great channel to add to your media mix when relying on collaborations and social media. Programmatic activation is particularly useful here as you can ensure that campaigns are timed to correlate with fluctuations in activity on other channels and target audiences’ movement patterns.

That’s exactly what Just Eat did when promoting their exclusive collaboration with Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios and Joe and The Juice during Wimbledon. Take a look at the eye-catching, contextually relevant creative below that ran on our roadside and rail inventory across southwest London during the tournament.

Agency: Kinesso

DSP: Yahoo

How to get started on your sporting programmatic DOOH journey

You don’t have to be a sponsor of a sports team or a manufacturer of sporting goods to reap the benefits of increased contextual relevancy during times of heightened interest in sports. As the examples in this article prove – the opportunities to incorporate a sporting element into your pDOOH campaign strategy are almost endless. Furthermore, I believe that there’s more scope to do this in pDOOH than any other channel.

Firstly, you have the benefit of having access to large screens where you can be more creative compared to mobile, desktop, and tablet screens. Secondly, you can layer first-party data and JCDecaux’s proprietary audience data for exceptional precision targeting enabling even small budgets to achieve big things. Finally, thanks to seamless DSP integrations you can add pDOOH alongside any other digital channel and measure performance using tried and tested, robust metrics that are consistent across all channels.

And the silver bullet... campaigns can be up and running across the UK in a matter of hours, you don’t have to have booked pDOOH months in advance. If any of the campaigns above have inspired you – get in touch with the team and don’t let the next couple of months of sporting excitement pass by unexplored.

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