A QMS neuroscience study highlighted the greater impact of Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) campaigns on changing creatives. The report stated that evolving creatives delivered a 38% higher impact than static creatives. The report also states that studies have found that long-term memory encoding for campaign effectiveness continues to grow in respondents exposed to evolving creativity.
In recent years, we have seen the adoption of data and technologies that have transformed the OOH media space. It is not just static sites that have become digital but the ability to deliver content based on external signals like weather, traffic, footfall, and more has created new creative possibilities for marketers.
We take a closer look at weather trigger optimisation, which is a form of dynamic creative optimisation and also among the most popular data content signal being used to execute campaigns from the ‘Moving Audiences’ platform.
Utilising live weather data enables marketers to tap into weather-driven patterns to understand demand and consumer behavior. How does a weather-triggered ad work? For instance, if the weather in a specific location is raining, then the advertisement on the billboard can be contextual showing either rain-related messaging or imagery.
Likewise, if the weather is bright and shiny the advertisement on the billboard will adapt to show creatives or adverts that encourage purchases during such weather. For a marketer, this is a great way to legitimise content, ensuring that their messages are relevant, timely, and hyper-contextual.
Let’s dive in deeper for a better understanding of how the weather trigger works for digital billboard content.
What Can You “DOOH” about the Weather?
You can now leverage real-time location-based weather data to trigger ads and customise marketing messages based on local weather. The term “weather trigger” represents the feature best because the campaign setup allows you to set specific rules to trigger the campaign or certain creatives when relevant conditions are met.
Who Benefits from using Weather Triggers?
Weather-triggered advertising is a great way for brands and planners to personalise content. Delivering personalised and dynamic content has maximum effect in delivering a more relevant message that brands utilise to reach end-users and increase engagement. By better targeting what’s relevant to them, you can anticipate an increase in leads, conversions, and eventually, the retention of customers.
Media owners also benefit from this feature as it elevates their DOOH assets. Contextual or changing content stands out when compared to static or repeated advertising messages and adopting new innovative capabilities such as these make media owner screens capable of being updated in real-time based on predefined parameters and rules set by the advertiser.
How is it Automated?
To set up weather trigger advertisements, we need two main components - first, the media or screens selected need to be connected to the internet and be able to play HTML5 files, a computer language that is easily readable by computers and devices such as web browsers and parsers.
Next, the sites will then need to be connected to ad-tech platforms where creatives can be set up or controlled with very little manual intervention. The content management system (CMS) chosen needs to be able to enhance campaign delivery with programmatic and automation capabilities. CMSs like LMX Content enable connectivity to multiple Demand Side Platforms (DSP) and can host multiple DOOH formats of content plays.
Foodpanda in the Philippines is a big believer in using the weather to trigger their DOOH campaigns. The brand had designed 5 creatives to match five weather possibilities in this particular campaign.
Image 1.0: A snapshot of DSPs' capability to upload curated creatives
Once the deal is set up and the creatives have been approved, the digital billboards connected to the platform will trigger the right line item based on the live weather condition being looked at by the Demand Side Platform (DSP) to decide on specific ad requests.
The line items contain information about how specific a creative ad is intended to be. If the criteria matches the trigger that is intended, the DSP will respond. This is called a bid response. Serving HTML5 files, allows for the creation of multiple rules.
The smart system picks up thematic readings on or near each targeted billboard and sees if the rules provided by the user are matching the current weather conditions. If yes, it delivers the respective ad.
Dynamic DOOH as Standard
In the past two years, foodpanda Philippines uses weather signals across all their DOOH campaigns.
Image 1.1: Foodpanda Philippines
It didn’t just stop there, following this more Filipino brands quickly adopted dynamic content for their DOOH campaigns.
Sunsilk 1.2: Sunsilk Weather Trigger
In 2022, Sunsilk designed specialised creatives, including special ‘rain-like’ creatives to match rainy weather, following bright sunny-look creatives to match a perfect sunny day.
Image 1.3: MacDonald's Mix&Match
McDonald's went a step further to mix and match creatives with three dynamic creatives that responded to the changes in weather - among them were creatives for sunny, rainy, and Petsa de Peligro.
Image 1.4: Netflix Hallyu
The dynamic DOOH bug has quickly picked up in other Asian markets where DOOH continues to grow. In Indonesia, we worked with Netflix to promote their latest K-drama release ‘Forecasting Love and Weather’. This was an ideal situation to personalise DOOH content as the show itself is based on the elements.
Setting Up Your First Weather Trigger Campaign
The weather signal is just one simple example where some changes in messaging can be implemented for brands to immediately this traditional form of advertising into a targeted media option.
Dynamic creatives aren’t limited to weather conditions alone, but multiple aspects that can be triggered like peak hours, environmental factors, specific audience segment targetting, google traffic, and much more!
Remember that when your brand communicates the right thing, at the right time, to the right person, this will resonate with your audiences and strengthen your relationship with them, which is almost impossible when done manually. DOOH provides probably the biggest media canvas to do this on in terms of the venue options combined with the large or premium nature of the screens themselves.
If you’d like to learn more about setting up weather triggers or other dynamic content signals for your DOOH campaign, get in touch with us at info@movingwalls.com.