Ocean Outdoor Launches New Showstopping DOOH Format, The Showcase

Ocean Outdoor is finally unveiling The Showcase after two years in the making. It’s a brand-new, freestanding, immersive 3D canvas drawing on the very best creative and technical opportunities modern digital out of home (DOOH) has to offer. The Showcase makes its debut below the Four Dials DOOH screen at Westfield Stratford City – in partnership with Warner Bros. Pictures UK – presenting a bespoke 3D asset of the forthcoming DC Studios ‘Superman’ film trailer with soundtrack.

Speaking exclusively to LBB about The Showcase, Catherine Morgan, group MD of Ocean Labs, says “there’s currently nothing else like it on the market.” She notes that it’s custom-made and “fully optimised for 3D DeepScreen® content, reflecting the quality and originality that brands would expect from Ocean.”

The specs are what makes this new format really stand out. With two curved screens spanning almost six metres wide and three metres tall, it’s freestanding, fully portable and designed to appear in unexpected locations, “allowing creative agencies and brands to scale their high impact 3D campaigns in environments they might not otherwise have been able to reach with standard DOOH. It brings immersive 3D DOOH right to the audience,” Catherine explains. Available on a solus basis, The Showcase allows for flexible location-based planning in high dwell time public spaces, giving brands the power to deliver premium large format DOOH wherever it matters most.

The Showcase’s debut will last three days and in that time Ocean will be monitoring audience dwell times, engagement levels, and social sharing behaviour. The data gathered will be used to build on Ocean’s recently released eye-tracking research, ‘The Attention Dividend’. It revealed that premium large format DOOH attracts five times more attention than online digital formats, and that 3D creative work delivers a 32% uplift in brand desirability.

“The Showcase builds on that impact by integrating 3D content with technology such as skeletal tracking and gesture recognition to create real-time interaction. These technologies, alongside audience analytics, give us tangible measures of attention, whether it’s how long people engage, how they interact, or how content drives behaviours like social sharing,” says Catherine.

While OOH has traditionally been seen as a brand-building channel, innovation like The Showcase is going to help advertisers drive not only awareness but measurable outcomes including engagement, conversions, and even sales. “OOH remains a brand-building powerhouse, but The Showcase demonstrates how DOOH can now deliver measurable audience interaction as well,” Catherine states. “With DeepScreen® Alive, gesture recognition and social-sharing opportunities built in, brands can create experiences that prompt real-time engagement, spark conversation, and extend campaign reach far beyond the physical space. By integrating this with location data and footfall analysis, we can start to map how immersive OOH activations influence both perception and purchase behaviours.”

Ocean has the data to back it up with neuroscientific studies that prove “standard full motion content is 3x more impactful when combined with interactive tech. We also know from our DeepScreen® research that 18 to 34 year olds are 70% more likely to go out of their way to see a 3D ad for a second time, and 65% more likely to encourage others to see it,” Catherine adds, citing data as compared to standard 2D full motion ads.

“So not only is it more impactful, but audiences want to actively engage with it, driving memory encoding.”

The Showcase reflects Ocean's vision for the future of OOH and its commitment to pushing boundaries in the space. “It’s about what we call ‘turning spaces into places’, where we combine creativity, technology and data to elevate brand experiences. The Showcase has been designed specifically to ensure it is future-proofed for new technologies, so this is just the start of the stunning 3D content and immersive audience experiences that are yet to come,” says Catherine.

OOH and premium DOOH is a complementary partner to TV and digital in today’s media landscape and formats like The Showcase are, in Cathrine’s words, “bringing together the immediacy, targeting and engagement of digital online with the scale and spectacle of OOH which is a proven driver of fame and measurable action.”

Citing Ocean’s research, ‘The Attention Dividend’, Catherine says that “premium large format DOOH not only grabs more attention than digital but is 5.1% more effective and holds attention 8.2% longer than online display and 5.5% longer than social media content.”

Catherine’s message to marketers? “This isn’t an either or, it’s about integrating OOH as a high-impact, high-attention layer in the media mix that builds brands and drives business outcomes.”