Why FOOH Needs a Reality Check

Over the last year, FOOH (Fake Out of Home) has become ubiquitous, filling up our social feeds with seemingly endless variants of giant-sized products hanging off cranes, bursting out of buildings or interacting with famous landmarks.

Let me start by saying that I’m a huge fan of all things OOH. I love it when we push the boundaries or explore new ways of doing something in a medium. I think you can split the most exciting campaigns into one of three areas: 1) inspiring and thought-provoking creative/content, 2) an elevation of the format using technology or interaction to create a genuine experience, or 3) new and exciting ways to use the medium that no one has thought of. Pretty broad areas, I know, but not always easy to accomplish.

So, I’m writing this slightly conflicted, as FOOH feels like it sits perfectly within the last of those categories. And yet, I’m struggling to love this new branch of OOH, if we can even call it that, because it has saturated our feeds with less-than-premium-looking campaigns, with little resonance or creative thought behind them.

It all started so well. The Maybelline Mascara tube train took us all by surprise. “Did they do it for real?”, and “How did they get permission?” became standard questions in the comments section. For me, its success was creating something believable and inherent to the brand’s storytelling. The rationale behind it seemed to be about creating a workaround for an OOH activation that would have never been allowed in real life.

It clearly captured the imagination of creative teams around the world, and this new medium took flight. But somewhere along the way, the core reasoning to make FOOH has got lost. We stopped interrogating why the concept made sense to the brand, or how could we create an impossible OOH stunt and instead defaulted to placing large versions of products in various environments, with little to no exploration beyond that. Have a look at a few and ask yourself why. Why is the product giant? Why is it hanging off a building? Does this make sense? I often struggle to find the creative purpose.

And over time, one of the answers seems to be that it’s cheaper than other forms of advertising. Where there are few experienced production and creative agencies specialising in OOH, there are many more 3D artists with no need for OOH experience, ready to jump in. But approaching a creative brief prioritising budget over execution will rarely create a standout, and has led to an abundance of subpar, homogenous CGI pieces that potentially cheapen the brands and the potential of truly good FOOH concepts.

I look at a lot of FOOH and often muse on how impactful these would be if they were practically done. Suddenly, the activation breaks out from being just a video living online and becomes a real living thing, for the public to tangibly connect with - and that’s what OOH does best! Think of it like a magic trick: if it was all just faked for TV, no one would care… but the joy is knowing that, somehow, it was done for real.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. The London fireworks this year used hologauze to ‘project’ content into the middle of the London Eye. When you explore how this was done (creating a perfectly mapped overlay projection in front of the camera lens), there’s an extra level of satisfaction of seeing it done for real, in camera. (And while we’re on hologauze – check out the latest Samsung Galaxy AI piece to see how epic this technique can get!)

Jaquemus created a FOOH piece with some giant handbags appearing to drive through Paris. But they followed it up with real-life, road-legal versions of these bags and brought the campaign into the physical world.

An early piece of FOOH from Zara created a shopfront filled with swirling particles that looked so real that several clients have asked to replicate it. But Hiscox’s The House I Grew Up In shows that this can be done with a combination of projection mapping and a synced motorised camera rig.

Would the Sony Bravia bouncing balls ad have worked if it was just CGI? A huge part of the wonderment came from the viewer knowing that it was done for real.

Imagine trying to replicate a FOOH campaign all in camera: is there a way to hang a football shirt in the foreground and make it look like it’s draped off Tower Bridge? A similar result (although potentially more realistic), but with additional making-of content to use, and brand kudos for approaching the challenge with innovative thinking. 

I could continue eulogising, but you get the idea! One of the reasons why Anamorphic DOOH continues to have an impact is that it’s done for real. You could just use CGI to digitally map the content onto a building or screen but seeing it in person is the magic trick. It shows you how it’s done and still leaves you in awe.

Does this mean FOOH shouldn’t have a place at the table? Where does it belong? I think everyone will have their own view. What I do know is that this medium will struggle to find resonance as it becomes more prolific. At Grand Visual, we believe that FOOH could be a great way of augmenting special builds and other activations: you have the hero piece, living in the real world, connecting with audiences via that magic that OOH brings, and then FOOH can be served up as that something extra – taking the concept to impossible new heights and generating additional content on other channels.

The Jaffa Cake special build is a great example, where we built a Wonka-esque billboard with an array of mechanisms, pipes and tubes that vended Jaffa Cakes Cola Bottles for real. This was accompanied by a crazy CGI extension that took it to a wholly different, impossible level. And last year we genuinely parked a Nissan Qashqai on the side of a 49-meter chimney at The Truman Brewery in London to accompany the CGI films of drones flying the car through the skies. This mix of real and FOOH can make a potent combination.

I’ll finish with this… even though a lot of OOH excellence is only ever seen online in your daily feeds, it’s still real, living on a street, screen, billboard or wall near you. That’s where the magic is. And when things are done for real, you create a lasting impression.