Why Out of Home advertising is the best format for your summer marketing campaigns

Out of Home (OOH) advertising is uniquely suited to reach and influence audiences as part of a summer marketing campaign. As the days grow longer and people spend more time outdoors, this is the place your brand needs to be in order to reach them – and OOH is how you get there.

In this guide, we’ll explain exactly why OOH is the ideal format for your summer marketing campaigns and how you can use it to achieve success with your seasonal promotions.

Leveraging the Power of Summer Outdoor Advertising

Summer is when people spend the most time outdoors, which is why OOH advertising can be a particularly powerful tool for summer marketing.  

High Visibility During Peak Summer Activity Periods

As the weather heats up, so does the UK public’s appetite for getting out of the house. Whether it’s a trip to the supermarket for BBQ necessities, travelling across the country for a staycation or a city-centre meetup with friends, there’s a surge of activity during summer.  

OOH Summer advertising helps you capitalise on this increase in foot and vehicle traffic. With prominent digital billboards placed across public transport, main roads and retail hotspots, you can reach large audiences with heightened visibility. 

Reaching Audiences on the Move 

OOH can help you reach audiences on the move, no matter where they are. With increased activity comes changes to routines and your summer marketing needs to adapt to reflect this. Summer advertising along routes to popular locations like beaches and parks, and in key shopping areas, can help you reach consumers in their summer routines.

Amplifying Brand Presence During Festivals and Events

The summer months coincide with festival season and a range of other events, including sporting occasionsts competitions, summer parties and community gatherings such as Pride. Using digital billboards strategically placed near these venues, you can enhance your brand presence and capture the attention of large crowds.

Creating Vibrant Summer Marketing Campaigns

Here are some strategies for designing visually appealing billboards and other OOH formats to boost your summer marketing.

Using Bright Colours and Seasonal Imagery

The visual aesthetic of your summer marketing campaign is what matters most when it comes to grabbing your audience’s attention. Vibrant colours are eye-catching and evoke the season’s spirit of fun, while also helping to ensure maximum visibility on sunny days.

Summer themes can also be portrayed through imagery. Consider using visuals such as beaches, friends in the sunshine and holiday packing to tap into the appeal and energy of summer. 

Dynamic Content for Maximum Engagement

Dynamic DOOH can increase audience engagement by improving contextual relevance, which can result in an 18% increase in brain response, or adding a sense of urgency to summer promotions. It’s possible to create:

• weather-triggered ads where messaging changes depending on temperature, UV levels and local conditions 

• real-time countdowns to local events, tickets going on sale or special promotional offers ending 

• rotating creatives that showcase multiple products or highlight different events

Incorporating Calls to Action for Immediate Impact

To encourage immediate engagement and activate audiences on the spot, your summer marketing needs a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA). Some tips to think about include:

• only using one CTA at a time to avoid confusion

• using clear, action-orientated language 

• highlighting limited time offers and promotions

• directing audiences to nearby stores or events

• incorporating QR codes to encourage online activity  

Best Locations for Summer OOH Advertising

Summer advertising can reach large and diverse audiences who are outside making the most of the warmer months. To take advantage of this opportunity, choosing the right advertising environments and locations to reach your target audience is paramount. 

Targeting High-Footfall Areas

Targeting high-footfall areas helps maximise the visibility and impact of your summer marketing campaign. Your billboard needs to be seen by the right people at the right time, whether you reaching them through busy transit routes, popular summer leisure destinations or buzzing urban areas.

Some of the highest footfall locations through summer include:

• shopping districts

• high streets

• beaches

• tourist attractions

• parks

• nightlife areas

Roadside Billboards for Summer Travellers

Road traffic surges during summer, thanks to seasonal road-trippers, holidaymakers and day-adventurers adding to the usual daily commuters. This means roadside billboards are seen by more diverse audiences during this time of year, presenting a unique opportunity for advertisers.  

The increase in road users also leads to lots of sitting in traffic. With a digital billboard, you can capture the attention of bored passengers and inject a little entertainment into their journey with your creative design. 

Proximity to Summer Events and Activities

Situating ads near popular summer activities like outdoor concerts, sports events and festivals not only increases visibility but can also influence brand perception. You can align your brand with the values and emotions of the event, creating a positive association in your audience’s mind.

Integrating OOH Advertising with Multi-Channel Summer Campaigns

Creating a cohesive summer marketing campaign that incorporates more than one channel is one of the most effective ways to reinforce your messaging and improve brand recall. 

Social Media Integration

Social media can be leveraged to amplify your OOH ads, extending their reach and impact. There are various ways to do this, with one of the easiest being to create a summer-themed hashtag for your campaign. Audiences can then share their own user-generated content online using your hashtag. 

Incorporating interactive elements such as motion sensors can improve shareability, while running a cross-channel competition using OOH and social media helps increase engagement. For example, ask audiences to share their campaign-related content for the chance to win a prize. 

Mobile Ad Synergy

There’s a natural synergy between OOH and mobile marketing. For one thing, a staggering amount of mobile users report taking action on their device following recent exposure to DOOH ads, proving the power of integrating the two mediums.

But there are also ways to integrate the two mediums to increase engagement among audiences who have not yet taken action. Geofencing can be used to serve mobile ads to audiences who have been exposed to OOH, while platforms like Clear Channel RADAR allow you to target specific audience segments, who can then be retargeted using mobile ads.

Driving In-Store Traffic and Online Engagement

Through strategic design and considered placement, OOH ads can be used to direct consumers to physical locations or online platforms. Positioning ads near to your store or event location and using directional messaging, such as ‘50m this way’ or ‘Join us on X street’, can help drive footfall.

Alternatively, you can maximise the impact of your summer promotion ideas and campaigns by adding a QR code that takes users straight to your website or social media. 

Successful Summer Advertising Campaign Examples

We’ve pulled together some of our favourite summer marketing campaign ideas that used OOH advertising effectively.

Standout Summer Brand Campaigns

These brands created memorable summer brand campaigns with the help of digital billboards.

Funkin Cocktails

Funkin Cocktails’ colourful summer billboard campaign promoted their range of canned cocktails. The messaging plays into the kick-back-and-relax vibes of summer and the tropical colour palette both grabs attention and conveys the cocktail’s fruity taste.

Gala Bingo

Gala Bingo used OOH advertising as part of a multi-channel summer campaign covering digital, social, radio and outdoor media. The visual of friends gathering around a campervan mixed with the bright colour palette just screams summer, while the messaging leans on summer joyfulness. 

Creative Use of Summer Themes

These brands are great examples of how to use summer themes to add contextual relevance to OOH advertising. 

Costa

Costa’s creative depicts two friends enjoying an iced coffee outdoors, with the message ‘Summer made a little better’ overlaid. The inclusion of a paddling pool, sunglasses and deck chairs makes this instantly relatable to summer, while the messaging capitalises on the rise of ‘little treat culture’.   

Greggs

One of the most creative uses of summer themes comes from high-street bakery Greggs. Their ad design shows their iconic sausage roll on an ice lolly stick, held up against a summer sky with the tagline ‘Unofficial sponsors of rolling into summer’. This humorous play on words combined with the summer theme brings a spark of joy to anyone who sees it.

Key Takeaways from Successful Summer Marketing Campaigns

This range of examples shows how there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a successful summer campaign. Different brands have taken different creative routes – whether borrowing the atmosphere of summer to enhance their brand appeal or using summer-themed visuals to capture audiences’ attention.

When applying these tactics to your own summer promotions, think first and foremost about your audience and how to best appeal to them during summer. Finding the overlap between your audience’s motivations, your brand identity and summer themes is the key to creating a successful campaign. 

Measuring the Impact of Your Summer Marketing OOH Campaign

Tracking the performance of your summer advertising efforts is key to understanding what works so that you can gather insights that help inspire your future summer marketing ideas.

Key Metrics to Monitor

The most important metrics to monitor will vary depending on your campaign goals. However, the following list is a great place to start for most campaigns:  

• Reach

• Foot traffic

• Brand recall

• Website visits 

• Sales lift 

Tools for Measurement

Measuring the effectiveness of your digital billboard campaigns is made easier with the help of the following tools and technologies:

• Audience measurement tools like RADAR

• Mobile device IDs

• Facial recognition technology

• Google Analytics

• Social media analytics

• Footfall counters

Optimising Future Campaigns Based on Data

Once you’ve identified the metrics that are most important to your summer campaign, you can search for insights to help you improve future OOH marketing efforts. From understanding the best locations to reach your target audience to knowing which time of day they are most responsive to your ads, there’s a lot that can be learnt from a single campaign. 

By consistently analysing and optimising over time, your summer adverting campaign will improve with each iteration.

Kickstart your Summer Advertising campaigns with Clear Channel and reach your audience this summer season. Get in touch to find out more about Clear Channel’s expansive OOH network and how it can be used to enhance your summer marketing campaigns.