5 awesome examples of digital signage campaigns and what they can teach us!
As a business owner or marketing manager, you’re probably well acquainted with the benefits of digital signage. This is a cost-effective solution that can help deliver your brand message and grab the attention of your audience, ultimately helping boost your bottom line. If you’d like to know how to create effective and compelling digital signage campaigns, you’ll want to read through the examples below, which show how companies from different sectors have used digital signage campaigns to successfully engage their audience.
1. Land Rover’s see winter differently: simple is better
The British luxury vehicle manufacturer put forward a digital signage campaign that enjoyed huge social media success and also won a Creative Out of Home Award. Digital billboards were used to display inspiring messages and images, encouraging viewers to make do with what they have, and to make the most of it: if what you have is winter, challenge the assumption that you have to stay indoors and go exploring instead, finding positives and moments of beauty even during the dreariest time of the year.
What made this campaign effective & lessons that can be learned: This example shows that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a digital signage campaign effective and memorable. Good old billboard signs can work just as well as the most cutting-edge piece of tech if the idea behind it is well crafted and executed with care.
2. Pepsi’s unbelievable shelter: it’s ok to push the limits
This is a well-known Pepsi campaign where virtual reality technology was used to display stunt-like scenarios on a London bus shelter. The scenes included everything from wild animals to outer space creatures, and leveraged the power of the unexpected while playing with the surprise factor.
What made this campaign effective & lessons that can be learned: In some cases, you can use digital signage to entertain and even shock your audience. This can make a powerful impression on them, which in turn makes your brand more likely to be remembered. The idea draws on the peak-end rule, a psychological concept that claims that intense experiences (called peaks) are remembered more accurately. This concept is now used in many aspects of business operations, from user experience design to online marketing, and is certainly worth incorporating into your digital signage campaigns.
3. Timberland: solve a problem
In 2014, clothing label Timberland made use of augmented reality technology to improve (and in fact transform) a troublesome aspect of the in-store experience: going to the fitting room. Using digital technology, Timberland created a virtual fitting room on an 80-inch screen, allowing customers to sweep through their entire clothing collection and to try clothes on without actually going to the fitting room.
What made this campaign effective & lessons that can be learned: For a campaign to be effective, you must find your audience’s pain points and design a digital signage solution that solves the problem. Digital displays are effective if they have a practical application – in this case, allow customers to bypass the usually inconvenient and time-consuming fitting room experience, but still let them do what they need to do (i.e. try clothes on). And there’s another lesson to be learned: don’t limit digital signage to a campaign and look for ways of incorporating it into your everyday operations.
4. City of Sao Paulo emergency route: make it practical
The Emergency Route project shows that digital signage can be more than just entertaining, but practical side to it. The Brazilian City of Sao Paulo teamed with an advertising agency with the objective of facilitating access to emergency service vehicles in the city’s notoriously bad traffic. The campaign involved creating an app that connected ambulance GPS systems to the city’s roadside billboards, which then displayed messages letting drivers know they should pull aside to let an emergency vehicle through within a specific amount of time.
What made this campaign effective & lessons that can be learned: To make digital signage campaigns effective, try to make them practical for everyone involved. Also, it may be worth integrating them with other tech solutions, such as a proprietary app, for even better results.
5. Christmas cards Edinburgh: involve your audience
In 2016, the City of Edinburgh created a heart-warming campaign using digital displays in bus shelters along the city’s main shopping street. The displays were used to showcase a selection of Christmas cards hand-drawn by some of the local schoolchildren.
What made this campaign effective & lessons that can be learned: As simple as this campaign may appear at first sight, it does a good job showing that it’s important to involve the public in your campaigns. Try to find ways to let your audience be an integral part of them by bringing them into the campaign’s narrative, since this can generate audience engagement. The Christmas Cards Edinburgh campaign also teaches us that it’s important to get the timing right, so always think about whether your campaign can be timed with special times of the year to have even more of an impact.
Through this blog post we’ve seen that digital signage campaigns should be simple, practical, solve a problem, and that you should try to involve your audience, even if that means playing with the surprise factor. Keep this in mind to boost their effectiveness and to give your brand more exposure. If you need advice on how to use digital signage solutions that engage, entertain, and involve your audience, get in touch with the team at LamasaTech.
