Using OOH for Good.

Out of Home Advertising holds the ability to get a message out to an audience on a scale which is incomparable to other advertising mediums. With it, brands can reach viewers on a massive scale. OOH can be depending on to provide an impressive reach and most certainly create impact.

Amongst other things, DOOH can primarily be used to sell, influence and inform. Because of this, there are many ways to use DOOH for good. For instance, charity campaigns can get important messages out there, raising awareness and creating impact from a message. It can be used to inform the public of important message such as vaccine drives or messages from the government or local councils in which sites are situated.

A subject which is at the top of a lot of businesses agendas (and rightly so) at the moment is what we can be doing to save the planet. As Carbon emissions rise and the world sees more and more climate change, people are wanting to see action and purpose behind the brands they are using and purchasing from and DOOH can provide a great platform to convey these messages to the public.

A great example of this is a recent campaign from National Rail in which we proudly ran on our large format network, OPEN Connect. Network Rails campaign ‘We Mean Green’  informed and educated the public how much Carbon could be cut and how many less cars would be on the roads by choosing to travel by train.

We all have a part to play in the fight against Climate Change and although DOOH is a great opportunity to increase awareness of these issues, there is no denying that even with Digital Out of Home, that it is still producing Carbon emissions.

DOOH can be viewed as the more sustainable option rather than traditional as it reduces the need for multiple sites to display multiple ads. Also, using Digital instead of traditional OOH helps reduce fuel emissions from the travel needed to put up physical displays. Not only this, but some billboards have been found to be produced using toxic chemicals and produce high volumes of waste.

Although DOOH is a good option for advertisers looking for lower Carbon emissions for their campaigns, there are still ways in which we can cut these down even further.

According to our new strategy of People, Place, Planet, OPEN Media having been researching and pledging ways we can make our network work better for the planet. Some of the steps we are taking include:

• Tracking and monitoring our CO2/CO2e emissions across the business to develop a full view of our Carbon footprint.
• We have pledged to achieve Net Zero (completely negating the amount of Carbon emissions caused by human activity) by 2030.
• A number of our sites now run on a renewable energy tariff.
• We are on our B-Corp journey!

As well as the important steps we are making above, we are also powering down our OPEN Connect sites each evening from 12am to 6am. After extensive Route research looking into the network impacts hour-by-hour, we discovered that the early hours of the morning were the ones with the lightest amount of impacts, making it the perfect opportunity to power down the sites, resulting in less carbon emissions! Although impacts will be missed during these times, our clients can rest assured that they will be made up during powered up hours, this way everyone is a winner!

At OPEN Media we pride ourselves not just on the quality of our screens and their locations but also the quality of our banner locations. We offer several banners at key locations including; Liverpool Lime Street, Manchester Old Trafford and Liverpool Anfield Stadium. Although banners are less environmentally friendly than our digital sites, we are taking steps such as an optional coating with REACTIV AIR (a pollution-eating speciality coating which improves air quality by taking humidity and oxygen from the air and turning it into cleaning agents that scrub the air of VOC’s and NOx- also known as Smog) and also recycling old banners.

Although making these changes may seem like a small drop in a very big ocean, we believe it is important to play our part in making our planet a healthier place.

This is only the beginning for us here at OPEN Media and we are so excited to continue to further learn and develop how we can work most efficiently. Keep an eye out for some more exciting developments in the near future!

Sources: adquick.com, vistarmedia.com, Route