oOh!media’s Josh Gurgiel: From Hulk to hashtags – driving brand fame in a world drowning in content

Fame just ain’t what it used to be.  

Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, being ‘famous’ meant something. Hulk Hogan was ‘famous’. Michael Jordan was ‘famous’. Agro and Ann-Maree were ‘famous’, and super creepy. The ability to penetrate the public consciousness was reserved for a select few, governed by corporations and crafty tastemakers, built exclusively by broadcast channels.

Fast forward to today, fame is no longer an allusive ambition; it’s a common currency. Its dissemination democratised, with equal access afforded to anyone with a portable device and a penchant for chutzpah. The very notion of ‘fame’ has shifted, at least as it pertains to the individual; once predicated on a certain level of notoriety and (heaven forbid) talent, it has morphed into a more aggressive game of numbers. With such oversaturation of potential influence, the battle is no longer for access to an audience, but for shelf space in their minds.

Unsurprisingly, it is no different for brands. Their share of voice, time and mind is no longer measured against that of their category rivals, but against the ever-expansive sea of content curated and consumed by their potential customers. To cut through and build a solid level of salience with such category buyers, they must use broadcast media channels in a way that adopts certain lessons from the past and present, centred around securing mental availability in both the short and long term. Aka ‘brand fame’.

“Hold my beer” – Outdoor media, 2024. 

When it comes to using OOH to secure mental availability in moments of physical need, we merely have to turn to the seminal work of the godfathers of marketing science, Les Binet and Peter Field, to understand the interplay between short-term attention and long-term brand growth tactics. By virtue of its unskippable, unblockable, unmissable presence in the public domain, OOH can be used as a creative canvas to capture both immediate spikes of salience, as well as prime audiences over time through repeated exposure. 

Let’s start with the short of it… 

Binet and Field gifted us with possibly the most obvious insight of all time. They found that ‘fame-driving’ campaigns – those that inspire people to share their enthusiasm on and offline – generated 4x the excess share of voice of ‘non-fame-driving’ campaigns. But herein lies the first opportunity for brands to use OOH as a basis for building immediate consideration based on notoriety and earned celebration. 

OOH is a passively consumed medium. It doesn’t interrupt the content, it is the content. It is public space art, sponsored by a brand. The more creatively a brand activates in the public domain, the greater the propensity for audiences to pay attention to the comms. Impactful outdoor art taps into our insatiable quest for content, prompting consumers (aka ‘people’) to capture, amplify and elevate the executions through their social channels, extending the reach of the outdoor execution to a broader potential online audience whilst driving “on and offline enthusiasm”. Aka ‘fame’.

We have seen a range of brands – from British Airways to Specsavers, Barbie to Koala – tapping into this online x offline fame-driving interplay and benefit from spikes in online celebration driven by inspired OOH activations, whether through the use of 3DA, FOOH, special builds or just super smart copy. But as we know, this level of resonance is unsustainable (both mentally and financially) when competing with the myriad of messages deployed on a daily basis.

Which brings us to the long of it…

If we understand genuine brand fame to be more akin to the old school ‘Hulk Hogan’ definition – a certain level of salience based on deep-seated associations built over time – then the reality for brands is that this mental availability must be built over a sustained period.

In his Bible of brand growth, Byron Sharp specifically stipulates that when building such mental availability: “the more extensive and fresher the network of memory associations about a brand, the greater the brand’s chance of being noticed or thought of in the variety of buying situations”. What Sharp is referring to is brands creating a sense of ever-presence; to become less ‘famous’, and more ‘familiar’. Brands achieve this level of ubiquity not through a single stand-alone execution or campaign, but through repeated, reinforced exposures. That’s right, we’re talking about the dirty marketing ‘F’ word: ‘Frequency’.

Analytic Partners’ ROI 5.0 study recently reinforced the need for frequency in OOH. They found that as advertisers diversified their OOH placements and added more formats to a campaign – enabling more opportunities to reach and reinforce messaging – their ROI increased. They also found that those advertisers that ran long-term campaigns (8+ weeks) saw significantly better ROI than short bursts of activity. These findings support the notion of ‘priming’ through OOH – a form of subconscious memory activation whereby prior exposure to a word or object provides a response advantage. Considering 95% of purchase decisions are made in the subconscious mind, the more exposure we have to a brand’s distinctive assets and attractive proposition, the more that brand can cut through our subconscious and simmer to the surface in moments of need.

Ultimately, all brands really care about is selling more. And the surest way to do that is to ensure they are ‘famous’, or ‘mentally present’, at the moments that matter. Creating big, impactful, shareable executions can be extremely powerful in creating spikes of awareness, appreciation and action. But the type of ‘fame’ that fosters long-term brand growth is more subtle and nuanced; a subconscious resonance driving purchase preference due to reinforced priming by the brand over time. By virtue of its artistic, integrated and uninterrupted presence in our daily lives, OOH facilitates both forms of fame, affording brands their five minutes.

And beyond.  

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Top image: Josh Gurgiel