British out-of-home (OOH) media had a lot to show in 2023. The year saw plenty of thought-provoking, funny, tongue-in-cheek campaigns filling public spaces across the United Kingdom. Travel and transport players stood out for addressing the public in especially creative and effective ways. Honored with numerous awards was the ‘A British Original’ campaign of
, revealing the real reasons why people travel, such as burnout, remission, or mischief; ‘Trains, now on Uber’ to advertising rail-booking capabilities offered by the app; and campaign Transport for London (TfL) to promote the launch of the new Elizabeth Line. Among non-travel advertisers, KitKat with its hammock billboard and Krispy Kreme with a light-therapy dispensing screen caught most eyes.
A COVID-19 convalescent
OOH media appeal to advertisers because they have an extremely high reach. Market data shows that out of 66 million people living in Great Britain in 2021, more than 52 million see OOH ads weekly, resulting in a
reach of roughly 80 percent. It is also a highly memorable medium. In early 2023, approximately a third of UK adults remembered
coming across an OOH ad in the four weeks leading up to the survey. Only TV had an even higher recall rate. Advertisers’ unwavering trust that outdoor ads would deliver was deeply shaken in the first year of the pandemic. Consumers spent their time indoors, and
out-of-home ad spending halved. However, the recuperation process already started in 2021 with a nearly 30 percent
annual growth rate, and the market is expected to return to its pre-Covid size in 2024.
Use of QR codes in OOH media
Quick response (QR) codes date back to 1994, but the first scanning and reading smartphone apps were not released until 2010. However, until 2020, the codes had a very niche presence. This changed during the pandemic when the technology became omnipresent overnight as it was used to track and trace the movements of people. Marketers quickly jumped on the bandwagon, developing new, creative waves to integrate QR codes into their ad strategies. They are used for anything from forwarding the user to a page where the advertised product can be purchased and increasing the number of social media followers to showing a video and setting up a reminder in the user’s calendar. British audiences saw QR codes used in OOH campaign of e.g. Coca-Cola Light and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). State-of-the-art QR codes make it a breeze for marketers to track return on investment (ROI) as they can include such information as the ad's location, time scanned, and device used to scan. This way, ROI can be calculated for each billboard or screen separately. When asked about the
role of QR codes in advertising, more than half of responding marketing professionals said that QR codes dramatically improved the measurement of ad campaign performance. Nearly all believed they were vital to successfully targeting Generation Z.
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