Innovation: Digital billboards interact with people and the weather

Author: CIMCOM

This November digital billboard creative for Women’s Aid scooped an award at the Masters at Marketing Festival. The billboard interacts with the public to address the issue of domestic violence. ActionAid has also made use of digital billboards which trigger ads whenever it rains and publicise the issue of how climate change is bringing life-threatening floods to nations like Bangladesh.

Whether you look determines Women’s Aid imagery

The interactive billboard for Women’s Aid was designed to demonstrate how we should all change our behaviour in order to tackle domestic violence. The digital ad developed with WCRS and Ocean, featured the face of a badly beaten and bruised woman. Across the bottom of the billboard web-cam footage appeared in ‘ticker-tape’ style showing everyone passing by in real time.

Women’s Aid campaign: Look at me

The campaign, entitled ‘Look at me’ shows the image of the beaten woman visibly becoming healed when more people look up at the billboard. It neatly demonstrates the message of the campaign,  that we shouldn’t ignore the signs of domestic violence.

Polly Neate, CEO of Women’s Aid explains more about the campaign in this one-minute video: 

Women’s Aid and Ocean Amplify the Violent Face of Abuse from Ocean Outdoor on Vimeo.

The campaign was timed to coincide with the interest surrounding International Women’s Day and was screened at New Street in Birmingham and in London at Canary Wharf and Westfield. TV spots on Channel 4 provided further promotion of the charity’s work. The digital billboards employed facial recognition technology to determine how many people were looking up at the screen and for how long. When people looked up it triggered a changing image with visible injuries becoming healed until finally the woman can be seen saying the words “Thank you” to her audience.

This digital campaign has just won WCRS and Women’s Aid the Charities and Non-profit Masters award at the Festival of Marketing as "A fantastic, modern and innovative concept, employing a creative approach that truly utilised the potential of the media."

The weather prompts display of disruptive ActionAid ad

A huge digital billboard at Piccadilly Circus showed an advert for ActionAid, triggered when rainfalls reached a certain level. The international development charity works to promote human rights and defeat poverty. It commissioned the ad to raise awareness of the plight of children in Bangladesh affected by climate change. The ads were created pro bono by Weber Shandwick with ad space donated by Clear Channel outdoor media, using their premium digital service called, appropriately enough, Storm.

ActionAid campaign: #WashedAway

In Bangladesh floods and cyclones have become more frequent and more deadly. Children are hard hit with this risk to their safety and the impact of this adverse weather on their ability to attend school and get an education.

In the UK the ads were triggered with live feeds of meteorological data from the MET Office to a content management system which varies the messages. Whenever rainfall reached set levels the billboard ad schedule is disrupted to feature the ActionAid advert. Content was varied to feature weather inspired lines such as: “Drizzle in Piccadilly Circus. Devastating floods in Bangladesh.”

Himaya Quasem, Stories and Editorial Officer at ActionAid introduces the campaign in this video: ActionAid #WashedAway on One Piccadilly

The ads were displayed for one week in November, appearing whenever it rained and called on the public to join the London People’s Climate March on 29 November. This march was called to put pressure on world leaders at the upcoming Paris Climate Change Conference to take steps to protect the needs of children in countries like Bangladesh as a priority when developing global agreements.

This innovative campaign blends creativity with digital technology to display a flexible series of messages at the exact time that the message becomes most relevant – when it rains.

ActionAid is no stranger to the limelight of awards, picking up a Bond Inspiring Campaign Award this summer for its tax justice campaign. It remains to be seen if this innovative rain-triggered, disruptive WashedAway campaign will enjoy the same level of recognition.