The value of doing things differently
In 1975, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards that gave creative minds a prompt whenever they got stuck. Draw one at random and it might nudge you to ‘treat a mistake as intentional’, or to ask ‘what someone else would do in your position’. The idea was simple: if you interrupt your usual way of working, you can see something that routine has hidden.
The principle applies well beyond creative pursuits. When a setting becomes familiar, we stop noticing it. Change the circumstances and the same thing can feel quite different.
That raises a question we think is worth asking about Out of Home advertising: how much does it matter when the places where people meet a message are not always expected?
Same message, different surroundings
Discussion of advertising usually centres on some combination of the message, the creative, the audience and strategic location.
A fixed poster meets people in one setting, and that is its strength. It builds familiarity with the same audience in the same, often relevant place. A taxi works differently. The creative stays the same, but the streets, buildings, crowds and occasions around it keep changing.
That difference is not automatically an advantage. A changing backdrop does not guarantee more attention or a stronger response. However, what it does is create the possibility of a different kind of encounter, and we think that is worth understanding properly.
What do we mean by “fresh”?
We asked 1,000 London adults aged 21 to 55 who notice taxi advertising how far they agreed that it usually seems fresh because they always see it in different places. 80% agreed, and more than a quarter agreed strongly.
This interests us because freshness is not only a property of the artwork. So, is the iconic shape of a taxi a fresh, unexpected place to see an advert? We certainly think it has the power to deliver a double-take… (so, is that double the impressions?!)
Freshness seems also to depend on where and how people see it. A familiar message might feel new against an unfamiliar backdrop. Seeing it in several places might add variety. Or the movement might simply make each encounter less predictable.
Dynamic Context
We call this ‘Dynamic Context’. A taxi can carry one campaign through an affluent residential area, a shopping district and a major commuter hub in a single day, and the creative does not need to change for the context to change. Like one of Eno’s cards drawn at random, the encounter isn’t chosen in advance, and part of its value is that it arrives when people aren’t expecting it. The variety comes from the environment rather than the plan.
Sometimes the surroundings reinforce the message. Sometimes they reach people in a different frame of mind. Sometimes they make a subtle difference, and at other times a huge contrast. Freshness matters only if it helps a campaign get noticed and remembered, and our Taxis Live research points that way: people also described taxi advertising as noticeable and memorable.
Where this fits in a plan
This is why we would suggest taxis as a complement to fixed formats, not an alternative to them. Fixed formats do something valuable: they build familiarity through repetition in known places. Our research found that most people notice a fixed poster when its creative changes. A taxi can deliver a similar jolt without the creative changing, because the context does the work instead. The first gives a campaign consistency, and the second gives it variety.
Eno's cards were designed to interrupt routine at the moment it threatened to stifle creativity. And Eno himself was hardly short of results: when music magazine Pitchfork published its 100 best albums of the 1970s, it described him as being connected with more than a quarter of the list. The Oblique Strategies cards were one of the distinctive tools in his creative arsenal, used to challenge assumptions and open up unexpected directions.
We think taxis can play the same role in a media plan: the fixed formats carry the campaign, and taxis take it out of the routine, where the same message can feel renewed.
