Why is empathy a powerful tool in the out of home (OOH) advertising practice?
Rick Robinson
Chief Strategy Officer
rick@pjxmedia.com
August 26, 2022
“By engaging with empathy, the respect you will gain for the “audience” will provide powerful insight into your planning choices and ability to see how the carefully selected individual pieces influence the whole.”
To thrive in the OOH space our campaigns must add to the public realm. We are duty bound to earn our right to inhabit cities by creating utility for our viewers – rewarding regular people for giving us their attention while living their lives out and about. When we take away their sky, or someone’s line of sight, it’s our obligation to replace it with OOH messages delivering brilliant moments that matter, those perfect mergers of content and context. Knowing this we should strive to bring value and get it right every time.
This is where empathy is our secret weapon. When we can better understand and share the genuine sentiment of the brands we advocate for, the people we work with, and the public space we buy our way into, we have a legit shot at delivering effective campaigns everyone talks about!
Why put a finger on empathy? Isn’t media planning all about data, access, process, and testing? Isn’t raising the importance of empathy over-emphasizing a soft skill? Don’t underestimate the ability to feel something for others and put yourself in their position. Every day we reduce our media planning to blunt outcomes that more and more often miss out on the benefit of nuance. By engaging with empathy, the respect you will gain for the “audience” will provide powerful insight into your planning choices and ability to see how the carefully selected individual pieces influence the whole.
This is because empathy is intuitive. Human. The pursuit connects our instincts to a solution. It’s an intellectual discipline that takes practice and becomes more subtle yet sharp over time. It’s a big part of how we uniquely understand and solve problems. It’s reciprocal since the investment of effort and energy always returns the favor with deeper clarity and sense of purpose.
Greg Fischer, Founder/CEO at brand consultancy Force Multiplier Strategy, notes “In a world full of narcissistic marketers, the brands people love most are the ones that care about their communities' needs and give back.” This sentiment extends to specific brand behaviors like channel messaging. Today when brands invest in OOH there’s always the lingering questions. Did we spend well? Did we buy the right locations? Will we reach our target audience? Will our creative play well in public space?
Perhaps the search for the perfect OOH plan starts with empathy. Listening, learning, and absorbing from a genuine, open, mindset allows for OOH campaigns that are true enablers of the creative message. Constructing inspired media plans that find their way beyond the brief, and see the medium organically as a living, breathing entity.
The OOH medium today is a concurrent, timely, interactive public experience on an epic daily scale. At Project X, we believe empathy provides a pathway to campaigns that matter.
