One of the key challenges brands have faced this year is the need to rethink the role of out-of-home (OOH) advertising experiences within a customer journey that’s become overwhelmingly digital. But for digital-native audiences that gravitate toward experiences, OOH still has plenty of value to offer–especially when amplifying local stories for audiences far and wide.

This was an approach we took with More Than 7, an outdoor exhibit that strove to provide visitors to Chicago’s Grant Park with a historical understanding of the protests that happened there during the 1968 Democratic National Convention–an event that instigated the real-world trial depicted in Netflix’s recently released film, The Trial of the Chicago 7, directed by Aaron Sorkin.

By recontextualizing archival images of the protests and placing them directly where they were captured, the exhibit offered a profound space for reflection–and offers insight on how brands can build impactful OOH experiences that prompt digital engagement.

Focus Digital Placemaking on Your Activation’s Key Goals

In building an OOH experience that speaks to the modern consumer, adopt a mindset of digital placemaking. Placemaking is the process of creating quality places that people want to live and work in, and these efforts can become amplified through digital elements that aid in the experience and increase the value of the space itself–a process referred to as digital placemaking.

Placemaking must align with your goal for the experience you want to provide your audience in the place. With More Than 7, we wanted to create a space that was contemplative, inviting viewers to linger and reminisce on what had happened there, building their own understanding of the events rather than have us prescribe our own political stance.

This goal comes to life in the way the exhibit prompted viewers to literally observe the photos from different vantage points. When viewed from the right angle, the images blend in with their surroundings, joining together past and present. While we didn’t overtly call for visitors to share their experience on social, the fun of lining up the images with their surroundings created a natural photo-op, allowing people to share their views digitally as they learned more about the history of the community. This point of interaction shows how OOH experiences can elegantly prompt earned media that starts a cultural conversation and builds relevance to viewers.

Build Value for Audiences Near and Far

Since the pandemic, we’ve all learned how important it is that events and activations reach fans at home. But at-home audiences have always been important to reach–even for OOH activations, and especially ones that have a limited throughput. Even when an experience is closely tied to a local narrative and location like ours, digital elements offer an opportunity to open up that experience to people afar, increasing reach and relevance in the process.

Experience the movement of 1968.

Each stop across our outdoor exhibit prompted viewers to scan a QR code to access an audio track about that location. But the audio guide, collected as a Spotify podcast, wasn’t just for those listening at the park: listeners online could also immerse themselves in the space and feel transported there through the commentary. This touchpoint also helped in building outreach online, with previews of episodes shared through the film’s official Twitter account. As brands consider building location-based spaces, they shouldn’t forget faraway audiences–or their relationship with the brand through social media.

Be Aware of Local Nuances

Finally, when creating an experience within a public space like a park, ensure it lends value to the surrounding community. One of Netflix’s key goals with More Than 7 was to give something back to the city of Chicago by offering an experience that its citizens would enjoy. While The Trial of the Chicago 7 film represents a unique moment in the city’s history, the protests aren’t often talked about, and younger generations in particular may not relate to the impact the events have made.

To ensure such a hyper-local story could be told authentically, we partnered with teams who had close connections to the city, including the production team working on the ground, who were natives to Chicago. The historian who wrote the audio guides also had a tie to the protests: their parents were present as they happened. Through these teams’ participation and input, we could offer a more localized, personal and nuanced take on the project overall.

Essentially, these points are about being authentic to your audience and creating a space for them to reflect, relate and share that experience with others. By infusing digital elements into these spaces, brands can increase the value of a public space and facilitate conversation–driving impact well beyond the borders of a park, much like the protesters of 1968 achieved.

It can be tough to adapt to the relentless pace of change in digital. From a need to meet and engage with customers on new channels to the rise of digitally native competitors, there are many ways that established, legacy brands can improve their digital maturity—and they might begin that process by taking inspiration from what’s worked with DTC brands in particular, whose close connection with consumers is arguably unmatched.

The secret? Adopt a challenger mindset. DTC brands have honed their digital prowess by necessity. Newer and lacking the big marketing budgets of legacy brands, they’ve shifted focus away from broad-reaching TV spots to instead focus on digital marketing. Through this practice, they’ve developed measurable marketing strategies that aid in discovery and are backed by data.

Shift Toward Data-Driven Messaging

“DTCs opt for targeted appeal over mass appeal (at least initially),” write Ryan Skinner and Sarah Dawson in the Forrester report, “Lessons In Customer Acquisition: Learn From DTC Disruptors’ Awareness Strategies.” “Only when DTC brands more firmly establish themselves do we see them branching out into more expensive channels like broadcast TV.”

Remco Vroom, Head of Business Growth and Platforms Solutions at MediaMonks, notes the role that experimentation has played in getting to know what resonates with their customers, helping them increase the effectiveness of communication through fresh content. “Brands can learn from them by getting to know their audiences better, getting a feel for them how they operate,” he says. “In this area, these smaller, digital-native companies aren’t afraid to try things out, producing hundreds of pieces of content to see what sticks, then taking those things that were successful and building more content.”

It’s a strategy that we’ve used with skincare brand Gladskin, enhancing the creative of their awareness campaign by mixing (and remixing) an initial set of assets, seeing how they performed with different segments. Depending on the performance, we tweaked the creative even further while also reassessing the media spend for those segments, incrementally zeroing in on the most effective and interested groups per each channel. The tactic provides a dependable way for budget- or resource-strapped brands to optimize creative and better understand their audience while avoiding the strain that even digital native brands may feel in a need to refresh branding and content at an increased rate.

Elevate Social’s Role in Your Marketing Strategy

The focus on the role of data above should drive one point home for brands that aim to take a page out of the DTC handbook: they must not treat social media as an afterthought. Instead, they must elevate the role of social media earlier in the planning cycle.

With a leaner and more agile approach, brands can strike close, one-to-one connections with consumers through smart use of data that leaves their audiences feeling heard. Yet bigger brands limit themselves by focusing their investment on traditional formats that focus on broadcast rather than the interactive elements of newer social channels like TikTok.

“Traditional formats like TVC or OOH are safe bets for the larger companies, because it’s something they’ve done for the past 20 years,” says Vroom. “They tend to put millions into these channels and pennies in social media, but that’s not substantial enough if one of your goals is to connect with your audience.”

There are a couple ways that brands can adopt a challenger mindset by upping their social strategy. One way brands can adopt a challenger mindset is by helping consumers see themselves in the brand by breaking down barriers between audience and what goes on behind the scenes. For example, our influencer activation team IMA worked with womenswear brand Noisy May to help the brand partner connect with six regional influencers, who each designed a series of products for a capsule collection titled #NoisyMayInfluenced. The influencers documented and shared every step of the design process, reaching their target audience in an authentic and community-driven way.

Consider Building Brand Passion by In-Housing

Not every brand is going to be so radical in breaking down the barriers between product development and their audience. But they can take initial steps to a greater strategic investment in social by building a task team dedicated to seeking the potential benefits of tapping into novel, new formats and user behaviors on social platforms, which Vroom compares to the trend of brands taking their creative in-house.

“If you want to be successful, you have to bring the message really close to you—which is key for new channels like that,” Vroom says. When brands give creative freedom to passionate teams like this, they can break free from tradition while still remaining true to their core values.

And that gets at the heart of what legacy brands must do to keep up with digitally mature brands: connect authentically with consumers where and when it matters most. Through adopting data practices that inform the creation and delivery of content to elevating social media within the marketing mix, brands can do more than just weather disruption from competition—they can cut become challengers in their own right.

This week, marketers descended upon San Diego for ANA’s Digital & Social Media Conference, where representatives from top brands within their respective industries spoke about their approaches to digital marketing. An over-arching theme of the event was how digital experience (DX)—through a combination of investments in emerging tech, supporting cultural moments and delivering authentic social content—builds brand love in an era where consumers are increasingly critical (and annoyed by) online advertising.

From machine learning to influencer marketing to programmatic, ANA’s speakers covered it all. We’ve cherrypicked the highlights to keep you up-to-date on where top brands have met success, and the learnings they’ve taken from it.

Being a “Challenger” Brand Isn’t About Size—It’s Attitude

When you think of challenger brands, you probably think of smaller, up-and-coming brands that have sprung onto the scene with disruptive strategies that upend their respective industries. But even established, legacy brands can be challengers in their own right. Sharing the stage with representatives from VMLY&R in the talk “How Inventive Brand Experiences Are Powering New Balance’s Success,” New Balance Global Consumer Marketing Director Allie Tsavdarides positioned the athletic brand as a challenger dedicated to seeking out ways to do things smarter.

Amplify your team’s DX capabilities across the full customer journey.

One way to do this? Injecting the brand with some cultural relevance by “looking to engage in a cultural point in time.” Going far beyond tweeting a message acknowledging a holiday or event, New Balance’s interest lies in taking a more strategic approach to cultural moments. Both the brand and its agency showcased their Runaway Pub, a pub opened in the lead-up to the London Marathon, where runners could pay for drinks with digital points earned by succeeding in a series of running challenges.

The campaign leveraged a cultural moment that inspired many to achieve their running and fitness goals, giving runners a space not only to train, but to connect and unwind over a couple of (free!) pints. MediaMonks helped bring the experience to life by enabling the integration between fitness app Strava—which measured users’ running progress—and the digital wallet, and by producing a clever bartender web app to ensure simple, seamless service.

Embrace Being a Work-in-Progress

New Balance wasn’t the only legacy brand embracing tech in innovative ways. In his talk “From Bad Pizza to Machine Learning,” Domino’s VP of Digital Marketing and Global Ecommerce Christopher Thomas-Moore discussed how important it is for brands to consider themselves as works-in-progress. While many brands might find discomfort in the move-fast-and-break-things attitude popularized by startups, Thomas-Moore suggests the secret to the Domino’s pizza sauce is being an early adopter of emerging tech.

“Being an early adopter allows your brand to understand and refine,” he said. So is Domino’s—who’s prototyped delivery robots, self-driving cars, an order-taking chatbot and was named 2018’s Tech Accelerator of the Year—a tech company, or a pizza company? For Thomas-Moore, everything ties back to the core product; if the pizza weren’t good, after all, no one would want to eat it. “If we could get our product right, then the other pieces would fall in place,” he told the audience.

MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar says that “Real innovation lies in learning how to start matching your products and services to evolve with user behavior.” It’s through this desire to constantly iterate that brands like Domino’s and New Balance can adopt a challenger mindset.

You Can’t Beat a Good Story

In her talk “Target: Innovation Driven by the Basics,” Kristi Argyilan—President of Target’s in-house media company Roundel—gave a peek at how the retailer generates results for its partners and itself: relevance. Mentioning shuttered retailers like Toys ‘R’ Us, The Limited and Circuit City, Argilyan noted that “what every failure has in common is that it was preceded by a loss of relevance.” (It’s worth noting that Toys ‘R’ Us may have learned its lesson, with plans to return just in time for the holidays with a renewed focus on experience.)

Retailers—and brands in general—are at a crossroads on delivering more relevant messages and experiences to their consumers, who are spread across many different channels along the path to purchase. Target’s Roundel media company exists to hit a bullseye on consumer needs by pushing relevant content tailor-made for Target guests.

From applying the retailer’s own insights to crafting creative and picking the most relevant channels, Roundel, quite simply, is dedicated to giving people what they want. “People don’t like online ads,” says Argyilan. “They like good stories.”

With user journeys becoming increasingly fragmented, these stories will need to fit within a larger strategic narrative that can be easily reconfigured to different segments and channels. In the conference’s first kickoff session, “From Alligator to Zebra: Digital Storytelling at the San Diego Zoo,” the zoo’s Director of Marketing Debra Erickson discussed how “a great story is great, and it’s platform-agnostic.”

But how do brands envision a platform-agnostic story? Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell noted later during the conference that the “big idea” approach is outdated, and that brands must leverage data to address end-to-end customer journeys. Along these means, Argyilan noted the importance of leveraging partnerships—even for in-house media companies like Roundel—to expand a brand’s capabilities for maintaining relevance across channels and from all directions in the decision-making process.

First and Foremost, Social is About People

If anyone understands applying data to achieve relevance, it’s MGM Resorts. Their VP of Social Portfolio Strategy, Beverly Jackson, spoke about how data is key to meeting customers’ expectations. But just as important is authenticity, which the brand maintains through social-first, fit-for-format content.  Some of Jackson’s most interesting ideas were about social: “Selling FOMO is becoming just as important as selling a ticket,” she said.

According to Jackson, “social marketing is on the frontlines of bringing the brand promise to life.” By applying data-driven insights to content that in turn drives experiences, the brand has adopted a lean, nimble approach to social marketing that helps it better deliver upon consumers’ shifting expectations.

One of the key ways that MGM inspires consumers is through strategic influencer partnerships—and they weren’t alone. In her talk “Creating Digital Content That Sparks Engagement,” Emeline Berlind, VP of Content Strategy at Sephora, mentioned that “social was created for people, not brands,” highlighting the unique points of view that influencers offer to brands and their audience. As for how to remain authentic in these partnerships, she said that “It’s a balancing act … We can’t be too prescriptive with the brief. We create guidelines, but are not prescriptive.”