Fake OOH - the fake news version of Augmented reality?
Mascara lashes in the subway, The Big Ben wearing a jacket, or a Barbie doll the size of a building? You’ve experienced a Fake out of home campaign.
What is it?
It’s simply clever editing of short 10-second videos to make it look like a brand created a huge brand activation. Designing and rendering 3D content as part of videos has increasingly become cheaper and faster, supercharged by open-source (free) software like Blender. This has triggered a wave of brands creating these videos, destined to go viral on short-form video SoMe, like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat Spotlight.
Who does it?
Pretty much every consumer brand, Burger King, North Face, Barbie, Maybelline, Gucci, just to name a few.
Does it work?
That depends on your goals. If your goal is to generate buzz in the marketing industry, it works. But what most brands care about is generating sales rather than winning awards. Traditionally, the purpose of OOH, or simply billboards, is to create broad awareness by placing your message in locations with many people, like train stations, shopping malls, and highways. Fake out of home, on the other hand, is targeted for social media, where reach is purchased by the second. Occasionally, videos still go viral on social media, generating free reach. But to achieve this, great creative content is needed. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Great, so how do we make it go viral?
The natural limitation of FOOH is that only one video of the activation exists (because it never existed in real life). Only having one video and betting on it to go viral is the most literal way of putting all your eggs in one basket.
Augmented reality, FOOH, and influencers - a winning combination?
At the Hololink HQ, we’ve seen our fair share of CGI-generated marketing gimmicks. Every time, we wonder why not just create a real AR experience that anyone can experience, film, and share. That way, you could have hundreds of videos of the same experience, significantly boosting the chance of it going viral. You could even hire micro-influencers to create and share their videos to boost your chances. And by using web-based augmented reality, it’s as simple as sending out a link to the influencers and asking them to share the screen recordings. This logically seems to be the winning combination to achieve the highest ROI possible, but we haven’t seen this done yet.
Interested in exploring the full potential of FOOH?
