Choosing advertising... it can be hard, right? The media world has splintered into such a fragmented space of ways to deliver content, the choices are exhaustingly vast. Each media outlet comes with a group of professional and polished sales people all holding a case study from their best client ever thus proving their product will work for you too. It's understandable how media placement fatigue could cause an advertiser to make some mistakes.
After going through this media goat rodeo, clients get the urge to rush through the final stage of the process: creative. The most common mistake with a digital billboard buy is that the client just sends their one static vinyl file and runs it and only it for the entirety of their campaign (sigh....). Mistake number two comes right after that - when the client doesn't get the response that they want. They blame the entire medium of digital billboards even though they massively underutilized the capabilities available to them.
For this blog, I wanted to show a campaign with good execution. The Horne Law Firm is a personal injury law firm in Pooler, GA. The Principal of the firm, Derek Horne, is a compassionate man working in an industry with a long list of nicknames that can sometimes represent the opposite side of personal injury law (i.e. ambulance chaser, etc.). That being said, creative for The Horne Law Firm's advertising has always had the goal of creating a positive emotion when his audience views the firm.
Our idea to reinforce this brand initiative was to come up with a dynamic media ad that would offer information the average driver would find useful for the moment they are currently in: afternoon rush hour.
This particular stretch of freeway connects Savannah's south side, where arguably the largest amount of commuters have to get to every Monday through Friday. It's where the jobs are. The Horne Law Firm is on ROA-22 which faces traffic commuting back to the Western Suburbs of Savannah (see more about the board with the attachment below). Anyone who drives this route can tell you that traffic is a daily problem here and one accident anywhere between here and I-95 will make it significantly worse.
The Horne Law Firm ad is integrated with a live mapping software that updates the ad every 120 seconds with the amount of time that it will take to get to I-95. As this billboard is one of the first seen at the very beginning of the freeway, the goal is to create a habit in the commuters of checking for the Horne Law Firm's ad at the start their journey to see what they're up against on the way home. If successful, not only will this ad help the branding efforts of The Horne Law Firm, it will help the other 6 advertisers on this digital billboard that will be receiving some extra attention during this site's famously frustrating afternoon rush hour.