Ultrafast top-of-the-bill OOH billboards? The right mix of human & AI delivers.

First, let’s start with a familiar scenario…

Walk through a busy shopping street or wait at a bus stop in the city. Everywhere, brands are competing for attention. Travelers, pedestrians, and passing traffic absorb a message in just a few seconds. They do not read in detail. They do not analyse. They scan.

What stands out, what is immediately understood, and what presents the brand and its message clearly and unambiguously wins. Everything that is too complex fades away. These three principles make outdoor communication seem simple, but in reality it is extremely complex. A strong billboard is not about including as much information as possible, but about making the right choices.

Without that expertise, creative work quickly falls back on internal preferences. But what convinces in a meeting does not automatically work on the street, where speed, context, and visual competition are decisive.

Haystack Consulting therefore approaches the evaluation of OOH billboards through the below-mentioned principles. The solution’s name tells the story: ABC.  

1. Attention (Does it stand out, and what stands out first?)

2. Branding & Distinctiveness (Which brand element must be instantly and consistently recognizable?)

3. Communication (Which message sticks in that fraction of a second?)

In order to achieve this goal, we leverage the combination and synergy of people and machine:  

• Predictive eye-tracking applied in different ways: from impact in the environment (is it noticed?) to understanding the gaze patterns and the focal points on the OOH. All important to understand the performance on ABC-metrics.  

• We combine this with our Virtual Audience ©, our synthetic humans, with whom we explore distinctiveness and message transfer in depth; is it aligned with the intended message, are existing brand distinct assets leveraged?  

• As a final part with all the information at hand (both rich qualitative insight and quantitative gaze pattern validation), it is the Haystacker’s turn. Where and how can we improve this ad, thinking beyond the obvious?

Because successful OOH billboards do not shout louder — they communicate more intelligently. They guide the eye, load the brand, and distil the core down to what truly matters. In outdoor advertising, the following credo applies in the extreme: It’s a jungle out there… Eat or be eaten.

But that is the theory — and what is theory without practice?
So below is a shortened real-life example, picked from the streets last week. Obviously, you will receive more detail and direction if you commission a concrete evaluation. By the way, had I already mentioned that this method also works for outdoor advertising at a premature (unfinished) stage?

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And about that ultrafast in the title: Yes, I mean delivery in days instead of weeks.
Interested in how this could work for your company? Your Haystack consultant is happy to have a chat and initiate a project, so you can build top-of-the-bill billboards!

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