Don't Advertise, Demonstrate

To stay relevant and to create a big impact on the target market, brands should explore functional OOH advertising.

- V V Ravi Kumar

Advertising, has many a time, relied on innovation to catch the attention in this era of clutter. It does not just encompass the need to build awareness and increase revenues for the brand; it is also about showcasing how a product caters to the customer’s functional needs. This is where functional advertising puts a real feel to the customer as to how effective a brand can be in terms of its utility value. This type of advertising aims to build a positive image for the brand. To put it more succinctly, functional advertising could be termed as a form of out of home (OOH) advertising, which is focused not only on marketing the products to consumers but also engaging them customers actively when they are on the go or in public places.

Functional OOH advertising

Brands often do not project themselves as offering a purely functional benefit to their target audience, but are more likely to just present the USP to the audience. Billboard ads are an architectural eyesore—their purpose is to leverage visual noise to distract and get attention. But in the case of IBM, the IBM’s People for Smarter Cities Project, a campaign by Ogilvy & Mather transformed the billboards—what they did was simply curve one billboard at the bottom to double as a bench—and flipped upside down some others to create a protrusion as a shelter from the rain.

Moltyfoam, Pakistan’s leading mattress company, they brought to light a problem faced by the homeless. Their billboards–cum-on the move mattresses were simple—all people had to do was just flip them over and they would get a comfortable bed for the night. Many day labourers found shelter at night, thanks to these bill beds.