The Future: Everything As A Billboard

In the recent The Future Of Marketing webinar I hosted, I recommended that we would see the future recycle a number of features and tactics we have experienced previously.

I made a number of recommendations where I broke down the future and how to capitalise on it. In The Future Of Marketing blog series, I will include blog posts, decks and rich media-based content to help inspire you and help shape your thoughts moving forward.

The wider larger concepts we will see are:

• The shift towards interacting with items, objects and people differently
• How there are going to be thousands of opportunities with objects becoming billboards
• A new demand for how we see and interact with entertainment,
• How we view and interact with “live as on-demand”
• How we will see a huge shift and a new demand towards the third space – the experience space.

The everything as a theme came from how we will be inspired by reliving and re-introducing ourselves to experiences, to objects and

Here were the ways I suggested the attendees think and consider with build the future not reacting to it and being too late.

Everything As A…

• 🤳 Everything as a billboard 
• ✋ Everything as contactless 
• 🤯 Everything as experiences
• 🤩 Everything as entertainment 
• 👁 Everything on demand  

In the coming posts, I will share five ways to think about these concepts and how to consider using these in the future.

In this post, we will tackle 🤳 Everything As A Billboard and how to think around billboarding and refreshing the concept in the transitional period we will be experiencing until midway through 2022.

Here are five ways to look at opportunities in forms of billboards.

🤳 Everything As A Billboard 

1/ Walking Billboards

With limited activities, we are seeing a lot less stimulus in person, tote bags, clothes, food and drink packaging are all billboards.
Many brands lost Marketing opportunities when they removed free bags and were charging for brands, this was right for the environment, many brands missed out the second-order effect of this and did not see the risk and missed marketing opportunity.
Starbucks is still incredibly lucky they are open and have the ability to turn any walk into a billboard moment, consider how you leverage this with your brand and brand packaging in the near term future.

2/ Wearable Billboards

While everyone is using video screens to communicate and host events, an opportunity is to leverage what is in view… an example is what people wear, what their backgrounds are, what you make appear as a prop or how your logo appears. There are great opportunities in this, especially with QR codes etc.

3/ Leveraging View, Touch, Sharing Experiences

In the near future, we will see more shops, galleries and ‘normal everyday life happenings’ open up, these are huge potential moments for Marketing, Product and Growth teams.
Consider how your brand can stand out and can create touchpoints back in normalising times.
Bags were and are great adverts, viewing items, touching, feeling, eating all great opportunities and experiences to connect and leverage packaging as actionable and shareable billboards.

4/ Locational Billboards

Consider how you think about key locations where people will be walking, running and when possible eating outside, these are all opportunities to leverage billboard moments or create billboard moments. Leveraging locations will be smart but competitive, see how you can leverage this early and beat your competitors to the punch.

When we are comfortable to eat outside, there will be a number of opportunities to leverage billboards, think of outdoor spaces like sponsoring benches, communal areas, food packaging and working with local councils to offer sponsorship or development of local area’s. Local has been hyper-relevant to everyone, especially those who proactively decided to move out of cities or move further out of busy cities. Shop local will continue but convenience is always the factor that wins.

5/ Micro Moments

Can you offer something more compelling, more engaging, more rewarding with these micro-moments?
Leverage the mobile phone and AR to truly build connections and shareable billboards.

Billboards are not just static and basic adverts anymore, billboards are what you make of them…