In October 2012, CBS Outdoor initiated a monumental outdoor advertising strategy to promote London to advertisers with their Look For Longer campaign. Accompanied by a #lookforlonger route to social media explosion, fifty 48-sheet billboards took to the London Underground stage in a bid to prove just how effective targeting the right audience can be.
As displayed through the above animated video, CBS Outdoor have had quite a good reaction to the whole thing. The Look For Longer website received a total of 578,777 visits from nearly 300,000 unique visitors – 30% of which were browsing from a mobile device – with each player spending over an hour engrossed in an interactive hunt for 72 hidden Tube stations.
170 countries responded – proving just how far news can spread thanks to our digital capabilities – resulting in over 60,000 visits external to the United Kingdom. And all from advertising that was solely placed in London.
In a monumental demonstration that urban environments have unrivalled promotional power, feedback has revealed that 24% of visitors were directed by the billboard itself, 30% came thanks to social media, and 36% engaged with the campaign because they had heard about it through word of mouth. Evidently we should never underestimate the power that humans can hold if something captivates them – in a digital environment it is becoming increasingly easy for fads to erupt on a global scale. With 12,119,901 answers submitted, Look For Longer was on everybody’s lips and finger tips, receiving 1,220 backlinks and 99.8% of conversation related to the billboard was positive.
So what do CBS gain from it? Well, not only have the company earned £238,619 via social media and reaped a level of PR coverage equivalent to £65,657 advertising value, their campaign was clearly a staggering success – confirming to the world that, if planned correctly, outdoor advertising has the power sail across oceans, it can infiltrate houses, streets, neighbourhoods, cities, countries and even continents.