Introduction

In 2019, the Weavers Community Action Group, exasperated by the lack of response by both the council and the police, commissioned a group of street artists, the Columbia Road Cartel, to communicate the problem with drug dealing in their area. The artists created an ambient advertising campaign/street art campaign as a low cost means to engage the general public and get them to think about the issue. They changed ordinary street ‘furniture’ such as parking signs to ‘Drug dealers only’ signs and, by imitating the language of disabled parking spaces, they created a drug dealer parking space. It was a local response to draw attention to drug dealing and was a call to action for the police. The campaign gained considerable earned media through national press and the BBC and it achieved its aims: to stop drug dealing on their streets.

Over the last two decades, there has been an explosion of many such forms of alternative out-of-home advertising and experiences in our public spaces (Rosengren, Modig and Dahlén, 2015). Ambient advertising is one of these alternative forms, deliberately placed where audiences go about their everyday lives and practices rather than in demarcated advertising sites. It playfully and imaginatively uses or places objects in everyday spaces to communicate a message on behalf of brands or organisations (Gambetti, 2010; Krautsack, 2008; Luxton and Drummond, 2000; Moor, 2003).

Similar to guerrilla marketing, it is a low-cost tool that can be afforded by smaller companies or institutions at a local level, not just by multinationals or large charitable bodies (Hutter and Hoffman, 2011; Jurca and Madlberger, 2015; Luxton and Drummond, 2000), allowing smaller businesses to raise awareness of their brand (Gambetti, 2010). A guerrilla marketing campaign can use ambient advertising as one of its modes of communication.

A number of factors have influenced this increase in alternative out-of-home advertising. From the perspective of an advertising creative, it is an exciting mode of communication: ‘Everyone wants to get an ambient ad out’ (Daltry, interview, 5 July 2019). It is not a fixed format. Ambient advertising in particular can be anything; small, large, painted, constructed, transformative. It provides an alternative to cluttered advertising environments: ‘digital is now oversaturated so people are moving into street stuff, trying to spark joy’ (Hanson, interview, 15 March 2019). While it can ‘be incredibly effective, it doesn’t lend itself to measurement which gives it a certain [creative] freedom’ (Tindall, interview, 10 October 2019). In addition, the effectiveness of guerrilla marketing, including ambient advertising, is well recognised ‘in terms of the ratio of costs and benefits’ (Hutter and Hoffman 2011, 42).

From the client’s perspective, with an eye to audience behaviour, there are a number of persuasive arguments for being more open to alternative out-of-home advertising. Firstly, audiences respond to such experiences as part of the ‘hedonistic aspect of consumption’ (Gambetti, 2010, p. 3). Secondly, clients have noticed that their preferred audience – the hard-to-target 18–35 demographic (Eberstadt, 2000) – have changed their media habits and are increasingly difficult to target through mass media. Thirdly, as audiences we are more likely to be out of our homes as a normal part of our day: ‘We live in one place, work in another, play football in another’ (Cresswell, 2015, 36).

Together these form a powerful case to use alternative out-of-home ambient advertising. Envisioning this form of advertising as an audience experience and an entertainment has allowed ambient adverts not simply to be conceived as a point-of-sale consumer trigger (Shankar and Horton, 1999), but rather as a way to engage an audience at a variety of touchpoints (Gambetti, 2010). Whilst there is no doubt much alternative out-of-home advertising is created for product promotion, there is also a lot of work created for good causes and for social awareness. This ranges from the 16-foot sculptural installation Lungs for the brand Eon by Engine to the What’s in Your Wash stunt ambient advert by Hubbub.

Site is an integral part of an ambient advert and it is this quality which requires ambient advertising to be studied in situ. However, while many researchers have called for fieldwork (see Abdul-Razzaq, Ozanne and Fortin, 2009; Bennett, Kottasz and Koudelova, 2000; Gambetti and Schultz, 2015; Karimova, 2014; Rosengren, Modig and Dahlén, 2015; Yuen, 2017), few have done it. As a former advertising creative, my instinct was to go out and conduct fieldwork, interview advertising creatives, and work with participant researchers as they take a physical journey past an ambient advert.

This paper is based on that fieldwork. It allows me to compare the views of academics and advertising creatives with the actions of participants to investigate engagement. I will show why audiences engage with ambient advertising; if they are prepared to engage with ambient advertising far from a point of sale; if they will engage with a low-cost form of ambient advertising; and if the ambient advert causes them to think about the message. The reason for doing this is to propose ambient advertising as an effective, tactical and immediate response for smaller organisations and social activists seeking to do good.

Field experiments

There were four field experiments. Forty participants responded to the call out in four groups of ten, all together 39 were able to participate on the given dates.

The experiment and methods used were designed to investigate;

• If the participants engaged with the ambient advert

• Why they engaged

• If it needed to be near a point of sale to make sense

• Do scale and production values increase engagement?

• Are viewers prepared to engage with a low-cost form of ambient advertising?

• Do they take time to think about the message?

The methods used were

• A lab

• Video and walking diary – through a lapel camera which both records an audio walking-diary and captures context (Pauwels, 2012; Pink, 2007)

• Autophotography – to record participant interest or things that they found significant (Glaw et al., 2017)

• Field interviews – to ascertain whether they had commented on and photographed everything that they had considered to be important (Berg, 2009; Krajina, 2014).

All the field experiments have taken place in an alleyway. It is a controlled environment that functions as a lab. Abdul-Razzaq, Ozanne and Fortin (2009) found that participants were more likely to notice ambient advertising in enclosed environments. All the participants walked past the ambient advert, allowing the experiment to focus on engagement rather than whether the participants walked past it at all. Both the literature and the interviews indicated that the ambient advert did not need to be near a point of sale.

In the experiment, I designed an ambient advert to send a message on behalf of the local council based on Hutter’s findings (2015) that only one in five ambient adverts sells consumer goods. In common with much ambient advertising, I adapted existing street furniture – in this instance a lamppost. The advert for experiments 1-3 was a large pink bow and an oversized gift-tag with the copy ‘Thank you. This lamppost was paid for by your tax contribution.’ (See Figure 1). Experiment 4 had a large silver bow and an excessively large silver-backed gift tag which read ‘Thank you for your tax contribution which paid for all the lampposts that light up your streets.’ The lamppost itself was also partially wrapped with branded wrapping paper for experiment 4 (see Figure 2).

Figure 1

Advert used in experiments 1–3.

Figure 2

Experiment 4 – with branded wrapping paper.

The public sample group was initially recruited from a local school’s ‘mum’s Whatsapp group.’ The advantages of this purposive sampling technique (Etikan et al., 2016) would be to find ‘existential insiders’ (Relph, 1976, 53) to whom the alleyway had some meaning that would notice something that stood out from the ordinary. These individuals would also be more inclined to make time for the project because of proximity. Following this, each participant recruited a man that would be willing to take part in the research. A snowballing recruitment technique followed for the subsequent three experiments, generating a roughly equal male/female ratio and ages ranging from 18-53. There are clear limitations using this method of sampling. The individuals are from broadly the same socio-economic group and people with ages from age late 30s upwards were more likely to participate. This might mean that they would respond in a broadly similar way.

Findings

The walking diaries collected information on everything the participants noticed. A total of 97% of the 39 participants walking through the alleyway noticed the advert. In addition, 85% of the participants took photos of it. This was the most common thing to be photographed. All the participants that noticed it commented that it was new to the alleyway. They had not seen it before, and this intrigued them sufficiently to go and have a look at what it was. Roughly half noticed the colour and the other half noticed it was a ribbon or present from a distance.

‘What is this pink thing on the lamppost?’ She stops to take a photograph. Participant V1

No-one asked what the ambient advert was doing in the alleyway, and no-one commented that the advert would be better near the council offices – similar to point-of sale. In the field interviews that followed, a number of the participants wondered if there would be messages on some of the other lampposts, and why that lamppost in particular was important. Some even felt that the lamppost was new – this is despite the fact that they walk down the alleyway regularly – on average one participant per group. This indicates that until their attention had been drawn to the lamppost it was almost invisible. Few of the men talked about the light that the lamppost gave at night, roughly one from each group. This was much more relevant to the women with all the women mentioning it from each group. While the extra lighting was relevant to the women, it didn’t improve their perception of the council.

A pretty dramatic difference was the number of participants talking about other distractions within the physical context of the alleyway across the four experiments. All the experiments were placed on the same lamppost. In experiments 1-3, participants were consistently distracted by a variety of other features of the alleyway. However, participants were intrigued by the larger ambient ad with higher production values in experiment 4 some time before they got to it. They were also more likely to touch it with a number holding the gift tag and flipping it round.

So, from a distance I can see something that’s wrapped up on a lamppost that is really intriguing, so suddenly nothing else round here is as interesting, obviously… He walks up to the ad ‘Bromley Council,’ He takes a photo ‘that’s very nice.’ Participant M4a

Once they had engaged, they all understood what it was. Across all four experiments, 59% read out the advertising copy with a further 69% commenting on it further. They spent on average of between 23–28 seconds thinking about the advert, including walking up to it, reading it and continuing to comment on it after leaving. This means the advert wasn’t just seen, it was engaged with.

She pauses in front of the ambient ad. ‘Ah, that’s cute’ she said in an upbeat tone ‘I’m not sure I’m not supposed to take a lamppost for granted, that’s a funny thing to be celebrating,’; she walks away adding, in a pessimistic tone, ‘that makes me feel there’s going to be more cuts.’ Participant C1

The field interviews showed that not only had they decoded the meaning, but that in experiments 1-3 five to six participants from each group remembered the brand. However, this rose sharply in experiment 4 with all ten recalling the brand. This group also contained an 18-year-old that commented:

I didn’t know Bromley could be thought of as a ‘thing’ until I saw it on the ad. Participant W4

Experiment 4 had the advert with slightly higher production value and advertising craft applied and was slightly larger in scale.

The engagement with the ambient adverts was very high, with a high proportion of participants seeing it and interacting with it. Once they had interacted with it, they continued to think about it. This was evident within each experiment as well as in the experiments as a whole; the numbers did not vary wildly. Acknowledging that the numbers of participants thus far are small – 39 participants (1 from the 40 was unable to attend on the given date) – there is some robustness to the consistency of responses. While some small boost in scale and production value increased focus, it didn’t make participants like the message or brand any more than in experiments 1-3. The higher production value seemed to increase interactivity – perhaps because it felt slightly less ‘grubby’ to borrow a phrase from the advertising creatives. The higher production value also seemed to improve brand recall. The placement of this advert was key, since there were a number of distractions where the audience would go, part of their everyday environment.

Discussion

I have reported findings from the literature, interviews with advertising creatives and created two media interventions designed to ascertain participant engagement with ambient advertising. There were four key research objectives:

• Why do audiences engage with ambient advertising?

• Does an ambient advert need to be near a point of sale?

• Will audiences engage with a low-cost form of advertising?

• Do audiences of ambient advertising think about the message?

The engagement with the ambient adverts was very high, much higher than either academic studies or advertising creatives had considered that it would be. It is clear that people are prepared to engage with ambient advertising and this links to objective two, particularly if it is placed in the right location. Objective two appears to be answered by acknowledging that ambient advertising does not need to be near a point of sale. Sixty nine percent of participants engaged further: they considered the lighting, or their opinion on the council, to be directly relevant to them. This supports the insight from advertising creatives where over half thought public participants would do so if it was relevant to them in some way. Even though the advert was nowhere near a point of sale, it had remarkably high brand recall. One possibility is that it stood out precisely because it was far away from all other advertising forms and was unexpected.

All the industry interviews indicated that they thought ambient advertising needed to surprise, just enough to jolt someone out of their day-to-day practices; this was why people engaged. This was supported by the reactions of the passers-by in the field experiments that all had some small surprise in seeing this unusual object in the alley. One hundred percent of the participants that noticed the ambient advert also noticed that it was out of the ordinary and a new ‘thing,’ half the time commenting additionally on colour or material. The newness of the object would appear to override other considerations such as whether the viewed object is 3D or an optical illusion, a focus of much academic categorisation.

The third objective dealt with cost. All the participants that noticed the advert did not hesitate to engage with a low-cost form of advertising. That said it wasn’t as low-cost as stickering and didn’t enter the ‘grubbier’ end of ambient. However, when the production value went up in experiment 4, they interacted more and focused earlier. This bears out the creatives’ opinions, that increased spend can help realise the idea better, which might lead to more engagement, but that much bigger budgets are more about engaging mainstream media.

The fourth objective investigated whether audiences thought about the message in an ambient advert. Eighty six percent of the creatives interviewed thought that they would try to decode the message, and this was supported by Borghini et al’s (2010) study of street art and ambient campaigns. Indeed, that is what the participants did, with 69% commenting on the advert further, placing it into the context of their own lives and opinions. Experiments 1-3 had six participants from each group recalling the brand and experiment 4 showed all participants recalling the brand. They all understood what was being said and by whom; they simply didn’t all agree with it showing quite a deep level of processing and engagement with the underlying message.

This research had limitations. It used a small sample group for both the interviews and the fieldwork. There was a very limited number of questions asked about engagement. Furthermore, ambient advertising is usually deployed as a support to a larger campaign. As an industry practitioner I would have seen the merits in having other media supporting this idea and a number of different ambient executions; the situation was not exactly as one might find it in a real campaign. This, in turn, may have limited the persuasive power of a single advert to change opinion of a brand.

Conclusion

The reason for doing this research is to question whether audiences are prepared to engage with low-cost ambient advertising away from point-of-sale. If they are, it can be a useful, tactical and immediate response for smaller organisations and social activists seeking to do good with small budgets. Hutter (2015) noted that there is little research that proves empirically that passers-by would engage with ambient advertising. Advertising creatives believed audiences would engage and this limited study indicates that they do.

The two executions in the experiments were low-cost and were noticed by almost all participants. The engagement with the ambient adverts was very high, much higher than either academic studies or advertising creatives had considered. This has implications for considering the use of ambient advertising across a number of sectors. There hasn’t been much of this smaller low-cost ambient advertising created by big agencies recently as creatives and clients have moved towards spectacles and special builds to engage media attention. This means that it is being missed as a messaging opportunity. This smaller, cheaper means of advertising can clearly communicate brand and message far away from usual advertising environments.

Taken away from the simplicity of the cause and effect of point-of-sale advertising, ambient advertising has the ability to affect people in their everyday spaces, making messages more relevant to location and communities. Hubbub’s ‘What’s in my Wash’ changed the attitudes of shoppers to microfibres while they were engaged in the activity of shopping in Bond Street. The Columbia Road Cartel’s ambient campaign, highlighting the easy procurement of drugs, changed the attitude of both the police and the local council.

This ability to get people to think about the message in the context of their own lives is what makes ambient advertising so compelling. It can provide a useful and affordable tool for advertising for social good and social change.

Biographical Statement

Miriam Sorrentino is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communications at the University of Greenwich. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a D&AD and ISTD awarded lecturer. She is currently a PhD candidate at UAL. Miriam brings over 20 years’ experience in advertising and design at some of London’s most awarded agencies with work for Leo Burnett’s, Mother and Grey Interactive for a wide variety of clients as well as a body of work for the BBC and Channel 4 to her teaching and consultancy work. Laurence King commissioned Miriam to write the academic text Creative Advertising: An Introduction, published in 2014, an overview of current advertising practice and theory. In 2019 she co-edited and designed Publishing and Digital Culture: Agility, Community, Collaboration published by the Stephen Lawrence Gallery.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.