“Outdoor advertising doesn’t have to be complex. With a few smart design principles and the right tools, anyone can create stunning DOOH campaigns.”

Creating DOOH Ads for Beginners

Haowei Yu

UX Designer, youdooh

Ever thought about running your own digital outdoor advertising campaign but not sure how to tackle the ad creative part? It’s a question we get asked a bit, we’ve put together a few tips to help you get started.

What’s the goal?

First things first, identify the goal of your campaign and why you are advertising - is it for brand awareness, product promotion, stimulating sales or something else? Less is more in outdoor advertising, keep the message short and simple. For example, a billboard might have a play time of 8 seconds with people driving past it quickly, a long paragraph of text is definitely not going to be effective; keeping to between 5 and 7 words would work best. A clear call to action is also a great way for people to know what to do after seeing your ad.

Tooling up

There are lots of great ad building products out there, but we like Canva. It’s an easy to use, free tool for creating ad designs. There are templates, visual elements and a wide range of fonts and colour combinations to choose from. Canva is intuitive and allows you drag and drop in creative elements, move them around on your artboard and import your brand visuals and logos into the platform.

To create a design file, select the “custom size” option.

Based on the size of your screen, put in the corresponding pixel dimensions, and you’re ready to start designing!

Design Tips & Elements

Keep your designs simple with clear branding. Try to limit your colour choices to a few, ideally no more than 3. There are also colour tools that can help like Adobe Colour which can help with get inspiration for colour combinations.

Legibility and contrast are also a really powerful convention you need to think about. The higher the contrast, the easier it will be for people to notice and read your ad. This is especially important for DOOH as it can sometimes be up to the mercy of the elements. For example, a design with lower contrast will be harder to read on a sunny day.

To check your contrast levels try using a Colour Contrast Checker.

Make sure that the text is big enough to read. Just because you can zoom in on your computer and read it on there, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is readable a few meters away on a billboard. Bigger, bolder text makes your message more impactful.

Exporting Images

When exporting your designed creative, make sure that the resolution is set correctly for the dimensions of your ad. When exporting try to export a high resolution in the form of a PNG or JPG.

Testing Creatives

Before you book your ad campaign with your new ad, you can do one last quality check on the creative. Using the Youdooh mockup tool in step 3, once you’ve assigned your ads to a screen click on preview to see your ads in context, superimposed on the stock image (sitecard) of the screen you’ve selected. With the mockup too, you can see what your ad looks like in context and at distance - so how effective it might be in real life.

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