Author: Liu Zhonghui (Lecturer, Changjiang School of Journalism and Communication, Shantou University).
*: Young Journalists, Issue 24, 2023.
Introduction: This paper analyzes the problems existing in the design of outdoor public service advertisements in China from the perspective of audience interactive experience, and the importance of interactive strategies.
As an emerging form of advertising, interactive advertising has shown unique characteristics and advantages in the new era. The combination of diverse elements, such as images, sounds, animations, etc., enables interactive ads to present richer and more diverse information content to capture the audience's attention. In addition, with the help of computer** technology, interactive advertising enables an immersive visual experience, providing intuitive virtual images that allow audiences to feel and understand the message of the ad more deeply. Whether it is an interactive advertisement that breaks through the limitations of two-dimensional printing, or an interactive advertisement that integrates digital technology, it has a high level of participation. Audiences can interact with and engage with the ad, increasing the likelihood that they will turn a concept into action.
In the field of outdoor advertising, the concept of interaction design has been widely used in commercial advertising. However, in outdoor public service announcements, interaction design has not yet become widely available. The author believes that combining the situation or environment of outdoor billboards and introducing the interactive application between multiple users into the field of outdoor public service advertising can bring a more intuitive and in-depth experience to the audience. By connecting interactive points, you can promote audience engagement, increase their awareness of PSA content, and inspire audiences to participate more actively in public service activities or support related causes. The two-way communication method adopted by interactive advertising also helps to collect audience behavior data, which provides strong support for the creative production capacity and communication effect of interactive outdoor public service advertisements in the future. By analyzing audience behavior data, advertisers can better understand their audience's needs and preferences, and then adjust the content and format of their ads to improve their effectiveness and impact.
Interactive advertising has great potential and advantages in the new era. Whether in the commercial or public service advertising space, engaging audiences through interactive means, and collecting data on audience behavior can achieve better advertising results. Therefore, it is of great significance to actively promote the application of interactive advertising in outdoor public service advertisements to improve the creative production capacity and communication effect of public service advertising.
The current situation of outdoor public service advertising design in China.
Since the "13th Five-Year Plan", China has successively introduced a series of support policies to promote the development of public service advertising. However, the current PSAs generally have the problem of creative modelling and simplification, which has caused widespread controversy. As far as the current design status of outdoor public service advertising in China is concerned, print advertising and ** advertising occupy a dominant position, but the creative elements are relatively limited. Even with sufficient advertising space and superior geographical location, due to the traditional one-way media communication method, the public is only in a state of passive acceptance of information, and it is difficult to attract enough attention. Especially in the outdoor environment, factors such as weather and ** may have a negative impact on the communication effect of public service announcements. At the same time, with the advancement of economic globalization and the rise of new technologies, new forms of advertising continue to emerge, making it more difficult for outdoor public service advertisements to stand out in commercial advertising. Therefore, the communication effect of PSAs should not stay at the stage of simple information communication, but should guide behavior by persuading the public, urging action, and improving social cognition. Therefore, the application of one-way media communication has little effect on the communication effect of public service advertisements in today's society.
Since 2022, China has begun to implement the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Advertising Industry", which clearly puts forward the policy goal of supporting the development of public service advertising. The plan aims to establish a sound operational mechanism for public service advertising, promote the mutual promotion and integration of public service advertising and commercial advertising, and form a diversified and benign development model. By actively organizing various public service advertising activities and building interactive platforms, various advertising associations provide convenience for the majority of social entities to further unite the public. With the country's great attention to the construction of an interactive platform for public service advertising, traditional outdoor public service advertising is undergoing transformation, which has also become the internal driving force for the interactive design of outdoor public service advertising. Improving the interactivity of outdoor public service advertisements is considered to be an effective method, which can better use public service advertisements to play a role in promoting the construction of civilized cities and achieving the goal of public welfare education. In addition, outdoor public service advertisements are also a mirror of the development process of urban spiritual civilization, and shoulder the important responsibility of shaping and optimizing the image of urban civilization [1]. In the new era, the academic community is also paying more and more attention to improving the design of outdoor public service advertisements.
The importance of "interaction" in outdoor PSAs.
The emergence of digital out of home (DOOH) has brought new opportunities and challenges to traditional outdoor advertising. Traditional forms of out-of-home advertising, such as print ads and ** ads, often deliver information to the audience in a one-way way, lacking interactivity and personalization. However, with the development of mobile Internet technology and the rise of digital**, digital out-of-home advertising came into being, providing advertisers with a more flexible and interactive way of communication.
The advantage of digital out-of-home advertising is its ability to achieve two-way communication with audiences through technologies such as the web, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. Compared with traditional advertising, digital out-of-home advertising has stronger personalized customization capabilities, and can be accurately delivered according to the audience's interests, preferences and behavioral habits. This personalized approach captures the audience's attention and inspires engagement and action.
Interactive outdoor PSAs integrated with digital technology can further promote interaction and communication between advertisements and audiences. Traditional public service advertisements usually use the form of print and ** advertising, and the audience can only receive information by reading or **, lacking freshness and initiative. However, by introducing interactive points, interactive outdoor PSAs engage audiences and deliver information through individual actions. This interactive form not only enriches the advertising content, but also establishes two-way information transmission, providing accurate and data-based help for measuring the advertising effect.
Take, for example, a "No Smoking" billboard on the streets of Sweden that uses smoke sensors and proximity sensors to interact with smokers. When someone is smoking in the neighborhood, the model on the billboard starts coughing, an interactive way that makes smokers feel embarrassed and ashamed in public, thus reducing smoking behavior. At the same time, the number of coughs on the screen can also generate data that can be used to analyze changes in smoking behavior in public places. This interactive OOH not only captures and resonates with your audience, but also provides an accurate, data-based way to measure performance.
"No Smoking" billboards on the streets of Sweden.
In the new era, outdoor public service advertisements should make good use of digital technology and interactive methods, so that advertisements can better interact and communicate with the audience, stimulate their participation and action, so as to more effectively convey advertising information and public welfare concepts, and influence the audience's behavior. This development has provided advertisers and nonprofits with more innovative and practical means of advertising communication.
Use the environment to create opportunities for "interaction".
From the audience's point of view, the existing OOH creative performance strategies can be divided into four types, namely contextual consistency strategy, expansion and exaggeration strategy, situational deduction strategy and storytelling strategy (see Table 1).
Table 1 Common creative strategies in outdoor advertising [2].
In terms of interactive design strategies for outdoor public service announcements, contextual consistency and contextual deduction are two design methods that have attracted much attention and have potential. Traditional outdoor public service advertisements often use print advertising to expand and exaggerate, or to present them in ** advertisements through storytelling. However, the contextual consistency strategy and the contextual deduction strategy have not been widely applied and popularized in the field of outdoor public service advertising.
As a design direction that studies the communication between people and things, interactive design is committed to understanding the behavior of users and products when they interact with each other, so as to reveal the psychological and behavioral characteristics of human beings. Put simply, interactive design connects objects, such as product interfaces, to the user's behavior through interactive points to achieve a common goal. In commercials, interactive advertising aims to drive consumers to make a purchase by creating a point of interaction. In PSAs, the goal of interactive advertising is to create interactive points to increase the public's participation and emotional resonance with a certain idea or behavior pattern that is called, advocated or blocked in the advertisement. For public service advertisements set up outdoors, if they can be creatively designed in combination with the environment in which the public live, it can not only reduce the "sense of preaching", but also naturally arouse the public's interest, and then generate offline behavioral interaction. Offline behavior interaction can make the pain points to be conveyed by public service advertisements easier to be perceived, and realize warm public welfare operation behaviors. [3]
American communication scholar Joshua Merowitz believes that "in modern society, changes in the media make various fields interconnected, and the media, the social environment, and human behavior are closely related. [4] With the changing environment of the times, the communication medium of public service advertisements is no longer limited to one-way output of print information or animation**. PSAs urgently need to shift to multi-dimensional design. [5] Therefore, the use of the contextual consistency strategy of outdoor public service advertisements can break through the two-dimensional limitations of print advertising, and combine the audience's space, time and other environments with the advertising content consistently, forming a three-way integration of media, social environment and human behavior, so as to enhance the visual impact and atmosphere of the situation. This strategy allows the audience to feel the message conveyed by the ad in an immersive way, which naturally prompts the audience to take action. For example, WWF's public service announcement "S**e **S**e the Planet" (Save Paper, Save the Earth) uses the environment as a medium to cut out the shape of the map on the drawer box. As the amount of paper is extracted, the green part of the map will gradually decrease, intuitively telling the public the great harm caused by waste paper to the earth, and calling on the public to save paper and protect the earth. By creating a diverse and inclusive atmosphere, the contextual consistency strategy constructs a complete situational image. With the help of environmental stimulation, public service advertisements can vividly display the advertising information and arouse the audience's perception of the connotation of public welfare in contextual interaction. The multi-dimensional design of print advertising also helps to convey advertising information vividly and accurately, with better display functions and interactive promotion [6].
WWF Public Service Announcement "S**e **S**e The Planet" (Save Paper, Save the Earth).
In addition, contextual interpretation strategies can increase audience engagement and empathy by recreating and interpreting situations. Through the creative design of advertising information, advertising carriers and media environment, a special situation is created to guide the public to have an emotional experience, so as to guide the public to pay more attention to the message to be conveyed by the advertisement. Named after the Norwegian non-profit organization frivilligNO's interactive PSA "Would You Rather Have Coffee with a Stranger?" To show that volunteer work can be as simple as having a cup of coffee and chatting, frivilligNo has installed an app-controlled coffee machine on the billboard at the bus stop, and is equipped with a camera, speaker, and microphone. On the screen of the billboard, an elderly man accosted a passer-by, asking if they would mind having a cup of coffee with him. If passers-by agree, through the internal system, the coffee is poured into the cup inside the unit. In this way, passers-by can not only taste coffee, but also accompany the elderly to chat. The purpose of this interactive advertisement is to call on more people to take care of the elderly and volunteer in their spare time. Compared with the direct and slogan-style advertising words, the advertisement uses the "synaesthesia" technique to transform the different answers of passers-by into the different reactions of the elderly in the virtual advertisement, realizes the communication between virtual and reality, makes people experience it more intuitively, attracts the attention of the public, and improves the enthusiasm of the public to participate in public welfare activities.
Norwegian non-profit organization frivilligNO's interactive PSA "Would You Rather Have Coffee with a Stranger?" ”
In addition, sensory conversions are also a way to improve the effectiveness of interactive PSAs. Through the rational use of sensory transformation and the auxiliary perception of public welfare information, a more realistic and wonderful picture can be created than the real scene. Mo Meifeng and Xiang Yuanyuan pointed out that in advertising design, the "synaesthesia" technique is used to convey the feelings of different senses, and through association, emotions can be transmitted and intertwined, which can produce more real and wonderful images than real scenes. [7] When the perceptual characteristics of a certain information are not obvious enough, synaesthesia techniques can reasonably use the senses to transform public welfare information, so as to assist perception. [8]"Would you rather have coffee with strangers?" "PSAs take full advantage of the transformation between the senses. The interaction between passers-by and the elderly in the virtual advertisement makes the advertisement more vivid and allows people to perceive the public welfare information more intuitively.
In general, interactive outdoor PSAs can increase public participation and emotional resonance in the advertisement by using the context and environment for creative design and strategic use, thereby prompting the audience to pay more attention to and participate in the public welfare action. Through contextual consistency, contextual interpretation and sensory transformation, PSAs can deliver a more warm and impactful message in the outdoor environment, triggering a change in audience behavior. This innovative design and strategy should be more popularized and applied to promote the development of PSAs and the improvement of social benefits.
Conclusion. In the information age, everyone has the ability to gain power through access to information. Although the media channels of interactive advertising are becoming more and more diversified, the core of interactive outdoor public service advertising should still be designed around the content information of public welfare behavior. Taking into account various factors such as emotion, interest, and culture, the interactive design strategy of public service advertisements can enhance the value of public service communication through the interactive touchpoints between people and things. In the construction of spiritual civilization in the future of the city and the development of public welfare awareness, outdoor public service advertising should actively pursue change, and creators should closely combine life experience with the original intention of solving social problems, and extract the elements suitable as the theme of outdoor public service advertising in civilized cities. Under the urgent need to emphasize the image of a civilized city, combined with interactive strategies, we should promote the active acceptance and dissemination of public welfare information by various social groups, and give full play to the positive role of outdoor public service advertising in shaping the image of a civilized city.
This paper is the interim result of the Shantou Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project "Research on the Interactive Analysis and Optimization Strategy of Shantou Outdoor Public Service Advertising" (No. ST23QN04) and the Shantou University Research Start-up Funding Project "Comparative Research on Social Values and Creative Expression Strategies in Health Public Service Advertisements in China and Korea" (No. STF22012).
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This article refers to the citation format:
Liu Zhonghui. Research on Interactive Strategy and Innovation of Outdoor Public Service Advertising[J].Young Journalists, 2023(24): 77-79