OOH#1 - My name is AMY. I like slugs and snails.

The origins of the advertising bus shelter. Reading time: 4 minutes.

Now, this is a bizarre title to begin with and I know this might not make sense. This newsletter is 100% about OOH (out-of-home) advertising, I promise!

My first edition is about how one of the most popular advertising formats, “The advertising bus shelter” came into existence. 50 years since, and the advertising bus shelter is still one of the most sought after media in the advertising world.

Your perspective of a bus shelter is often defined by where you are from. Apparently if you’re from Estonia, you would think bus shelters across the world are made from stone carvings, wood or calcium silicate bricks.

I come from a family with an advertising background and a good portion of my childhood was spent observing and surveying different outdoor media, rating the myriad advertising campaigns on a binary scale (yay or nay) in my mind.

Bus Shelters also bring back a lot of fond memories of friendship as we would hang out in the bus stop near school and discuss about football or whatever happened in school that day. My first ever advertising campaign in Surespace was a multi-city bus shelter campaign and so was my most recent campaign.

Getting back to the topic, between the 17th and the 19th century, much before FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Google), Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Volvo, etc, horse drawn coaches ran regular services between many European towns, often stopping at designated Coaching Inns where the horses could be changed or passengers often boarded or alighted. In a way, this is the bus shelter's true pre-origin story.

One of the defining moments came when in 1969, two advertising billboard companies, More O’Ferrall (now Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the Big-4 OOH companies in the world) and London and Provincial, joined to form a company called Adshel.

The idea behind the new firm was simple: Adshel would supply bus shelters to local authorities for nothing, in return for the right to display advertising on them. In the early 1970s it began installing its first shelters in Leeds, which is why the Adshel bus shelters there are still numbered “0001”. The ads were displayed in “6-sheet” panels – now universally known as “Adshels”, whether they adorn shelters, supermarkets or motorway service stations.

There’s also a concurrent origin story, the one that belongs to one of the largest OOH companies in the world, i.e., JCDecaux. Taking an excerpt from the article, “The advertising bus shelter: JCDecaux’s Trademark” -

In the 1960s, the urbanisation of society resulted in the development of transport networks connecting city centres with the suburbs. Jean-Claude Decaux made a new product available to local authorities - the advertising bus shelter - giving them the opportunity to finance street furniture through advertising. He embarked on a journey around France to convince mayors to adopt this new street furniture, explain the prototype advertising bus shelter to them and promote its advantages, especially for public finances.

Lyon became the first city to be equipped with free advertising bus shelters in 1964 on the initiative of its mayor, Louis Pradel. Jean-Claude Decaux decided to ensure the cleaning and maintenance of the bus shelters in order to guarantee the satisfaction of his advertising customers and his company's reputation.

At that point, bus shelters became a highly-prized platform for advertisers as they were the only type of street furniture that enabled advertising to be displayed in city centres, where advertising space was strictly regulated.

Going strictly by timelines, it appears that JCDecaux was the first one to introduce the advertising bus shelter. However, in terms of impact, I’d say Adshel made a bigger splash and its eerie campaign (can’t help but notice that it appears as if the letters are written with blood!) is remembered till date.

In 1984, Adshel launched a much obscure campaign depicting a small girl named “Amy”. Not the Hollywood Amys that we know of, but a make-believe character, Amy (and we are finally back to the title of this edition).

The company ran an advertising campaign on 3000 bus shelters with an image of a small girl - Amy, saying: “My name is Amy. I like slugs and snails”.

This wasn’t (surprisingly) done to creep people out but was done actually to show the power and the brand recall value of the medium. Research tests showed that after 14 days, 33% of those questioned were aware of Amy and her message.

Talk about making a statement! It was a campaign designed to advertise advertising.

Decades later, Amy is still remembered by a lot of people who remember strolling across or waiting in those bus shelters.

(Personal Note: Amy could be the face of a D2C brand targeting the baby boomers or the Gen X!)

This was in 1984 and 36 years later, we still don’t have a proper attribution for offline advertising; an attribution and a feedback system that Adshel executed to perfection but impossible to execute now due to the number of channels, scale of campaigns, etc.

Ending this with OOH attribution which is a smooth segue into our next story.

Also, just leaving this cool bus shelter here.