When it comes down to it, digital and traditional out of home (OOH) are completely separate elements, according to MediaCom UK’s head of OOH trading.

Posters on billboards that are up for a couple of weeks at a time do a fantastic job of the classic OOH deliverables; quick coverage and viewability, but with digital you need to be thinking right outside of the box.

Ahead of his judging position for The Drum Creative Out Of Home Awards, Arran Javed talks about the move from traditional OOH to digital, key trends in data and programmatic and how MediaCom UK are using data more intelligently.

With digital becoming more prominent in OOH, is there still room for traditional methods?

My personal view is that they are two separate channels. If you are putting up a poster and it's going to be up for two weeks, it’s going to do a fantastic job of the things that OOH has always been good at; driving quick cover and viewability.

When it comes to digital you can be a lot smarter. Adding context to a creative in an environment, for instance that changes throughout the day to make sure that the add is having as big an impact as possible to the consumer. This means that it has a completely different role to a poster, like a traditional poster sight. You need to treat them as two separate channels, whilst they complement each other massively, you can't just buy two weeks’ worth of digital and two weeks’ worth of 96 sheets, they don't do the same job.

What is MediaCom UK doing right now in OOH that is unique/innovative?

That would be our attitude towards digital. It's not necessarily, as a whole, unique but the way we are approaching it, from a planning and trading perspective, is starting to use all the data that is out there in a smarter way.

We are also looking at how we can make sure we are driving trading efficiencies and adding creative context to give the consumer more out of OOH, with all the data we have, be that simple context like the weather, or mobile geo data, or even sales data from clients. For example, if Subway is having a quiet week in one of their stores in Manchester, can we flip the switch and get some ads on to drive footfall into that store.

What are the key trends in OOH right now?

A big buzzword, at the moment, is programmatic OOH and what that actually means. I feel like the market is a little bit confused about it. Everyone has their own definition and at MediaCom UK, we have a very clear vision of what it is.

Data and from a commercial viewpoint, it's looking at how we buy OOH. Do we carry on in a panel by panel basis as we always have done or do we start looking at audience trading? We have this wealth of data now, so can we start using that a bit smarter?

What has been the most innovative thing you have seen from the OOH industry this year?

There have been some really smart digital campaigns and as a whole, seeing people taking advantage of digital out of home properly on scale, it's hard to pick out one.

The campaigns are getting smarter and data is being used a lot more. One of the things that I did when I was with TED a few years ago, was triggering ads on screens when a radio song was playing. For example, when Justin Bieber pinged up on Capital FM, what I did was change and block out the screen for the three minutes that the song was on, with his album.

Where do you see OOH heading in the next 12 months?

There will be more digital going into the ground. We will see a number of site types like 96 sheets being replaced with digital screens as more companies are investing in heavily in digital OOH, in terms of infrastructure and we are seeing that our clients are doing a similar thing.

MediaCom UK are just ahead of the market average in terms of spend on digital OOH. Clients are certainly embracing it as well. The opportunity is there. In the next 12 months we are going to see people buying it differently, using a lot more data and a lot more creative OOH campaigns.

For instance, we ran a campaign earlier this year, that had 100 variants of creatives which was all about creating different processes triggered by the weather, time of day and other data and that was quite exciting. It was something that you wouldn't have ever bothered to do or thought you could do a couple of years ago.

What is the best work you have overseen?

The best thing I have overseen was the Jurassic World Waterloo take over. It ticked a lot of boxes in terms of the experiential element to it. There were massive dinosaurs, real smart use of digital (using transition screens hooked up to a mobile phone so people could go to a website to hear what was going on in the screen) which added a new dimension to OOH.

We even got it into the media; like Good Morning Britainwhich instigated it into other media outlets. It wasn't just the use of posters and digital screens; every best bit of OOH came together. It became famous online and drove social engagement. It gave consumers a reason to go down and see it.

As a judge for The Drum Creative Out OF Home Awards, what do you want to see from the entries this year?

I want to see more than your standing building wraps. More smart use of data. I will be looking at data and how it informs the positioning of adverts, location and the forming of creative. Seeing how people have used data to get the most out of the site.

How important are the awards for those in the industry?

The acknowledgement and recognition of good work by the industry, is hugely important. It inspires people to develop creative work. It encourages better work moving forward.

What advice would you give to this year's entrants?

The best thing to do is to be as clear as possible as quickly as possible. What's the headline? Capture the attention straight away. Then tell the story of the campaign in a unique way.

What's the premise of the campaign? Why is it being entered? What was the outcome? Be very clear about those three things. It's not necessarily about how you sold 10 million cars or what the KPI's were, it's more how did you get to where you got to.