From the idea to the big screen: "Churchie's Drive-Thru Car Insurance"

Simply enter Ocean Outdoor's 2017 digital outdoor creative competition, run in partnership with Campaign. You come up with a winning concept, Ocean will help make it reality on its network and Campaign will make you famous. Easy.

The glory starts at an awards ceremony where you will be feted in front of a 500-strong audience and on Britain's biggest (20m x 26m) screen at London's BFI iMax.

We're bringing you inspiration over six weeks from past winners who have seen their entries go from an idea to the big screen. This time:  Churchill's "Churchie's Drive-Thru Car Insurance" by WCRS.

Dino Burbidge, director of innovation and technology at WCRS, talks us through the journey from the idea to the big screen

Tell us about the project:

In a nutshell, we turned the Holland Park roundabout in West London into a giant, 1950's-themed drive through cinema with personalised insurance messages. 

When cars stopped at the lights, we looked up their car make and model using Ocean Outdoor's vehicle recognition technology and delivered a highly personalised message to the driver. We had messages that spoke to German cars, 4x4's, small cars, gold cars, old cars - and everything in-between. 

For instance, one driver might see "Morning red Prius! You care for the planet, we care for you with 24/7 breakdown cover" while another may see "Sporty silver Boxter, Keep those wheels hot. Repairs guaranteed for 5 years". The system even took account of the time of day, so even if we didn't recognise a specific car, we could wish drivers a good morning, afternoon or evening, ensuring everyone got a personalised message in some way.

How did the idea come about?

Research had shown that car insurance had a problem. Once a driver signs up for their policy, they don’t usually go looking to change it. It really needed something big, easy and, more importantly, relevant to interrupt the status quo. That was the DNA of the "Churchie’s Drive-Thru Car Insurance" campaign. 

We knew we needed to make our messaging personal (but not overly) and to deliver it when people were actually receptive to car messaging. What better time than driving a car? That's where the Ocean vehicle recognition technology was such a great fit - the tech was pretty much built to bring this idea to life.

The 50's drive-thru theme came from the need to deliver simplicity and cut-through. It was important that the 'interaction' was effortless, so the idea of simply driving up and being entertained had great parallels with the classic 1950's America drive-in cinema culture. 

What did success look like?

Churchill is no stranger to effective marketing but this had a specific goal - making the messaging super-relevant while still communicating the product benefits. The beauty of this idea was that, once the tech was locked down, it simply became an efficient copywriting challenge. There were approximately 2,400 vehicles that stopped each day and we could trigger one of over 18,000 possible messages. It was important that we only delivered messages when we had something relevant to say.

Over three days, we triggered a total of 380 unique messages to over 3,700 individual car drivers, something that would have been impossible to achieve with a traditional out of home media buy.

One of the meta goals of the Ocean Outdoor Digital Creative Competition is to give brands and agencies the opportunity to experiment outside of the day-to-day. Churchill saw really positive results which goes a long way to support investment in OOH as an effective and exciting part of the media mix. That’s a win for the wider OOH industry as it's creating more engaged, more adventurous clients.