Website Research - The Big Boys...

Awesome Billboards
This site shows different ways people have used outdoor advertising in an unusual and fun way. I feel that our site would do well to show that we can do designs similar to the ones on this site. An example of one of the designs is a Law and Order billboard which has a pop-up 3D design which has the effect of the investigators arm holding the light which is illuminating the poster in the suspects face.

JCDecaux

This website is for JCDecaux, the second largest outdoor advertising corporation in the world. Especially well known for their bus-stop advertising systems, billboards, bicycles (in France), and street furniture. Over the years it has expanded some would say aggressively, through acquisitions of smaller advertising companies in several countries including the UK. It currently operates in more than 54 countries, 165 airports and has approximately 8900 employees.
Their website has a very simple layout, with 7 main pages with several sub-pages, similar to what we are designing.
The pages about the billboard types tell you, the percentage they have which are lit and contracts (which i assume is how many they own) and have a arty photoshopped image of the type of billboard, the page has links to pdfs to rates cards and the information about size as well.
There is also a link to 'see your billboard in situ" although you need to download some random windows program that doesn't work on my mac so I couldn't try it out. It pretty much just looks like street view but over complicated though.



Titan
Titan are another outside adverting agency, they are nowhere near as big as the above but still have a modest market share, with over 11,000 billboards, their main clients are bus companies. They also work with BBC News 24 on their editorial content.
The website has a weird mix of videos and pretty poor flash links which barely work (like the one above, give it a try, it might just be me being simple!). It does have a clean layout though and not too many pages.
And some snazzy graphs like this one.

Its about rail advertising or something?
They also have a section about their experimental advertising, which we could "borrow" some ideas from, such as 5x lifesize models and this thing...


PrimesightI've just read that Primesight have bought Titan's roadside (billboards) estate, which means a lot of the above now applies to this part.
Not sure about the size of primesight but I've never really heard of them but apparently 82% of the UK population see a Primesight 6 Sheet every fortnight so they must be quite big. The prices on there are pretty cheap but I've got a feeling they'ew in lower frequency areas so that would be why.
The website is OK, not amazing but OK, simple flash animations of photographs on the pages, but lots of pages on the side, which isn't very appealing to the eye and you kind of scan them automatically without taking anything in.
They've got an eco policy like nearly every other site so we defo need one.

CBS Outdoor

CBS Outdoor are a big advertising company, owned by CBS, and operating around the globe.
The cooperation are the main advertisers for the majority of the factors of Transport for London (underground, bus etc) they also advertise in Airports, and Shopping Centres. CBS seem to be the adverting agency of choice for really high profile companies like Coca Cola etc.
The best thing on this website is the visualizer, this is a really cool way of seeing how your image would look in different locations, I had fun playing about with it, give it a go yourself. I think if we have the time we should try to make something similar to this for our website.
I couldn't really find a rate card or anything on the site, but it didn't seem like the sort of place the advertisers would be thinking about the cost!
I think this brand may be a little out of our league but we can take a lot of good ideas from the website.