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Outfront, Farmlink fighting hunger with OOH campaign

Sometimes the plight of others can go unnoticed, but Outfront Media, through a partnership with The Farmlink Project, hopes an OOH promotional campaign will bring food to families in need.

Outfront Media, along with The Farmlink Project, has introduced digital canvas displays with bold messages to fight hunger in the U.S. The signage has debut in several major markets, including New York and Houston. Provided

July 13, 2021 by Kevin Damask — Editor, Digital Signage Today

Sometimes the plight of others can go unnoticed, but Outfront Media hopes its OOH promotional campaign will bring food to families in need.

The digital billboard, transit and mobile advertising company has unveiled a series of OOH signage promoting The Farmlink Project's goal of ending food insecurity. The Farmlink Project, which began in early 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, aims to deliver unused produce from farms to food banks throughout the U.S.

"When the opportunity came our way to work with Outfront, it was a no-brainer on our end. Our team immediately connected with Outfront's creative vision and the liberty they granted us to put out messaging that was especially unique to our identity," Aiden Reilly, Farmlink co-founder and creative lead, said in an interview with Digital Signage Today. "Given that this was our first campaign, Outfront could have enacted any degree of control over our creative output, yet instead decided to provide advice, guidance, and support in making sure we put out the message we wanted."

Not only does the campaign fight hunger, but it also expands on Farmlink's other goals of combating food waste and climate change.

With bold, eye-grabbing slogans such as "One Third of All Food is Wasted," "Put Us Out of Business," and "The Solution is Right in Front of You," the partnership's mission is to motivate people to action. Outfront's studios and Farmlink's creative team created the campaign and designed the artwork, placing it along areas with high-pedestrian traffic in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, and New York.

"These cities were strategically chosen to align with Farmlink's most prominent outreach," Elizabeth Rave, Outfront's senior director of Marketing, said in an interview with Digital Signage Today. "We know witty OOH ads like this drive online search. By driving people to the Farmlink website, we hope they will be inspired by the small and obtainable acts that they can do that add up to big change — whether that is volunteering in their community or donating."

The campaign will debut next week in Kansas City.

"Once the ads went up and were amplified across press and social media, other markets wanted to get involved, including Kansas City," Rave said. "We expect the partnership and coverage to grow as awareness of the campaign and Farmlink's mission grows."

In the U.S., one in every six children go to bed hungry, according The Brookings Institution. The Farmlink Project provides over 30 million pounds of healthy, fresh food to food banks, which in-turn goes to families in need.

"Our goal with OOH signage was to get our name and branding out in the physical world — we wanted to catch people's eye and make them stop and think," Reilly said. "The fact is, Farmlink should not exist. If we do our job right and garner the support of millions around the country and globe, there won't be a need for Farmlink. The partnership with OOH is our biggest opportunity to get in front of the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people."

For Outfront, the ad campaign made sense since the company focuses on providing media assets to important causes, donating about $10 million in media space to charity and public service announcements annually, Rave said.

"In 2021, we wanted to be more focused with our strategy. We asked our employees what causes meant the most to them and racial and social justice and food insecurity rose to the top," she said. "Our partnership with Farmlink was somewhat serendipitous. Their marketing lead saw the 'So Yummy' content running on our Moments by Outfront platform on our subway screens and reached out to me. Upon early discussions, we discovered how much impact this small Gen-Z run company had made in under a year, over 30M pounds of food saved and repurposed, and were blown away."

In about 14 months, Farmlink grew from a student-led movement to respond to a national crisis to a project focused on driving systemic change, according to Reilly. He said Farmlink wants to move a billion meals to food banks in the next decade.

"The only way we can do this is by hammering home the absurdity that millions of people are going hungry while our country grows enough food to feed everyone in the world twice over," Reilly said. "Aside from our first foray into billboards, we rely on storytelling through short documentary series, partnerships with sustainable companies, and grow our following on social media platforms to generate momentum behind our movement."

Farmlink has delivered more than 35,000 pounds of produce and dairy to foodbanks in the U.S. since the project began more than a year ago.

"The attention, funding, and priority the last year brought towards keeping Americans fed has revolutionized the way American's look at our food industry," Reilly said. "We feel lucky to have played a small part in that."

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