Hong Kong’s outdoor ads stand firm in the digital era
The city’s ubiquitous billboards are not battling the smartphone for consumer attention, they’re embracing it
From modest bus shelter posters to the giant billboards beside the city’s cross-harbour tunnels, a distinctive element of Hong Kong’s cityscape is its sheer abundance of outdoor advertising. This aesthetic was already so embedded in popular consciousness by the 1980s that it served as the inspiration for the look of a futuristic Los Angeles in Blade Runner, whose grim skyline in 2019 was then imagined to be dominated by vast adverts for the likes of Pan Am and Coca-Cola.
Today, this same outdoor advertising ecosystem might appear to be in danger from the screen-saturated habits of the real 21st century. After all, if Hong Kong’s “smartphone zombie” commuters remain fixated on their screens, not looking up at the ads around them, how can this industry possibly survive?
According to local experts, quite easily, as out-of-home (OOH) advertising is evolving with the times.
Traditional formats of OOH advertising have a strong foundation in Hong Kong. Johnny Ng, vice-president for marketing and growth at WPP Media, specifically credits Hong Kong’s population density for making it one of the world’s most powerful out-of-home cities, with display sites seeing fierce competition.
“It is perfect for media people like me because securing a site means you have constant exposure throughout the day,” Ng explains. “It’s not like you’re in the boonies somewhere where you’ve bought a site that no one’s ever seen.”