Todd Turner is the chair of the Creative Committee of the OAAA.  Turner is the National Creative Director at Adams+Fairway Outdoor.  Prior to joining Adams in 2004, Turner was a designer at EB Wall and Associates and Moonlight Creative Group.  An example of Turner’s work is this 2015 Best of Show Obie award winning design for Sonic Drive In.

Todd, how did you get involved with out of home advertising?

Before joining Adams, I designed a few OOH ads for a handful of clients. I looked at OOH as a giant print ad with less stuff. Boy, was I wrong. I joined Adams in 2004, and one of the first critiques I got was that my billboard design looked like a print ad. After being exposed to other work Adams had done and the OBIE Awards, I realized OOH most definitely is not a big print ad.

Talk about the creative process for your 2015 Best of Show Sonic design.

I often think about how we can change the visual landscape overnight with OOH. I imagine people on their morning commutes looking around thinking, “Holy crap. Something’s different today.” When I got the creative brief for this project, the colors of Sonic Slushes popped into my head. I wanted to change the landscape into all of these bright colors. From a distance, every billboard would look like a solid color, but as you approached you got a little bit more – the straw, the logo, the flavor. It was so minimal that viewers have to put the puzzle together themselves, and at that point, they’re engaged.

If you could change two or three things about the way the industry approaches creative, what would you change?

I would change the focus from legibility to ideas. The most legible OOH ad isn’t going to do anything unless there’s a compelling, persuasive, original idea behind it. So let’s come up with a great idea that will stick with viewers THEN make sure the execution is legible. Legibility-first thinking is what has turned the OOH landscape into a sea of yellow backgrounds and black typography that are ultimately ineffective.

What creative initiatives is OAAA working on?

We will be putting more resources and focus on local creative. By my estimation, there are over 300 creatives working at OAAA member companies, and they are creating the vast majority of what we see on the streets. So in the next few years, there might be events or groups formed specifically for these in-house creative workers. We’re also retooling some of the OAAA materials to be more idea-first instead of legibility-first.

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