New app opens door to the digital world for outdoor advertising

Vooh! is the attention-grabbing name for the new innovation that has now been launched by Ströer, Germany's largest outdoor advertising company: an app which links up conventional out-of-home advertising campaigns with attractive online content. Vooh! stands for "Virtual Out-of-Home" and turns outdoor posters into interactive playgrounds for advertisers by means of the most commonly used mobile device of the moment - people's smartphones.

Vooh! starts the smartphone's camera function independently and consumers take a photo of the poster with their device. Then, software recognizes the image and connects it to exciting content from the mobile web, such as directions to customer branches, competitions, short moving-image ads or even elements from augmented reality. The content is determined by the advertisers themselves.

"Vooh! can take you anywhere in the internet! This app really does open new doors. Customers can enter into direct interaction with their consumers - wherever those consumers are", says Christian von den Brincken, Managing Director for marketing and strategy at Ströer Sales & Service GmbH.

The new application for iPhones and Android smartphones has been available free of charge since last night. To celebrate the launch, Ströer Marketing used today's opening of the "PlakaDiva" conference in Düsseldorf to show the industry a real innovation. The conference's poster image became a presentation space: with the new app, photographing the poster led directly to Ströer Group's contact form - a mini-guerilla campaign which made sense to many right away. The cellphone providers e-Plus have secured exclusive cooperation for their upcoming campaigns.


The digital extension of outdoor advertising campaigns using Vooh! also works independently of the type of out-of-home media employed by the customer: no matter whether that's posters, transportation advertising or digital out-of-home media. The image recognition developed by Ströer in cooperation with the Berlin-based systems company Prisma works reliably and can be used with any type of media from conventional advertising columns to out-of-home channels.