Los Angeles | The Moxy, the Circa, and Sunset Spectacular: We visited LA’s three most iconic DooH screens to capture world-class campaigns by Range Rover, Sony, and other big brands.
Los Angeles is renowned for its movie sets, but the local outdoor advertising scene has always had a cinematic flair of its own – think of the Rock’n’Roll billboards on Sunset Boulevard, for example. But in recent years, the County of LA has transformed its OoH landscape to match consumer’s expectations of larger-than-life experiences. In 2022 and 2021, three of the most iconic DooH canvases in the world went live in here: The Moxy, the adjacent The Circa and the Sunset Spectacular.
The Moxy covers a strip as long as a football field on the Moxy/AC Hotel’s façade, which is located directly across from the LA Convention Center. On the adjacent side of the building complex lies The Circa. This LED jewel is a synchronized trio of screens that collectively outsize its sister screen on the other side.
The third, the Sunset Spectacular, is a freestanding DooH screen on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. It is housed within a sharp, angular structure designed by Tom Wiscombe. The architect, who was involved in building procects like BMW World in Munich, describes it as “a fusion of architecture and media”. Sunset Spectacular is the first of eight DooH landmarks the City of West Hollywood will launch in collaboration with architects and designers of the likes of Wiscombe.
Each of these screens plays brand campaigns that are specifically tailored to its shape, size, and viewing angle. Iconic DooH screens around the world like Seoul’s Coex or London’s Piccadilly Lights have proven in the past decade that brands have embraced these special-format screens to deliver visual narratives they would not be able to convey on any other media.
Current brands to advertise on Hollywood’s greatest DooH are, for example, automotive brands like Range Rover and VW. With the LA Auto Show taking place right now, they leverage the Moxy’s eye-to-eye contact with the LA Convention Center. Sephora has crafted a holiday campaign specifically for the location, and Sony is following up on a series of spectacular DooH campaigns these past two years with an animated masterpiece that turns the screen into a wall of steel breaking apart brick by brick.
The three-part Circa on the other side has attracted big tech with campaigns from giants like Google for Chrome, Apple for Apple Pay, and Meta for the augmented reality glasses by Ray Ban, following up on Mark Zuckerberg’s viral presentation of the product in late August.
Some of the same campaigns also show on the Sunset Spectacular, like the Formula 1 campaign by whisky maker Glenfiddich. The structure of the freestanding screen, characterized by Wiscombe’s sharply towering shapes, gives them an entirely different feel from the huge wrap-around screens of the Moxy and the Circa – less reminiscent of big theater and more of a space ship landing on earth.
All three, however, show how technology, art, and storytelling can converge and together create a new definition of digital-out-of-home advertising.