Out-of-home has spent years quietly making its case. Now, with digital formats accelerating, programmatic buying maturing and creative ambition growing to match the scale of the medium, the industry doesn't need to make that case anymore.
Last night at the Outdoor Media Awards, run by Bauer Media Outdoor, Carat came away with two golds and a silver, across Planning Excellence, Creative and Effectiveness, with Kraft Heinz's "Trigger the Taste" taking home the Grand Prix and £150,000 of media space across Bauer Media Outdoor's digital network. The awards marked their 20th anniversary this year, celebrating two decades of standout OOH across the UK.
Trigger the Taste
GRAND PRIX | GOLD: Effectiveness / Brand Building Award | GOLD: Creative - Outstanding Poster Award | Client: Kraft Heinz
In 2025, Heinz faced a challenge it hadn't encountered in a long time. The cost-of-living crisis had turned the brand, embedded in British food culture for 150 years, into a symbol of rising prices.
The creative answer was deliberately stripped back. Close-up, hyper-detailed product shots paired with the iconic Heinz font reimagined around the food that completes the pairing: Chips. Toast. Fries. Bread. No logo. No product name. Just the image and a prompt that trusted people to finish the thought themselves. The campaign rolled out across London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Glasgow and Leeds, with large-format digital sites amplifying the sensory detail and classic 6 sheets building frequency. The Beanz Bus, a full-wrap red London bus, became its own cultural moment and generated significant organic reach on social media.
Kantar research confirmed that taste is the strongest driver of perceived quality for Heinz, which shaped a year-round deployment built in two phases. Phase one was a high-impact national takeover. Phase two was about sustained memory building, with long-term Paper and Digital placements maintaining rhythm week after week, with effectiveness-optimised weekly weighting ensuring every pound worked harder.
Two is Better Than One
SILVER: Planning Excellence - Cross Format Award | Client: VodafoneThree
When Vodafone and Three merged in May 2025, there was a regulatory catch. The two brands couldn't appear together in the same ad. Which, when your entire campaign message is "two networks are better than one," is a fairly significant problem.
The solution was to make OOH do the work. Across roadside, rail and underground environments, the campaign turned a legal constraint into a creative principle. Dual-site formats let the two brands hold a visual conversation without ever sharing the same frame, while iconic placements gave the launch the stature it needed.
The campaign reached a significant proportion of the UK population, with the vast majority of those exposed recognising the VodafoneThree launch. Brand trust surged, and the campaign's core message, that two networks are better than one, landed clearly with Vodafone customers.
Comfort at the Right Moment
FINALIST: Planning Excellence / Programmatic OOH Award | Client: Kraft Heinz
Heinz Soup was entering 2025 with declining sales, a cost-of-living headwind and consumers increasingly questioning whether premium was worth it. The brief was to reverse that trend, and the answer came from regression analysis rather than instinct.
The data showed a clear relationship between temperature and soup sales, with demand rising sharply as the mercury dropped. That insight shaped a programmatic OOH strategy that activated only when conditions matched, serving different creatives at different temperature thresholds to catch people at the precise moment they were most likely to reach for something warm and comforting.
Rather than spreading spend nationally, the team used sales data to identify where Heinz Soup already had strong category share and focused there exclusively. A cold snap at the start of 2025 allowed the campaign to launch ahead of schedule. Post-campaign analysis confirmed the approach contributed to a positive media ROI.
Congratulations to all the teams involved.
If you would like to discuss your out-of-home strategy with a member of the team, get in touch.
