The Instagram post that walked out of the phone

Sibuya Urban Sushi Bar runs more than 70 restaurants across Spain and talks to 249,000 people on Instagram. That audience lives on a phone. The restaurant on Santa Engracia 70, in central Madrid, lives on a street full of other places to eat, and needed locals and tourists to pick it over the one next door.

The brief was to break the fourth wall between the two: take the conversation already happening on Instagram and put it in front of the pedestrian, at the moment they decide where to eat, a few minutes from the door.

glooh built the creative. A dynamic template took Sibuya's Instagram posts and rebuilt them for the street screen, keeping the look of the feed: the photo, the @sibuya_es handle, the caption, and the like and comment counts, updated in real time. What people saw on the bus shelter was the post they could find on their phone, with the same numbers.

The screens sat around six key Metro stations and street locations near Santa Engracia 70: JCDecaux bus-shelter screens on the street and platform screens in Metro de Madrid, bought programmatically. The creative only ran during peak hunger hours, so every play landed when a sushi lunch or dinner was a real decision. Digital audio and Sibuya's own social channels ran alongside.

The campaign was delivered with our partners Glocally and Appcelerate.

A restaurant does not need the whole city. It needs the few streets people walk before they choose where to eat, at the hours they choose. Six locations around one address, switched on at hunger hours, is the last mile at its most literal.

The live counts did the persuading. A food photo on a screen is an ad. The same photo with 162 likes on it is a recommendation from strangers, and it reads like the Instagram post it is, because it is one. Nothing was shot for the campaign: the creative was content Sibuya had already published.

VIOOH's programmatic showcase on the campaign reports a 10% increase in sales at Santa Engracia 70 in the first week of activation, and a 5% uplift in the weeks that followed. These are observed figures for one restaurant, not a controlled test.