Barnaby Page's SCREENS.tv Digital Signage Blog

Digital signage 101 (0 comments)

Have you ever tried to explain the digital out-of-home sector to an outsider? There are so many variables – revenue model, network ownership, venue type, content type – that sometimes it’s tough to summarise the options. That’s one reason I recommend you take a look at Steve Gurley’s article published today on SCREENS.tv. It’s the first in a series where industry insiders will share their views on what makes this business tick (or doesn’t, sometimes), and Steve does an admirable job of classifying the diverse networks out there into a few, easily-comprehended groups.

Enough already (0 comments)

Doing no evil? (0 comments)

Laurence Green, chairman of the advertising agency Fallon, has some great points to make in London’s Telegraph about what we might call the mainstreaming of digital – the way in which the planning and buying of bytes, activities once hived off into specialist subsidiaries with self-consciously funky names and faux-Googlish chill-zone workplaces, are being absorbed back into the parent agencies where the long-term strategic decisions are made and the serious budgets are allocated.

The piece is worth reading; find it here.

I will take issue with his opening point, though: yet another appearance of the Minority Report fallacy.

Perhaps the constant comparison of digital out-of-home media to the screens that harangue Tom Cruise in that entertaining-enough-but-not-really-terribly-good movie is only irritating to those of us in the sector who see the reference so often. I suppose that for many general readers, our hundredth encounter with the allusion is their first.

What deserves more serious repudiation is Green’s suggestion that digital billboards currently being trialled in Tokyo, which (like a number of DOOH audience-analysis technologies) guess at the age and gender of passers-by, are the thin end of a wedge: that there would be something objectionable about using this data not just to learn about a location’s foot traffic but to target individual ads. “Perhaps only ethics, rather than technology, stand in the way,” he warns.
 
If so, they are misplaced ethical worries. In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person’s gender and age group are clear for anyone else to see, without cameras or software. They are no more private information than the time of day, or the weather, or the mix of businesses on the street where that person is walking – all information that can and indeed should be used to ensure that DOOH ads reach the right audience.
 
Of course, there is scope for concern about what comes next. It is not difficult to imagine technology much more like the movie’s which would, for example, enable a digital billboard to recognise RFID-enabled loyalty cards, or mobile handsets, and serve ads aimed at specific, identified individuals rather than generic demographic types.

That’s an unsavoury prospect not only for consumers, whose tastes and habits would be implicitly exposed for all to see, but also for brands and the advertising sector, which would be collectively tarnished by such irresponsible use of recognition technology.
 
It’s just about conceivable that a careful company might pull it off on an opt-in basis, though it’s frankly difficult to see what advantages out-of-home with such hyper-precise targeting would offer over mobile: one of the strengths of the OOH medium, the ability to reach everyone in a given place at a given time, would be thrown away.
 
But in any case, that kind of application is not just a little, incremental move onward from today’s demographic guesstimates. It is several large, and obstacle-strewn, steps of development away.

For now, it is not as if this medium is doing anything remotely novel in matching ads to demographics. Print publishers and broadcasters do it with audience and readership research, online media owners do it with techniques that are sometimes significantly more Minority Reportesque than what’s actually taking place in Tokyo. Indeed, The Telegraph – which published Green’s opinion piece – runs ads served by Google, and it’s in that direction that anyone worried about the erosion of privacy by marketers should be looking.

Selling online, in-store (0 comments)

“Can’t find the size or color you need?” asks the loudspeaker in a Kohl’s department store in Brookfield, Wisconsin. The answer is just a click away, the voice advises, directing shoppers to a kiosk where they can order whatever they need and have it shipped home for free.

Read more of this fascinating story here.
 

In praise of tickers (0 comments)

Okay, not praise, exactly: but the headline took you by surprise, didn’t it?

Tickers – those horizontally-scrolling lines of text so often found at the bottom (or, less felicitously, the top or side) of digital-signage screen layouts, usually carrying news, sports scores and the like – have been getting a hard time lately.

Long sniggered-at by many as the sure indication of an amateur designer seduced by what’s possible to the extent that they forget what looks good, tickers suffered the indignity of being singled out by blogger David Weinfeld at Lost Remote for a whole 24 hours of mass opprobrium: the Ticker Free Day, scheduled for last Friday.

They have within the digital out-of-home business much the same image as the Marquee and Blink HTML tags did in the early days of Web design – the former of those indeed producing a ticker effect.

Incidentally, I have no idea how many tickers were actually switched off in response to Weinfeld’s plea: certainly not those on the Dutch ferry Stena Britannica, where I spent most of the day. But then Stena Line’s enthusiasm for onboard digital signage has unfortunately never been matched by its design savvy.

I digress. The points are: why do tickers provoke both such enthusiasm among some designers, and such dislike among some viewers in the DOOH business? (I know of no research suggesting that consumers have any anti-ticker stance; audio and, to a lesser extent, moving video are the elements of digital signage much more likely to annoy the public at large, it seems.)

And, are there any circumstances where tickers are the right solution to a design challenge?

The enthusiasm, I think, is easy to understand if not to share. Think back to the Marquee tag: it was a very simple way to add motion to your Web pages without resorting to real programming. And so it is with tickers and digital signage. Despite vast advances in user-friendly technology since the nascence of the Web in the mid-1990s, such as video-capable mobile handsets, it is still tough for the non-professional or the budgetarily-challenged to produce or procure good video or animation.

So, feeling that a screen without motion and without the latest news is an opportunity wasted, some less thoughtful designers turn to the ticker.

Why, then, the dislike? A small element of it (as with the Marquee tag) is snobbishness: tickers are easy to implement, and found in many bad designs, therefore they must be bad themselves, runs the false syllogism. More cogent reasons are that tickers simply distract from the main content of the screen – it’s well-established that the human brain can’t resist glancing at motion – and can clash, visually, with the pace and direction of other moving content such as video.

But the best reason to dislike tickers is, oddly, one less often spoken of, although Dave Haynes discusses it well over at DailyDOOH. It’s not their ubiquity or their motion that’s a problem: it’s that so often they are used to bring news headlines to completely inappropriate screens. And what that tells us is that the designer hasn’t sat back and thought about the purpose of his digital sign.

News tickers are great, in news contexts. You watch a screen displaying CNN or the BBC because you want to know what’s happening in the world, yet the report currently occupying the main part of the screen may not be one that greatly interests you: the ticker plays a vital role here, giving you all the main news stories in a quickly-digestible format, so your time at the screen isn’t wasted and – importantly – you know whether to stick around and wait for the main report to turn to the story that does compel.

But in other situations, they rarely help. You don’t want or need a news ticker on a screen showing cookery segments, any more than you read a food magazine for analysis of current events. (Just possibly, a ticker giving six-or-fewer-word tips – “Never salt pickled kumquats” – might make a useful contribution.)

Let’s not get fixated on tickers as such, then, and by all means let’s use them when we’re showing the news. But equally, let’s remember that just because we can add them to other kinds of programming doesn’t mean we have to.

The long view: from Caxton to Cat 5 (0 comments)

Amid the bustle of product launches and network rollouts and ever-multiplying alliances, it’s easy to forget the big picture: where does DOOH stand, in terms of its own development as a medium, and in terms of the broader evolution of media from analogue to digital?

Some interesting ideas come from Barry Sayer, CEO of South Africa’s Continental Outdoor, who – speaking at the recent FEPE event in Beirut – suggested that the death of out-of-home has been frequently predicted, and always wrongly.

For example, says Sayer, when London gained its first underground trains in the latter part of the 19th century, it was feared that the disappearance of commuters into the bowels of the earth would render them impossible to reach with commercial messages. Instead, of course, a new advertising location developed, today a significant one: the subway.

I will take exception to Sayer’s comment that Caxton’s introduction of the printing press to England “heralded the instant demise of the billboard” because “advertisements were to be placed among authoritative editorial copy of respected newspapers...surely, the newspaper would command the commercial attention of the populace to the detriment of the billboard”.

For a start, when Caxton changed the English-speaking world in the late 15th century, newspapers of any form were still a long way in the future. And in any case, there really wasn’t any advertising in the modern sense back then; just a bit of POS, much of it non-verbal.

But the article’s worth a read. Check it out here.
 

Ticked off (0 comments)

“Tickers, like weather modules, are an enemy of the digital-signage industry. Used in moderation, and within the right environments, these elements can function well within a defined programming package. More often than not, however, tickers are used and abused across a range of digital-signage networks.” Fighting talk from David Weinfeld at Lost Remote...

Has King Content been deposed from TV’s throne? (0 comments)

Technology is king. Content ownership may be competitive advantage, but it is a bad business model. That sound of static white noise on a broadcast channel has been replaced by the silent, but absolute and inevitable, destruction of the traditional media business and profit model. Cisco predicts that by 2013 90% of all Web traffic will be generated by video, and it is unlikely that broadcasters will ever make more money from their content than they did in the peak year of 2008, writes Tod Sacerdoti in MediaPost. Read the excellent full article here.

FEPE in Beirut (0 comments)

James Bicknell at BackLite Media in Dubai has sent me the following report on the recent congress held by FEPE, the federation of outdoor-advertising companies, in Beirut. It was written by FEPE's VP John Ellery.

170 delegates from 29 countries have just returned home from a most excellent 51st FEPE congress.

Ziad Baroud, the Minister of the Interior and Municipalities of Lebanon opened our Congress, and welcomed all the delegates to Beirut.

Watts Wacker, a well known futurist from the USA provided a key note presentation with a review of how technology has affected us all and what impact this has had on our relationships and the environment. Looking ahead he can see some positive signs for our medium as we develop with digital solutions and how there will be more green elements playing key roles.

Barry Sayer analyzed “Is the Billboard dead” and concluded that it is very much alive, particularly with Digital and Green awareness growing.

Francois de Gaspe Beaubien from ZOOM Media ‐ Canada gave us an excellent and in depth view of the trends that our competitive media have been experiencing around the World ‐ and concluded that OOH is in a very good position to grow as press and TV audiences decline . OOH is the second fastest growing medium to the Internet.

Lorna Tilbian from Numis Corporation UK provided us with a very thorough insight into the financial trends of the major companies in the Advertising medium. This set the scene for how lessons have been learnt from the previous market downturns.

Rachel Bristow – Unilever, and Stuart Williams – Sony Pictures represented two clients that spend sizable sums of money in OOH. In addition to confirming the value of OOH they pointed out we still have areas in which to improve, increased flexibility being one, and a greater awareness of the need for Green initiatives another.

Some excellent work for Fiat from Maxus MC2 in Italy was described by Massimo de Cesare, and the delegates enjoyed seeing the very creative way that our medium has, and is being used by Fiat.

Annie Rickard from Posterscope treated us to a review of how the medium is developing and how we need to work together, and with other media, to grow OOH. We are now selling audience – not just panels.

Steve Ridley Kinetic‘s new Global CEO encouraged us to view OOH from a fresh, new and different perspective.

Luigi Errico ‐ a specialist in Italy, Fosbury, expressed the need for us to continually strive to improve the quality of displays for our clients. Quantity is not the answer.

We were fortunate to have 3 key local speakers from the MENA countries ‐ Roy Haddad from JWT, Edouard Monin from Ipsos and Eli Khoury ‐ M+C Saatchi shared some very interesting facts and examples regarding OOH in the markets in the Middle East and North Africa region.

The medium is establishing itself and is proving a valuable communication channel. From FEPE ‐ Eric Marotel ‐ CEMUSA shared with us the very interesting history of the Street Furniture contract in New York. Karl Javurek – GEWISTA presented many innovative solutions that the OOH industry is now providing. John Ellery gave brief overview of developments in the Transport Advertising field, and with Florian Waltz summarized a new project – WIKIOOH – where we hope to provide Industry information for as many markets as possible ‐ Worldwide.

Christian Kauter explained how the “spoof” advertiser Ali Kebab became famous in Switzerland, and resulted in proving how effective our medium really is.

In a similar vein Antonio Vincenti showed some great work that our hosts – Pikasso had worked on ‐ with “Win the Yellow”. Again this initiative generated much interest and awareness in the OOH sector locally. A neat exhibition area with 6 exhibitors provided a focal point for delegates to gather and network.

We thank Ayuda Media Systems ‐ Daktronics ‐ Formetco ‐ Hewlett‐Packard ‐ Open Scrolling and Prismaflex for their involvement and support. Each exhibitor had a 15 minute opportunity within the program to share a new development with the delegates.

The social program was not to be missed and we enjoyed visits to Byblos, and Baalbeck with plenty of history to absorb. Lastly the hospitality we enjoyed in Lebanon was top class ‐ good food ‐ good wine and a very friendly welcome.

Our President ‐ Christian Kauter summed up the 51st Congress by commenting that this has been one of the best FEPE meetings for some long time. We are entering a Golden age for OOH. We need to increase our co‐operation with our clients, promote our medium by selling audience not panels ‐ the importance of digital is growing ‐ now it accounts for 1.5% of sales and is growing. As an Industry we need to produce guidelines for operators and Authorities to indicate what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Christian stated that Spain will be the location for our 2011 Congress, and lastly thanked Lidija and her team, and particularly Antonio and his whole team at Pikasso for providing such a well organized and effective Congress for us all to enjoy.

Not to be sniffed at (0 comments)

A trio of interesting pieces this week that don't directly relate to digital out-of-home but all cast some light – or in one case, some salivation-inducing aromas – on the increasingly tricky business of guessing where media businesses can profitably head next.  

The term TV doesn't really apply any more, we read in The Death of TV And The Rise Of Digital Broadcast. In the "olden days" of the media business, TV referred to broadcast on network television.  That expanded to include cable, and most recently it expanded even further to encompass online video when said video existed as an extension of network or cable programming on sites like Hulu.  These days media buyers are looking at mobile video, digital out-of-home and numerous other aspects of video as extensions of "TV," so how do you plan accordingly?

Plus, take a look at Slick ad campaigns now are affordable to small firms, and if you thought there were limits to advertisers’ sometimes desperate quest for novelty, check out this steak-scented billboard.

What Wal-Mart might do next (0 comments)

It’s 9:17 PM and customers in a Boston grocery store are wrapping up their shopping when some Blackberries and iPhones start vibrating the news of a key sports loss of the beloved local Red Sox against the rival New York Yankees. As frowns appear from frozen foods to the AAA battery endcap displays, all of the digital signs start flashing out messages of condolence, suggesting that shoppers commiserate with a case of Sam Adams. “We’ll get ‘em next time,” the sympathetic store displays digitally declare.

Just a taster of a terrific piece on Wal-Mart TV (don’t hear much about that network these days, though it once dominated discussions of supermarket digital signage...) from CBS. Read the full story here.
 

What’s wrong with supermarket design? (0 comments)

“Supermarkets often look old-fashioned – laid out with long, narrow aisles, accompanied by old-fashioned signage, lighting, and merchandising. Consumers hurry in and out of these stores as fast as they can.” And the solution? Check out the first of this week’s recommended reads...

• Redesigning Supermarkets to Better Engage Shoppers
• How Omni-Channel Retailing is Affecting In-Store Publishing (the short version: you need enterprise-wide information management to ensure all your in-store messaging is co-ordinated)
• TV in the aisles: Metro’s recipe kiosks
• James Cameron: “3D Will Replace 2D in Less Than 25 Years” (that long?)
• Intel Combines Vending Machine, Digital Signage (another next-gen product on trial in Japan)

The truth is out there...well, some good articles, anyway (0 comments)

With Screen Media Expo Europe over for another year it’s time to catch up on reading. So here, in no particular order, is the good stuff I’ve seen on the Web over the last few weeks – ranging from some weird applications of DOOH, to some cutting-edge (and bursting-edge) billboard technologies, to the latest tactics of retailers big and little. Read and enjoy; there will not be a test.

• “Facebook advertising is the new dotcom myth”
• Britain’s election hinged on outdoor, not digital, says The Guardian
• And The Wall Street Journal agrees
• Glare-reducing screen coating based on moths’ eyes
• British agencies on the future of outdoor
• Tips on digital-signage content from Tim Harvey of Dynamax (if you saw his presentation at Screen Media Expo Europe, you’ll know how widely Tim has thought about this)
• Adweek’s OOH Hot List 2010
• How brands prop up economies
• Light pollution defined; good to see a bit of factual detail on this emotive subject
• Looks like Karachi billboards won’t be going digital any time soon...
• IBM’s colour-sensitive LED billboard
• Interactive bubble wrap
• The pros and cons of DOOH, from Asia Media Journal (nice to see some honesty about the cons)
• Another reason why rear-window ads are a really bad idea
• Weird DOOH ads 1: the garage sale
• Weird DOOH ads 2: the marriage proposal
• UK retailers push for premium fittings  – certainly there’s a vested interest at work in encouraging this idea, but it’s an interesting take on the downturn
• OOH’s poor return on equity
• Does Costco belong in New York City?

Screen Media Expo: one more date for your diary (0 comments)

News just in of another presentation which could be worth popping into at Screen Media Expo Europe this week.

On 5 May at 2:30pm, in Theatre 3, Ian Collis – marketing director for EMEA with Harris Broadcast Communications – will talk on “critical success factors for developing and managing a network”. And if you think that sounds like six thousand other digital-signage presentations you’ve heard over the years, it may be worth thinking again, because Collis has a potentially interesting angle here.

Harris, of course, is huge in broadcasting. And what I reckon will be worth hearing are Collis’s “examples of where we have leveraged expertise from other industries to support the ongoing investment in digital signage” and “insights from our broadcast experience”.

Too often we think of DOOH as living in a little box all on its own; in reality, it’s a confluence of technologies and media categories also employed elsewhere, and we have a lot to learn from these other sectors.

There’s a handy page linking to all the Expo seminar programmes here.

 

What to DOOH in London: more free stuff, 6 May (0 comments)

Screen Media Expo Europe is nearly upon us – the two-day event at Earls Court kicks off next Wednesday – so it’s time to firm up plans for the learning programme. This year’s series of presentations and seminars is the busiest Screen Media Expo has ever had, so it’s very much a question of figuring out what can be reluctantly skipped rather than what can fill the time.

Having said that, the second day is a lot quieter than the first, with the theatres winding up around lunchtime (although the Expo itself remains open until 4pm).  So – following on from last week’s look at day one – here are my picks for 6 May.

Start the day in Theatre 2, where the theme is integration of DOOH with mobile. A 9:30am presentation from Kelly Moulton, marketing VP at Never.no, looks interesting primarily because of the range of case studies, including convenience stores, an arena, car sales and public transportation.

Then it’s over to Theatre 1 for a series of sessions on the very newest technologies, where they’re going and what they hold for DOOH. At 10:30am Ivan Franco, R&D director for YDreams, talks on augmented reality; at 11am it’s Mike Fisher, a consultant with Futuresource, on 3D.

And for the final session of the morning, it’s back to augmented reality again, but this time with Eric Gehl – CTO of Total Immersion – looking at how the tech’s been used for real campaigns, including one for a movie and another, less predictably, for an optician. See you there.

What to DOOH in London: free stuff, 5 May (0 comments)

I’ve been planning what to attend in the learning programme at Screen Media Expo Europe a couple of weeks hence, and here are my picks of the free stuff from the first day, 5 May.

Of course, the one certainty is that the sequence of seminars I end up at will be completely different – shows are like that, especially when there’s someone you’ve just got to meet who can only make it at 12:48:37.

But it does pay to plan, if only because when you’re actually at the event, you probably won’t have time to read the programmes in full. And this year some of the more interesting material is hiding behind rather mundane headings.

So: I’ll kick off the day in Theatre 4, aimed at brands, agencies and media owners. Here at 9:30am Brian Dusho, president of BroadSign, speaks on why real ad dollars are not in digital out-of-home (yet): obstacles to going mainstream. At last, a conference keynote that’s not just boosterism. This bodes well.

At 10:30am, it’s over to Theatre 1, to hear media consultant Ivan Clark discuss what can digital-signage networks do to grab a greater share of marketing budgets? This looks like a natural follow-on from Brian Dusho’s keynote: understanding the barriers that stand between the digital out-of-home network and the agency’s media plan. But I wonder if Ivan will be talking about marketing budgets – promotional funds – as well as straight advertising. I hope so.

Come 11am, I’m staying in Theatre 1 to hear another consultant – John Jefferson – talk on out-of-home screens and the “So What?” test. Not only can I not resist the title: this speaker also promises to look at local broadcasting for clues to successful narrowcasting. Out-of-home is hyper-local by its nature, and we should be paying more attention to what we can learn from established local media, which are generally smarter business operations than a lot of people realise.

11:30am sees me in Theatre 3, the nitty-gritty one devoted to “the mechanisms, operations, processes, products and services required to deliver and manage screen-media networks”. You can probably learn how to change a fuse here, but I’m going to hear Tim Harvey of Dynamax talk about integrating third-party data with your  content, and then come back at 1:30pm for Kevin Williams of KWP on how out-of-home can use the techniques of digital entertainment to engage customers.

Finally, at 3pm, it’s over to content-themed Theatre 2 for a couple of intriguing alternative takes on DOOH: Nicky Fleming from the Royal National Institute of Blind People on what we need to do to engage with the large chunk of the population that can’t see perfectly, and then, at 3:30pm, Andrea Clemente and Giorgio Olivero from ToDo with another look at interaction, this time casting the net wide to include issues like user-generated content, and digital signage’s role in public art.

That’s my schedule (maybe). What’s yours?

The car in front is a digital billboard (0 comments)

One for the Nice Try Dept.: Rear Window Media, based in Minneapolis and now moving into the Texan market, is trying to persuade drivers and fleet managers to put GPS-equipped screens in the...

...yes, you got it, in the rear windows of their vehicles, to broadcast advertising to the driver behind. It’s selling ads and offering private networks too.

Says president Jessica Netter: “As the topic of distraction on roadways continues to heat up, [Rear Window Media] is helping to remind drivers to drive safely and keep their eyes on the road by displaying messages on the rear of vehicles vs. other forms of outdoor advertising that are located away from the road.”

Right.
 

In-store, more is more (0 comments)

What's the secret of effective in-store marketing? Good ideas, according to Procter & Gamble's global design officer Phil Duncan. Not only are they more effective, but retailers – increasingly keen to avoid clutter in their aisles – will give them more space, he says. “We're really asking our communications agencies to vet [their] idea first in store, because that often can be the most challenging environment for us to communicate that idea,” says Duncan.

Read more about P&G's rethink of packaging and in-store marketing in this terrific article from Advertising Age.

Also on this week's reading list: a pretty good summary of both sides' positions in the great digital-billboard debate (from a cars-and-driving blog, and why not?), a report from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on how CompUSA is making use of all those widescreen TVs sitting around waiting to be bought, and the Retail Systems Research take on augmented reality.

What to DOOH in London (0 comments)

The line-up of speakers, seminars, conferences, briefings, theatres, tours – and probably full-blown operatic productions too – at this year’s Screen Media Expo Europe in London is almost too much to take in. But I’ve started planning what to attend, so here are what I expect to be some highlights of the two heavyweight conferences at the event.

The Strategy Institute’s European Digital Signage Strategies Forum runs 4-5 May – that is, the day before the Expo and then the first day of the show itself. It’s unusual in focusing on non-advertising end users of digital signage; among the most interesting should be a trio of speakers from higher education, one from the BI Norwegian School of Management and two from the University of Bedfordshire here in the UK.

Why? Well, at the risk of being insular, nearly all the higher-ed installs we hear about are in North America and they’re often very campus-security oriented. Understanding how European institutions with their much smaller student populations, and correspondingly less sprawly sites, use digital signage should generate some new ideas.

I’m also looking forward to hearing the speaker from the Newseum, a museum of the news business in Washington, DC, not just because it’s a facility I’ve long wanted to visit but because museums are a huge and still largely untapped market for this sector.

There’s a full agenda for the Digital Signage Strategies Forum here.

Then, on 6 May – the second day of the Expo proper – there’s the DOOH Media Summit, which takes the opposite tack and looks at our medium as an advertising vehicle. Nearly every session here is going to be a must-see, I suspect, but I’m especially keen on these four:

The North Face and Canditv talking about DOOH-mobile integration. It’s one of the most important avenues for development of this medium but we nearly always hear about it in gee-whiz terms: let’s see what a real brand has to say about real executions.

An exec from Camelot, the UK’s National Lottery operator, on “what clients want from digital out-of-home” – set to ruffle a few feathers?

Tom Goddard, executive chairman of British DOOH sales house Digicom, on pricing trends. Real numbers, please...

And finally Yasmina Siadatan, new business development manager at Amscreen, is likely to provoke “lively discussion”. Sir Alan Sugar’s businesses have historically not been good at talking to the rest of the world so this is a promising opportunity to find out what they’re thinking at Amscreen – which, love it or hate it, has managed to persuade some very serious brands to adopt DOOH.

The full agenda for the DOOH Media Summit is here, and of course there are – besides these two conferences – also free-to-enter events going on throughout Screen Media Expo.
 

You know this business has really arrived when... (0 comments)

...The Huffington Post gets all cynical about us.

A digital signage conference for the rest of us? (2 comments)

We’ve had digital out-of-home conferences for investors, conferences for retailers, conferences for advertisers, probably conferences for the guys who screw the screens to the wall. (Don’t knock it. It’s an important job.)

But could the Strategy Institute’s May event running alongside Screen Media Expo Europe be the first “digital signage conference for the rest of us”?

The Strategy Institute’s always assembled a worthwhile line-up of speakers for its U.S. conferences (even if they are occasionally afflicted by a touch of usual-suspectitis – something that doesn’t look like being an issue with this European event).

But what’s unusual about this one is the strong emphasis on digital out-of-home applications that aren’t necessarily advertising-driven, or even promotional in a purely commercial sense. Applications under scrutiny will include healthcare, convention and cultural centres, a university and a bank.

If you haven’t read our story yet, or seen the conference Website, check ’em out.

Facebook for the inner grown-up (0 comments)

This week sees the debut of our content on LinkedIn.com, where we’re partnering with Screen Media Expo Europe to bring you regular headlines and debate on all things digital out-of-home.

The Screen Media Expo Europe (Digital Signage & DOOH) group is already up and running, providing the inside track on what’s new at Europe’s premier DOOH event, as well as some lively discussions on subjects ranging from multitouch technology to the pros and cons of full HD.

If you’re already on LinkedIn, come and join the group – and if you’re not, why not join the site? It’s free, and it’s kind of like Facebook without those irritating farms and vampires.

From DiFranza to Dubya: more stuff to shock and awe (0 comments)

“All content goes mobile. News media that survive will move to the subscription model, in whole or in part. Connecting remote data to people and things in real time will lead to a series of exciting new devices and applications.” Heard it all before? Well, the predictions of Strategic News Service CEO Mark Anderson may have a touch of the...um, predictable about them at times, but they're worth checking out if only for the way they locate digital out-of-home developments in broader technological, business and social shifts.

(Too late for predictions, you say? Au contraire; just be glad we held back from bringing them to you at the end of last year, when – as every December – it was impossible to fight your way through the Web or the newspaper for all the retrospectives and forecasts.)

“From bad economies spring new media channels,” writes Mike DiFranza of Captivate Network and OVAB on FT.com. (You'll have to register. But surely you can't wait to know why the bad news is good...)

NEC's viewer-recognition technology is now “pretty good at getting within ten years of a consumer’s age”, according to the StorefrontBacktalk blog, although the firm expects to find it harder outside Japan, where physical traits are more uniform than in much of the world.

“The ability to use video billboards as a broadcast platform is transforming the way marketers look at Clear Channel Outdoor,” says John Partilla, executive VP and president of global media sales at the firm. Among those embracing the medium – and taking advantage of Clear Channel's range of other media too – are movie companies including Disney, Fox, Lionsgate Entertainment, Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers.

Yeah, it's a press release, but it's one with an unusually large implication: that instead of nibbling at the edges of big brands' ad budgets, as it so far does in most sectors, DOOH is ideally positioned to take a large bite out of the film industry's.

And just in case you doubted the power of (non-digital) outdoor: “A single billboard in rural Minnesota with the words 'Miss Me Yet' and a photo of President Bush was enough to start a national conversation,” reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Selling the value of digital signage (0 comments)

Digital-signage vendors: stop talking up features, and focus on the business value your customers really need. That’s the message of Steve Hemmings, owner of Realpoint Consulting here in the UK and a veteran of Cisco, Lucent, and VeriSign, who’s given us this interesting take on the digital-signage business from a seller’s point of view.

Steve writes:

When I made the move from selling core network infrastructure into the world of digital media, within the first 12 months I wondered what on earth I had done.  The sales calls were certainly more interesting; I talked about how much more effective rich media was in grabbing people’s attention, and how it was going to revolutionise communications in both consumer and corporate markets.  However, I’d stepped into an industry where customer acceptance was low, good content was thin on the ground, ROI models were nonexistent, security was questionable, and workflow awkward.

How things have changed!  Having now spent the best part of the last decade in digital media, the tide has turned and one of the markets that’s seen a huge take-up is digital signage. In all of its guises, digital signage has become an accepted channel of communication in both consumer and corporate markets. As this market moves forward we’ll experience new and exciting products and technologies as suppliers and services providers race to capture our attention and market share; innovate ways of doing things as we strive to create new market opportunities, improve systems and efficiencies, etc.

We’ve moved beyond the technology sales approach when dealing with customers, I see some really sensible business and technology applications being made.   For example, you don’t often see a media channel nowadays without some sort of measurement software being applied.  There are also some great content-creation tools available to support screens, and smart camera technology is helping screens in retail and transport businesses apply more effective business models.

One area that I have a particular interest in is the concept of ‘three-screen’ applications, where digital content is ingested only once but delivered and played out or consumed by many different ‘screens’ (TV, PC/plasma/LCD, mobile).  In the case of retail it’s been called ‘four-screen’ by adding ‘in-store’ as the fourth element.  In principle the technology is available today. However, further development is needed before we see really good ‘three-or-four-screen’ campaigns.

Not all is perfect however, and there are big issues the industry needs to tackle.  Industry associations are playing their part in helping with some of this, particularly around advocacy and standards.

However, as the market gathers pace it inevitably attracts lots of new entrants, which in itself is good.  But, when markets generate a lot of similar products and services the laws of supply and demand start to apply.  Where there’s a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people with similar jobs, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things with similar prices and similar quality, some suppliers will find it very difficult to compete.  As management guru Tom Peters observed in 2000, commoditisation is one of the biggest threats facing businesses.  Factors such as tougher competition, declining product differentiation and the rapid increase in exports from developing economies all make it harder for suppliers to differentiate themselves and withstand price pressures.

Strategic procurement practices also play their part and present particular problems for suppliers who sell on brand and reputation, have expensive infrastructure, and broad capabilities. 

To compete effectively in tough markets you need to create differentiation and build a genuine perception of uniqueness with your customers.  Engage with customers in a different way and use relationship strategies to construct and articulate truly differentiated value propositions.  Customers demand more than product or service from their supplier relationships, they seek value through consultative and problem-solving skills, with need-based conversations instead of sales pitches, and often a long-term relationship. 

The process of creating value for a single customer involves the whole of your organisation and covers not only products and services but your total capability.  It goes beyond the service level agreement and contract and is manifest in the way people from both sides in the relationship interact and deal with each other.

For example, when you are proposing a solution you will most likely provide clear financial benefit which is immediately recognisable and can be determined by your superior products and/or services.  Your proposal will highlight your expertise and knowledge, brand and company values (although difficult to quantify, they will have perceived value in your customer’s mind).

However, the most difficult value to put your finger on, and yet probably the most powerful, is the experience your customer gets when they deal with you.  By building great relationships from the very beginning at all levels you will gain access to people and information that is vital to you.  Once you start to sell business value (financial benefits and helping customers achieve their business plan this year and next), and then enterprise or organisational value (by building the customer’s forward strategy), you are really talking about the future and differentiating yourself.

Commoditisation is already affecting parts of the digital signage market.  I know that even complex solutions include a high element of commodity value, but to stay out of the commodity trap and see value pricing coming through, you need to sell your whole capability and focus on the relationship. 

In the days when I started selling digital media solutions it was mostly about the technology, a little about how it would help the business, and precious little about metrics.  Today, I’m pleased to say that we’re talking much more about the business end: integrating messages and experiences, improving ingest and workflow, targeting and metrics, etc.

The sales process with digital signage is complex and companies are looking to make the conversations between their sales people and customers more meaningful.  Even in a dynamic and exciting market like digital signage, the highly individualised and personal skills of communications, questioning, influencing, and nurturing are very important.  The relationship between seller and buyer is still the most significant contributing factor to winning or losing the sale.  

Expo: at last, an end to self-serving presentations? (0 comments)

The call is out for presentation proposals for Screenmedia Expo Europe in May, and it looks like Chris Heap at Imperative Group – organising this year’s speaker programme – has his sights set on an impressive package.

Chris writes:

Each programme/track contains a set of rhetorical questions. They are in effect hypotheses, although not quite so rigid. These represent in our view key areas of interest that these programmes can and should explore as part of its response to the DOOH/digital signage marketplace.
 
We expect companies who are selected to speak to specifically answer several of those questions as part of their presentation, thus ensuring that we challenge the speakers to create new and exciting material to provide the audience with the highest possible value.
 
In short, we are looking for new, innovative, well-conceived and bespoke content presented by high-calibre thinkers/doers. By virtue of this process, we intend to filter out overt sales pitches and repetitious presentations to improve the overall quality of the conference programme for delegates.

A bit different from (pretty much) every other generalist DOOH event we’ve been to, then...

These are the tracks, or channels, as Chris calls them:

Day 1 (5 May)
Channel 1: Screen Science – The marketing, media and commercial value strand.
Channel 2: On Screen – The content strategy, creation, delivery and development strand.
Channel 3: Screen Feed – The mechanisms, operations, processes, products and services required to deliver and manage screen media networks.
 
Day 2 (6 May)
Channel 1: Futurology – A practical look into the technologies, approaches and methods that will shape the screen media and OOH markets in the coming years.
Channel 2: The Smallest Screen – The influence of mobile handsets, how they will change the game tomorrow and how we prepare.
Channel 3: The Green Standard – This channel examines the long-term ecological benefits of digital media and how to reconcile the benefit of pixels over paper.

If you’re interested in proposing a presentation (and not just beating your own drum) contact Chris as chris dot heap at imperativegroup dot com. He’s asking for a one-page summary addressing the following bullet points:

• Which programme/track you are proposing to speak in.
• Which questions you propose to tackle within that programme/track and how you intend to answer them.
• The title of your presentation.
• Presentation chapter headers.
• Case or research studies you plan to use.
• Information you plan to disseminate (facts/figures etc.).
• Learning outcomes for delegates.
• Why the Expo organisers should consider your presentation.
• Your contact details.

Monopoly, moose and other recommended reading (0 comments)

I’ll spare you my 2010 predictions in this new year post, largely because I’ve already made them. Instead, a few pointers to some post-holiday reading.

Peter Kirwin at Wired has an interesting riff on what happens “when advertising slips the moorings that have traditionally bound it to Big Media”, taking in Monopoly, Coco Pops, Rupert Murdoch, and the bright future of outdoor.

Digital-signage vendor Noventri has what it cutely (perhaps too cutely, considering what follows) terms an “off-white paper” entitled Don’t Be Duped – The Truth Behind Digital Signage. The truth, unsurprisingly, seems to be that the world would be a better place if more people bought stuff from Noventri... but there are some good points here, so just sprinkle a pinch of salt on your screen before checking it out. (For some of you, there’s probably an iSalt app to do just that.)

Don’t believe all that you read about those sweet, gentle Canadians, always ready to help a moose across the road. (I used to be one – a Canadian, that is – so I’m allowed to make the moose jokes, okay?) The war against creeping outdoor advertising in Toronto has been one of North America’s most bitterly fought, and there’s a good – if not non-partisan – account of it here.

Finally, while we’re speaking of moose-helpers, a nod to my colleague Dave Haynes’s new(ish) blog, Buzz, Not Buzzwords. It’s a very narrow but very worthwhile project – its objective to increase the standard of media and public relations across the digital out-of-home sector. And, unusually enough, it’s actually good advice, for free, which doesn’t lead you to a sales pitch.

This is probably why Dave has failed to attain the Croesian riches of Bill G, but on the other hand, it means the blog is worth following – and nearly all of what he has to say is applicable to sectors way beyond DOOH, too.

Ten DOOH predictions for 2010 (0 comments)

New at Screenmedia Expo Europe next year is a separate-but-linked DOOH Expo, focusing on the advertising potential of this medium and aimed not at the guys with screwdrivers but the guys with red bow-ties.

What can they expect from the world of digital out-of-home? Here are a few words I wrote for the event’s organisers: stuff that probably will happen, and if it doesn’t, something a bit like it will. (Perhaps. That’s the way of crystal balls.)

1. Slowly but surely, metrics standards emerge, and get used.
Both the media owners within the DOOH sector, and the buyers looking at the bigger advertising picture, have long identified accurate and standardised audience metrics as the key to credibility. At last, through the efforts of organisations such as OVAB, they’re now arriving – and adoption by increasing numbers of networks will allow coherent  planning across DOOH and other media.

2. Aggregators deliver audiences – not locations.
The separation of the network from the venue owner is a critical part of DOOH’s progression into the mainstream. Aggregators – who package up multiple networks to offer a media buy based on demographics or region rather than a particular set of venues – are rapidly growing in significance in the North American market, and we expect the same to happen in other territories, including Britain and mainland Europe.

3. Media sales is increasingly done by media sales people, not by the guy who installed the screen.
The same forces driving the move toward metrics and the rise of the aggregators is also leading to the creation of bigger, better-informed and better-resourced DOOH sales teams, both within media owners and in dedicated sales houses.

4. The first truly international DOOH packages become available to media buyers.
It’s true that most campaigns are territory-based – so in DOOH, as in other media, there’s limited demand for cross-border buys. But there are special cases – event-linked promotions, for example – where they’re needed, and also some categories of audience, such as upscale air travellers, who can coherently be reached internationally. Whether owned by a single company or aggregated, DOOH media platforms will offer highly targeted and highly visible international opportunities at a fraction of the cost of buying conventional media in multiple territories.

5. Outdoor goes digital, all over the place.
While the big outdoor owners are tightening their belts on conventional billboards, capex on digital continues – even in the middle of a downturn. All now recognise that it is the inevitable future for much of outdoor and a necessary investment, not just a nice adornment. The bottom line: digital is now taking a substantial slice of outdoor revenue (almost ten percent in the UK, for example), is out-performing non-digital, and has passed the tipping point from experimental novelty to mainstream outdoor medium.

6. Sophisticated interaction increases consumer engagement – it’s not just about Bluetooth!
Interactive DOOH is finally being used for serious campaigns, and all the signs are that it further increases response to the medium – in many cases opening up a new channel for longer-term relationships with the consumer. Not only the ubiquity of the mobile phone, but also rapidly-developing technologies in areas like gesture recognition, are being harnessed as integral parts of advertising executions. We’ve come a long way since an SMS shortcode was seen as cutting-edge!

7. Creative works better.
It’s simple: the longer DOOH has been around, the more its practitioners have learned about what works (and what doesn’t). Thanks to formal research as well as seat-of-the-pants experience, a great deal is now understood about issues like spot length and the use of sound – and DOOH ads are more effective than ever. You’ll see this for yourself at the Expo.

8. Each screen is more effective too.
Again, a combination of detailed research and common-sense observation means that screens are better-sited and better-managed. Each screen now has the potential to work harder for the advertiser than ever before, reaching more consumers, for longer, with a more powerful message.

9. More advertising messages are based on external data – ranging from the age of the viewer, to the current weather, to the store’s stock levels. Call it “contextual out-of-home”.
One of DOOH’s biggest strengths – matched only by online – is the ability to change messaging according to context. And in an ever more data-driven world, it’s no surprise that networks and advertisers are working to make out-of-home screens more responsive to their changing environment. The result: spots that better match the needs of both advertiser and consumer, right here, right now.

10. Reachable audiences gain critical mass.
Perhaps this is the most significant development of all. The sheer number of out-of-home screens and people watching them now makes DOOH comparable to established media for many advertisers’ purposes . This, in turn, leads not only to more use of the medium, but also to the development of a thriving eco-system of sales, creative and production specialists...and of course the further expansion of networks. It’s a snowball effect.

Schering-Plough: the money was real (0 comments)

You might remember there was a lot of noise back at the beginning of this year about Schering-Plough in the U.S. spending $10m on this medium... as well as some speculation that the $10m figure was just ratecard value, and the real dollars involved were a lot less, even zero.

Well, the company’s agency has just spoken in detail for the first time about the lessons of that investment, and it’s worth reading what Schering-Plough’s Mad Man has to say. Among other things, there’s a suggestion that networks cut their ad rates by between ten and 40 percent – deep discounting to be sure, but still implying a hefty cash commitment.

Advertising Age has a good story, which also – not particularly relating to Schering-Plough – has the following harsh but difficult-to-contest summary of the state of DOOH:

Digital out-of-home – an industry that includes everything from taxi TVs and in-store retail networks to digital panels at malls – has long been touted for its promise as an ad medium but has shown little signs of earning a full-blown commitment from marketers. Aside from cinema, which has positioned itself as the most seamless way for marketers to shift their TV budgets into alternative venues with comparable scale, many networks are too fragmented to accommodate a TV-equivalent buy on their own.

Put this on a T-shirt (0 comments)

There’s a lovely quote from Bradley Walker of Nanonation over at Retail Customer Experience, which just about perfectly captures the right way to do DOOH:

The customer experience focuses on the consumer, ties to the brand, then delivers with the technology. Technology shouldn’t be viewed as a widget or solution – it should be about the brand coming alive via that technology.

This blog post does not constitute investment advice (0 comments)

And you thought digital out-of-home was a growth sector! I’ve just stumbled upon a fascinating essay entitled The Greatest Transfer of Wealth in the History of Mankind, written by a veteran of this business who’s since moved on to other things.

Indeed, some of you may well remember Ron Flynn, who astutely warns in this piece that “we’re on a collision course with financial disaster”. I couldn’t agree more.

No CAN DOOH? (0 comments)

The great naming debate is perhaps a little more subdued than when I first came into this sector half a decade ago, but it rumbles on, and Daniel Parisien, VP of product and strategic initiatives at BroadSign International (a man who must carry an outsize business card) is the latest to tackle the irritatingly tough issue of what we should call ourselves.

In his wonderfully-named Essay on the Compulsive Need to Rename Digital Signage, Parisien writes that of all the terms applied to this sector, from CAN to DOOH, “the only one to really stick through the better part of two decades is the term digital signage”.

He acknowledges that “the new kid on the block seems to be digital out-of-home and to its credit, it is the only alternative to digital signage that has really stuck”, but nevertheless takes issue with DOOH.

“Out-of-home, as a category, is already relegated to a relatively small category in the media mix that is one of the first off the planner’s list in times where money is tight,” Parisien writes. “Some of the proponents of the digital out-of-home term probably do not realize they are classifying themselves in a subcategory and aren’t doing themselves any favors.”

He concludes: “The name isn’t what’s hurting the evolution of this space.”

I’d like to agree, though I can’t fully: I wonder how many people unfamiliar with the sector still think of big, clunky alphanumeric LEDs when they hear “digital signage”? (There are generations – mine and any older, I guess – to which “digital” doesn’t just mean smooth and fast and creative and with-it; the term also conjures up supersized Seventies digital watches and the like.)

I wonder, too, whether aligning ourselves with out-of-home media is such a bad thing. True, it’s among the smallest of those that we might fairly term mass media, but it’s big enough that a slice is worth having (and it’s weathering the downturn pretty well); more importantly, perhaps, it’s an alignment that we can justify.

This sector clearly isn’t part of TV, and until interaction is almost universal it’s mischievous at best to classify it under digital interactive or other umbrella terms for Internet and mobile. Yet what is undeniably true is that it is entirely out-of-home, and this is one of the few characteristics that unite what Parisien points out are an extremely diverse bunch of networks and applications.

It’s a relevant characteristic, too: isn’t being out of the home, and therefore closer to the point of purchase (or decision, or other desired action) a large part of the point?

My quibbles notwithstanding, it’s a great piece and worth reading. And be grateful as you do that nobody has yet seriously suggested SIP (Screens in Public), or MOTH (Media Outside The Home), or a number that I won’t repeat here for the sake of our more delicate-minded readers, but that you can easily compose for yourself...

C001 linkz of the week (0 comments)

At the risk of becoming an unwitting link farm, I can't resist sharing this week a few more interesting bits and pieces that may have escaped attention.

First off, a couple of items about digital signage in call centres – here's an in-depth look at content, and another about the tech that underlies it.

Then there's this story about the project that won a digital out-of-home award – a neat iPhone app. But since when was that DOOH? If the term's being this vaguely-used already, maybe we need to go back to “digital signage” with our tails between our legs.

Finally, I've banged on often enough here about how we ought to see cinema advertising as part of the DOOH sector. So here's a striking piece from India on the rise of 3D digital cinema.
 

Thinking outside the ad box (0 comments)

As traditional news media (especially newspapers, and especially American ones) continue to hurt bad from the double blow of the Internet effect and the economic downturn, “it pays for editors and editorial thinkers to consider any and all technologies, including ones that today are primarily thought of as marketing vehicles”.

That’s what former AP, ABC and Newsweek guy – and current new-media consultant-type guy – Dorian Benkoil (who looks like he should make a good anagram) writes on Poynter Online, a Website operated by the eponymous journalism school.

What’s this got to do with digital out-of-home? Benkoil’s thoughts were prompted by a look at Oglivy’s latest Digital Labs in New York, and coming from where he does it’s no surprise that he’s contemplating our medium as a mechanism for delivering news, rather than ads and promotional messaging. Within the sector, we naturally tend to think first of commercial applications, because that’s where the revenue starts...but here’s a reminder that DOOH can do more.

A couple of other interesting bits I’ve seen recently:

Advertising Age has a nice piece on Procter & Gamble putting retail at the heart of its  thinking, rather than burying it in a little silo called “shopper marketing”.

And the Christian Science Monitor has a great story (as it so frequently does) on the philosophy underpinning the anti-billboard movement. Know thine enemy, and all that.

You say DOOH... (0 comments)

Like any new sector, the digital-signage business is rapidly evolving its own language, sometimes useful, sometimes opaque. There’s a nice piece by Bill Gerba on the subject here.

Amscreen, minus the screens (0 comments)

A follow-up to my own recent post about Amscreen...

It’s easily forgotten that besides its much-maligned digital-signage operation, the firm also has another arm – the M2M (machine-to-machine) division using the remote equipment management and measurement technology that it acquired when it bought Comtech M2M.

That division has now secured an interesting and big win with Brulines, a British company that provides stock-monitoring products to pubs. Essentially, the Brulines kit measures exactly how much beer is going out of the pumps so that managements can compare that figure with their records of how much was actually sold. Any big difference is a problem of one sort or another. It can also monitor other types of drink dispenser, fridge/freezers, and gaming machines.

Now Amscreen M2M’s µWeave system is to be deployed in 5000 Brulines customer premises, using mobile-phone networks to send the data collected by Brulines’ monitoring devices to headquarters. There, it seems, Brulines will chew the numbers and spit them out in a form digestible by the pub operators.

Perhaps not as sexy a client as some of Amscreen’s digital-signage customers, but an indication that the firm is doing real business.

BRIC drops Focus (0 comments)

Dow Jones has dropped Focus Media Holding from its BRIC 50 Index, which tracks a basket of shares in “the 50 largest and most liquid companies” from Brazil, India, Russia and China. Effectively coming in to replace Focus  (though officially it’s not an out-and-out substitution of one equity for another) is Baidu, the Chinese leader in online search – a competitor of Sina, which as we’ve recently written may or may not meet an end-of-the-month deadline to take over most of Focus’s out-of-home assets.
 

Hold the front page...or maybe not (0 comments)

“Old media” are in terminal decline, right?

Wrong, at least according to MediaPost. The publication analysed 2006-2009 U.S. advertising spend across major media and found that while online has predictably enough been racing ahead in terms of percentage share, it’s only newspapers that have suffered significantly as a result.

Nearly everyone is hurting right now, of course, but the takeaway here would seem to be that outside of the newspaper business, most of that hurt is attributable to a sick economy rather than to irreversible, terminal decline in sectors such as broadcast, magazines and outdoor.

Quote:

It’s worth noting that – with the exception of newspapers – the percentage share of most traditional media in overall spending has remained roughly the same.

Why Amscreen matters (0 comments)

Love ’em or hate ’em – and to be honest, it’s difficult to find anyone in the digital out-of-home business who will confess to more than a grudging admiration – Amscreen makes the headlines again this week (in more senses than one) thanks to a new deal with the FT.

Yes, its “close-proximity signage” units are, to put it as bluntly as Sir Alan Sugar might, plug-ugly.

No, they don’t do many favours for the image of a medium that’s forever fighting with accusations of intrusiveness and clutter.

No, its rollouts are mostly not huge.

And no, the company is not exactly forthcoming about the extent to which they’re paid jobs, as opposed to trials whose purpose is to serve Amscreen’s marketing as much as the supposed clients.

But just look at that list of clients: HMV, Lloyds Pharmacy, BP, Whitbread, Guardian Media Group, even recently-troubled Coffee Nation, and now the FT. What Amscreen is doing with unparalleled success is bringing big, big household-name brands into digital out-of-home. And whether their networks last or fail, that has to benefit everyone trying to sell the benefits of screens.

(Yet) another Japanese rail-station trial (0 comments)

Tech-On!, that estimable chronicler of Japanese innovation, reports that Shinoda is trying out a 145-inch plasma tube array (PTA) display for digital signage at a Tokyo rail station.

We're not sure if this is really a new incarnation of the same unit that we wrote about earlier in the year: the specs are close enough to raise suspicions, but there are some significant differences, notably a dramatically-increased weight.

If you know, tell!

“It shouldn’t be possible to separate message from medium” (0 comments)

There’s a nice piece by Amelia Torode of British agency VCCP downloadable here on the role of “trans-media planning” in the firm’s recent CompareTheMarket/Meerkat campaign (surely familiar to all our UK readers and, for the rest of you, confirmation of the bizarre British sense of humour).

Her conclusion: “The separate campaign elements can work in isolation, but they were designed to work seamlessly together and to deepen and enrich the campaign idea. The campaign narrative was constructed to tell an engaging and participative story that made the best use of multiple platforms. We aimed to encourage participation and conversation, with the belief that business and brand results would follow.”

Nothing specifically on DOOH (the campaign was built around TV and online), but worth a read. 

Has TV had it? (0 comments)

Has broadcast TV had its day as an advertising medium? Can consumers be trusted to rate which media are most effective? A nice, if slightly ranty, take on these and other questions from Branding Strategy Insider, here.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the freeway... (0 comments)

...advertisers find a new, and pleasantly scented, way to overcome the LA digital-billboard ban. Damned crafty, eh?

For aggregators, more is not always more (2 comments)

For the ever-growing advertising aggregators like Adcentricity, BookingDooh, rVue and SeeSaw Networks, size would seem to be everything...but is it?

Certainly, there is an extent to which sheer numbers are a necessary part of their model: the aggregator has to offer the media planner and buyer an easier route to their audience than going direct to individual networks.

Venue variety, and the range of audience groups it brings, also seems to be desirable –  not only for increasing demographic coverage, but perhaps also because if one were going to aggregate only screens in a certain location type it would make more sense in the end to acquire the individual network operators, rather than just sell their airtime.

And territorial range – whether it’s across regions of North America, or in BookingDooh’s case across different European nations – evidently also helps to deliver the choice of demographic options as well as the volume of audience.

But as our story today and the details of BookingDooh’s vivid offer of a fortnight-long, 67m-reach campaign make clear, while it may be tempting to judge an aggregator by a simple yardstick such as the number of screens it offers, the true measure of its value combines all these considerations. Notably, the volume of screens in each of BookingDooh’s territories bears little relation to its total reach in that country – a sign that headline figures on network size can be worse than misleading.

Despite the slump, outdoor’s future is still digital (0 comments)

It may not be the best of times for digital outdoor, but it is not exactly the worst of times either.

The big players have all endured painful second quarters – with revenue down 27 percent at CBS Outdoor, 15 percent at Lamar and 13 percent at JCDecaux, while Clear Channel Outdoor’s figures, due later today, are deeply unlikely to buck the trend.

Yet digital remains a bright spot, and it’s becoming almost routine for outdoor firms to identify digital and emerging markets as their strongest hopes for the future.

At CBS, for example, president and CEO Leslie Moonves says “we believe outdoor will perform well over the long term, especially the investments we made in digital boards and emerging international markets”.

Meanwhile, the new medium’s share of (admittedly heavily trimmed) capex at Lamar has continued to grow over the last year and the company is now investing roughly twice as much in digital billboards as in their conventional counterparts. In the same long term referred to by Moonves, this is far more significant than the revenue dip.

In the U.S., particularly, the future of digital billboards is still clouded by the long-running rows over traffic safety and visual pollution. But what seems pretty clear from the attitude of the media owners is that digital is not going to go away, and it is unrealistic to think that those arguments will provoke anything like a full-blown retreat.

Most likely, a consensus will emerge that will answer the qualms of the anti-billboard campaigners as well as meeting the commercial requirements of the outdoor firms and their advertisers. Ironing out the details will be tough, but it will happen, and indeed it may well be that the arguments that rage today are not really about whether digital continues to exist, but only about the details.

And in any case, the U.S. is not the only market. Wait for this slump to end, and we will suddenly see digital billboards transformed from interesting innovations (not to mention money pits) into the main long-term business of the big outdoor firms.

Watching the watchers (0 comments)

The recent JCDecaux/Eyetracker study of exactly how consumers view screens at Heathrow Airport has been exciting plenty of comment – not least because it’s a rare example of research that gets into the nitty-gritty of how digital out-of-home works, rather than just establishing that it sometimes does, or implying that it might.

Here’s what Greg Jeffreys of Paradigm Audio Visual – a veteran of the Manchester Airport digital-signage installation and chair of InfoComm’s European Council – had to say:

At one level I find it hard to comment because it’s a specialist area. But it also parallels other work I have been involved in concerning other aspects of perception.
 
As part of my InfoComm duties I sit on the task group writing a new ANSI standard on projected image contrast ratios. In our practical work and research investigating what comprises ‘acceptable’ and ‘good’ image quality, as driven by contrast ratio, then we are becoming increasingly aware that it’s not just a question of the physics of how and what we see – it’s how this is processed by our optical systems too.

The point being that what we ‘see’ is not a direct and unmediated input from eye to brain to received perception, but that there’s extensive interpolation upon that input that processes and filters what we think we are ‘seeing’. (Google ‘contrast rendering factor’ for one definable example.) And this interpolation can be informed by any aspect or feature of our environment and experience of it.
 
Which brings us to movement. It’s completely logical that our ancestors needed to see that twitch of leaves from the corner of their eyes before the tiger attacked. So it’s a survival-driven reflex action that draws our eye to movement.

Thus I can foresee a metric whereby an advertiser could be assured of an x% increased likelihood of the viewing of moving content over static displays, for example. So the JCDecaux work is of definite value. But it remains down to the quality and viewer relevance of the content that will make the poor punter keep his or her gaze upon it.
 
The other parallel with my own nerd-work is that it’s a multi-level issue. In practice this makes it tempting to either rub in large doses of snake oil (imagine a bull with the trots, or projector and display manufacturers’ contrast claims) rather than to break the issue down into its component parts and deal with each in adequate detail.

In this case it’s content being distinguished from the mode of delivery. We can all see many examples of both content and screens that would have got the hooter on Juke Box Jury (a TV reference for the benefit of other geriatrics) which is gradually informing an evolution out of the primeval soup of what we technicians call ‘crap signage’.
 
But it’s not just a question of refining content and delivery. There’s an implicit warning in this too. Many people take the example of Minority Report as providing a shining example of where the signage industry might be leading us. But that is surely the point of overload where, for example, our eyes will be so besieged with continuous movement to the point that we no longer even register its presence. It’s a cycle of diminishing returns.
 
To apply this to a business perspective, I would say that JCDecaux’s research will mostly prove of benefit to a sector of signage concerned with high-traffic, premium-demographic locations which will be worth spending big bucks on tooling up with fancy signage. It’s a sign of a maturing market that we’ll see specialists in areas such as these – as well as these vast estates of LCD panels gradually consolidating into media packages worthy of media buyers’ notice.

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V... (1 comments)

Call it a misguided sense of honour among thieves, but we generally try not to criticise our competition. However, we do think a little nudge in the direction of aka.tv is overdue.

Last year we wrote about some curious resemblances between our stories and aka’s. Now, today, we observe that this article is a straight lift from a Los Angeles Times report... without credit or even a cosmetic rewrite.

Sure: in the Web age, just as before, everyone “borrows” stories from everyone else now and again. But come on, guys. Copy-and-paste is not just lazy, it’s downright wrong.

How to succeed in advertising (0 comments)

The latest Media Advertising Forecast from Interpublic’s Magna, published this month, is being interpreted from – ahem – healthily diverse perspectives. Depending on who you listen to, either the end of the U.S. advertising world is nigh, or good times are (nearly) back in town again.

So we won’t comment on the numbers. But it is worth repeating some of the criteria that Magna suggests are necessary for an advertising medium to succeed, though if you’ve been in out-of-home for more than five minutes they may sound rather familiar...

• Critical mass of unique reach
• Uniform technological standards
• Research into optimal formats
• Smooth buying process
• Provision of robust user data
• Maintain quality service product
• Mere presence of a medium is insufficient to enable advertising
  

You can find the full 62-page report here.

Are things really that bad? (0 comments)

We wrote today about DisplaySearch’s latest prognosis for FPD makers – pretty positive on the digital-signage front, and not too doomy for the market as a whole.

But we do think the research firm ought to either back off from the term “public display”, or assign a minion to a spot of Wikipedia editing...

Consumers irritatingly fond of stuff they shouldn’t like (0 comments)

They didn’t cover OOH, so whether we should be basking in smug superiority or rending our garments is a moot point, but the latest AdweekMedia/Harris poll on the way U.S. consumers make use of advertising certainly casts doubt on some received wisdoms.

Quote:

Over one-third of Americans (37%) say that television ads are most helpful in making their purchase decision while 17% say newspaper ads are most helpful and 14% say the same about Internet search engine ads.  Radio ads (3%) and Internet banner ads (1%) are not considered helpful by many people. 

You’ll find more of it here, and I bet the overwhelming preference for paid search rather than Web banners will be the most-cited of this poll’s results, but the more striking bottom line is that those awkward, not-quite-with-it consumers find dead-and-dying “old media” like newspapers and TV actually rather useful.

Print and pixels: perfect partners? (0 comments)

Longer ago than I care to calculate, before “new media” was a phrase even on the horizon, I spent years covering the printing and prepress industry while it went through its own sometimes confused, often exciting transition to digital.

So when I was asked to write a little think piece for the printers’ group FESPA, it was a trip down a rather muddy memory lane, but more importantly it was a chance to look beyond the narrow confines of digital OOH and consider some of the ways we might work with the broader communications sector.

Anyway, here it is.

Digital out-of-home is a new medium at much the same stage of development – and confusion – as the World Wide Web around a dozen years ago.

On the upside, there is excitement over its undoubted potential to reach consumer audiences with highly targeted and micro-controllable campaigns; there is rapid technological development underpinned by a rapidly-solidifying consensus on what constitutes the mainstream (LCD, SMS, SaaS...); there is an emerging understanding of how content should address the needs of both viewer and media owner/advertiser.

On the downside, however, there is a bewildering over-supply of tools with little practical difference among them; there is still no unanimity on the practicalities of audience measurement, although it is universally agreed to be necessary in some form; there remains huge variance in the quality and appropriateness of content, sometimes left to the tech guys with predictably clumsy results; and perhaps most critical of all, there remains a wide gulf  between the understanding of and enthusiasm for the medium shown by its early adopters and the mixture of scepticism, incomprehension and plain lack of interest often displayed by advertisers and their agencies.

But one man’s gulf is another man’s opening, and it is this disconnect between the digital out-of-home community and the broader commercial world that offers an opportunity for practitioners in other forms of communication.

Most attention has been paid to the potential synergies between digital out-of-home and other media from the point of view of the media owner – particularly online, TV and local press, all for different but valid reasons. Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the supply and manufacturing side of media, including the printing sector.

Just as they were with online, when many smaller firms found a fertile new market in Web design for their existing customers, printers are well-placed to move into the digital out-of-home sector. And the greatest opportunities are probably for the design-and-print shops rather than the larger, industrial-scale printers.

They can exploit their experience in acquiring and servicing clients who may not be highly media-aware, in translating a brief into a visual, in working across multiple media and coordinating campaigns (for many smaller printers serve as de facto advertising agencies for their clients), and in creating point-of-sale material. Those with a retail operation – the printer-and-stationers and the quick-printers – may even find that the simpler, plug-and-play digital-signage packages are a suitable fit with their existing line of products and services.

How these synergies are brought into practice is likely to vary greatly, with the size and existing market focus of the printer being perhaps the most significant factors. But it is certainly possible to say that some strategies stand a greater chance of success than others.

For a start, the transformation of printer into digital out-of-home media owner can be dismissed as missing the point: while it is true that the printer (particularly the one whose business is mostly local, or specific to a vertical) may have existing relationships with other businesses whose locations are promising sites for screens, and may have or be easily able to acquire relevant skills in content production and conversion, monetisation of the screens via advertising sales is so far from the printer’s business model that diversification into media ownership makes little sense.

Another less than optimum route from print into out-of-home, albeit one that has a little more going for it than media ownership, is the establishment of a separate, pure-play digital-signage business alongside but independent of the printer. Again, while the printer may well be able to bring skills and clients to the new business, a lack of close integration between paper and pixels means that the out-of-home operation has little added attraction to customers over and above the benefits offered by other digital-signage firms.

The route ahead for printers eyeing the digital out-of-home sector, then, is in offering services that are as integrated as possible, while of course retaining the option of complete separation for those clients who want digital signage only, or for whatever reason don’t want or aren’t able to align their on-screen communications with their printed ones.

The ways in which this integration might operate on an everyday basis are manifold, ranging from the strategic – advice on visual brand identity or on large-scale content management, for example – to the practical and technical: to cite just one possible instance, prior experience with the journey from screen to paper will make the printer’s prepress department extremely well-positioned to manage a coordinated approach to brand-specific colours across multiple media.

If printers are to move into digital out-of-home, how can the digital out-of-home supply side move itself toward servicing the printing industry? We’ve already touched on the possibility of printers with a storefront acting as sales channels for digital-sign-in-a-box-type products. But there are also other ways in which digital-signage software vendors, in particular, can make their products more adapted and attractive to the printer.

An obvious prerequisite is to view the printing sector as a partner rather than a rival: while it may be technically true that digital out-of-home is “competing” with print for businesses’ marketing and communications budgets, in practice the pot is so very large that there is far more to be gained by securing more customers for digital signage through cooperation with the printing industry than by responding to entirely theoretical competition.

Equally, it is important to recognise that most printing businesses will remain just that: those that are not already viewing themselves as integrated communications shops are unlikely to make that transformation simply because digital out-of-home appears on the scene. In other words, while it’s a potentially rewarding enhancement to their businesses, it’s not game-changing for the printers, and both the pitch and the reality must reflect this.

For example, the digital-signage software vendor who recognises the dominance of Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and PDF in the print-design field and makes their content-creation tools at least somewhat compatible with these will have the advantage over those who try to shoehorn printers into a world of MPEG or PowerPoint.

The mutual benefits to the two sectors can be summed up as enlarging the range of services that printers can profitably offer to their customers, and enlarging the client base for digital out-of-home – whether the clients are defined as end users (in a situation where a digital-signage firm is partnering with printers) or as the printers themselves (in the case of straightforward equipment and software sales).

The world will not be changed radically for either sector; but as smart printers showed with the arrival of online, they can leverage many of their competencies and contacts into new media, and as smart out-of-home vendors are fast discovering, the route ahead for the sector is often through imaginative partnerships.

Mobile interaction: is digital OOH leading the way? (0 comments)

Could digital-signage operators in retail (and indeed other sectors) unwittingly be building the business model for mobile digital television? After all, they’re already dealing with many of the same issues that face the broader mobile-TV community: permissions, ROI and suchlike.

The development of interaction between the mobile phone and digital out-of-home could indeed pave the way for many future implementations of the handset as a media platform, implementations that go way beyond a crude “push” or “pull” approach. That’s the implication of an interesting comment over at Television Broadcast, which in turn bases its conclusions on an article by the ever-readable Laura Davis-Taylor.

Walking the agency walk (0 comments)

Monopoly Media, long an adventurous market leader in Romania’s digital out-of-home business, is subsuming thousands of screens within a single four-channel brand, Zoom TV. Stateside, rivals Outcast and PumpTop TV are combining their networks as a single media buy. And in Britain, Amscreen has just appointed Digicom to sell airtime on its Powerleague and healthcare networks, as well as BP Connect.

Yes, more and more media owners are now walking the agency-friendly walk. Goodness knows the talk has been talked for long enough; but while the situation has certainly been improving, there are still too many networks operating on the “if you build it they will come” principle.

Rollout and reach are great, and big numbers always look superficially good, but they aren’t enough to persuade media buyers who above all want deals that are comprehensible, easy and justifiable.

And anything that gives them that – whether it’s a straightforward way to buy across a range of estates, as in the Monopoly and Outcast/PumpTop moves, or the appointment of a sales house that speaks their language, as with Amscreen – has got to be good not just in the short term for the network operators involved, but permanently for the reputation of the sector as a whole.

Memo to Pizza Hut: less is more (7 comments)

As nobles in the Yum! Brands empire, the management at Pizza Hut should have a pretty good idea what they’re doing. But they’ve seemed, dare I say it, a little confused for a while: it’s not even clear whether the short-lived Pasta Hut branding was a spoof or a serious but aborted project. And now it seems they’re a little confused about digital signage too.

The news that the restaurant chain is rolling out a network in the U.S., albeit a very small one which can scarcely be counted as more than a pilot, might have seemed like a welcome endorsement of digital out-of-home’s role in the casual-dining sector.

But Pizza Hut’s proposed content, a mishmash of menu offers, entertainment and the dreaded scrolling news ticker, is a throwback to the bad old days when digital-signage screens looked like late-’90s frameset-based Web pages. My colleague Dave Haynes has already observed that much of the content will be too small to read; and just as seriously, this represents a terrible missed opportunity.

While it’s true – indeed it’s an important benefit of the medium – that a digital sign can serve different purposes and different audiences at different times, it’s almost impossible for it to do multiple jobs simultaneously. Far, far better to concentrate on one task, and execute it well. At Pizza Hut, which has a potentially quite baffling array of formats and menu choices, that task is surely to elucidate the consumer choice, increasing satisfaction as well as sales.

I have a pizza oven in my yard, and I can confidently assert that the golden rule of successful toppings is that less is more: a smear of tomato sauce, a few dabs of mozzarella, a sprinkling of solid bits and you're there. The same principle applies to digital-signage content (well, not the smearing of tomato sauce; I speak figuratively, you understand). So let’s hope Pizza Hut has time for a rethink.

Out-of-store TV (0 comments)

It wasn’t so long ago that advertising in vacant storefronts felt almost guerrilla in its sly use of failed commercial ventures to promote (presumably) more successful ones.

But it’s rapidly becoming mainstream, and as the downturn continues to scythe through retail, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see more and more digital out-of-home slipping into our commercial thoroughfares this way.

Beyond the indisputable ingenuity of the storefront specialists, though, this raises two questions. What will happen when conditions improve and retail occupancy rates rise again? And when will other stores, those that either don’t need all their window space or can’t use it for regulatory reasons, realise that it could be an advertising medium ripe for monetisation?

First LA, now Chicago? (0 comments)

Looks like the Windy City could be the next battleground for the U.S. anti-billboard movement...

OOH: completing the magic triangle? (0 comments)

Sounds like TBWA Worldwide is one agency that recognises digital doesn’t begin and end with the Web and email. Toronto’s Globe and Mail has a good interview today with head honchette of digital Colleen DeCourcy, musing on the “magic triangle [of] online, out-of-home and retail”.

First plasma display visible from moon (0 comments)

Okay, we exaggerate. But it looks like Shinoda has come through on its promise to deliver a 142-inch plasma, although it’s really more of a video wall – six 1x1m units in a 3x2 configuration. 960x720 resolution for each unit gives an overall resolution of 2880x1440, so viewed from a modest distance it should be pretty impressive.

What’s really notable about this, though, is the depth (reportedly 1mm) and weight (just 7.2kg for the whole setup) made possible by plasma tube array technology, which raises the prospect of some high-impact wall-hanging and free-standing applications in convention centres, corporate headquarters and the like.

It all makes Panasonic’s 103-inch HD plasma (with its price just slashed by nearly a third) look downright compact.

Wiki wickedness (1 comments)

Question: What do seleniuminc.com, sivimagen.com, aonarrowcast.com, signage24.com, mediasignage.com, myadtv.com and alphasignage.com.br have in common?

Answer 1: They are (at least some of) the outfits that in the last year have been added to Wikipedia’s entry on digital signage, politely removed in line with the general Wikipedia policy of not including “links to Web pages that primarily exist to sell products or services”, and then inserted again, and removed again. And in some cases inserted again, and removed again, and...

Answer 2: None of them has exactly set the digital OOH world alight.

Answer 3: Both of the above.

I’m not suggesting that it’s the official policy of these companies to spam Wikipedia, because I simply don't know who’s behind the addition of each link  – it may well be the work of over-zealous staffers, pumped-up resellers, or even users or members of the public who mistakenly believe that one of this lot represents the whole of the digital-signage market.

But people, please don’t do it. It is quite literally a waste of everyone’s time; your link will be removed almost immediately; slipping under the radar just doesn’t happen. And if you do think your company has a legitimate case for exceptional treatment, raise the issue first at the discussion page which Wikipedia helpfully provides for all articles.

Besides, as answer 2 may imply, I suspect link-spamming is not even very efficacious: less than two percent of SCREENS.tv’s visits in the last month came through our link from the Wikipedia article, where we were listed all month – not just for a few minutes – along with a number of other industry news sites.

(Though, in the interests of full disclosure and well aware that this may encourage more naughtiness, I will note that these visitors spent more time on the site and looked at more pages than the average.)

It’s the value, stupid (0 comments)

I saw a couple of interesting pieces today tackling the issue of value, and the question of whether we create enough of it, in the contexts of journalism and advertising (specifically online advertising, but much of what the writer says is applicable to OOH too).  Worth a read.

Outdoor: the future is still digital (0 comments)

The latest financials from the outdoor biggies (reported here and here) make for gloomy reading: while this sector at least hasn’t been hit by the horrific double whammy of recession on top of cyclical decline that has reduced some media like the British and (particularly) U.S. newspaper sectors to penury, it hasn’t been immune from the downturn either.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, however: digital outdoor has generally performed well, and some of the emerging markets have been healthy.

The fear now must be that that light will be dimmed by an understandable, but ultimately self-defeating, reluctance to invest in digitising more outdoor sites. The downturn will end and when it does, digital out-of-home will be coming into the limelight as one of the most enticing new advertising media.

Outdoor owners with a robust digital inventory – and all the infrastructure that goes with it, from interaction to metrics – will, quite simply, be better positioned to win campaigns from agencies that will increasingly regard digital OOH as a must-have rather than a would-be-nice-but-don’t-really-need.

There is another problem facing digital OOH as well, of course, and that is public perception. We’ve written often (and will continue to do so) about the resistance to digital sites that’s emerged in many U.S. cities, frequently under the guise of (as yet unproven) traffic-safety concerns – although we believe that that masks a more general antipathy toward what’s regarded as digital intrusion, as well as an understandable enough-is-enough attitude toward a sector some of whose smaller players haven’t always been as law-abiding as they might.

Echoing that antipathy on the other side of the Atlantic now comes a new report from English Heritage and CABE, a body charged with advising the British government on architecture and urban issues. We hope to write on it at length later this week, but for now let’s just say that it displays an alarming anti-commercial prejudice – implying that regardless of visual quality or public utility, non-commercial uses of screens are presumptively better than advertising.

Outdoor operators as a group will need, sooner or later, to counter these concerns. And the best way to do that is to invest in high-quality, sensitively located and designed digital sites – to prove to advertisers that the medium is much more than billboards with bytes, and to communities that screens can be a useful, non-intrusive, even (dare we say it) attractive adornment rather than the rampaging Godzillas that so many fear.

Evil cookies and ubiquitous touchscreens (0 comments)

“We’ll get to a place where people walk up to a screen and assume they can touch it,”  says a report on one of the more thought-provoking recent episodes of crystal-ball-gazing. Worth a read.

Cinema audiences: captive, and loving it (0 comments)

On the face of it, it was an everyday regional takeover: a cinema chain hardly known outside its own country (albeit a powerful force there) swallowing a small out-of-home firm with sites in a handful of cities. But the acquisition by Canada’s Cineplex of Onsite Media Network may prove to be one of the most important screen-media developments of the year.

For here, at last, is a cinema exhibitor realising that movies are not the only media game it plays. After all, we’ve long been told that the retail store is a mass medium, so why not the cinema?

And I’m talking here not only about what’s on the big screen, but what’s in the foyer and the washrooms, what’s on the ticket and the popcorn bucket, and of course on the small screens increasingly making their presence known in cinemas’ public areas. From buying a ticket to dissecting the movie as they depart, the cinema is a great place to reach consumers.

Consider: they’re in a self-indulgent, spending mood. The chances are good that after the movie they’ll carry on spending, maybe in a restaurant or a bar. Their demographics are pretty well-defined by the movie that they’re heading to (and even in multiplexes, there’s not too much muddle: different areas at different times of day will see quite specific groups).

Audience metrics produced from box-office systems are about as accurate as you could ever hope for. And, at least in the auditorium itself, the cinema audience is virtually guaranteed not only to notice what’s on the screen but to give it close attention too: after all, they’ve paid for the privilege.

All this adds up to a hell of an opportunity for advertisers and marketers – and cinema owners, of course. So Cineplex is to be congratulated for seeing advertising as more than a minor revenue stream, helpful but of secondary importance next to box office and concessions. It handles its own ad sales – unlike most chains, which give the job to agencies – and now, with the Onsite takeover, looks like it’s about to offer its audiences as a very attractive, accessible and well-understood part of an OOH package.

(By the way, when not editing SCREENS.tv, I work on the team running a non-profit cinema too. We don’t stretch to much that’s digital yet, unless you include counting audiences on our fingers, but if you’re ever in these parts come join us for a great show.)

Give your fingers a rest (0 comments)

With Screen Media Expo Europe nearly upon us, to all those sitting itchy-fingered in the conference rooms (you know who you are) I have just one polite request:

STOP THAT TWITTERING.

Trust me on this: there is nothing to be gained by Twittering conferences in real time, except the irritation of your followers and a spurious sense of “being first”.

Twitter is great for big, unpredictable events unfolding moment-by-moment – things like election nights, Windows reinstalls, soap opera Christmas specials. But when it comes to conferences, what those people who couldn’t attend really need is a thoughtful round-up of key points after the event, all accessible in one place. An article or an email or a blog post, in other words.

Being told what speaker X said five seconds ago, when you the Twitterer aren’t in any position to know whether it’s a trivial throwaway or the lead-in to an important revelation, is useless.

So just don’t do it. The world can wait.

Walgreens: enough already (0 comments)

Interesting interview conducted by the In-Store Marketing Institute with a bunch of Walgreens execs here. Sounds like the firm has not ruled out a digital-signage network, but is getting frustrated with the number of OOH firms that cannot or will not understand that for a retailer, retailing comes first...

Free conference passes for Screen Media Expo (11 comments)

Why do people go to trade shows? Some are there to hunt for specific products; some to get a feel for what’s new and where the sector’s heading. Some go for the gossip, some for the conferences, and a few for the freebies.

But whatever your reason for attending these events, here’s an offer you shouldn’t refuse: we have some free conference passes to give away for Screen Media Expo Europe in London next month, entitling you to attend any or all sessions at any of the associated conferences and summits.

Interested? Just post a comment to this blog post saying what you think trade shows do for your business. The first individuals to comment will each receive a pass.

(PS: please don’t press the Submit button more than once; your comments won’t appear instantaneously, but will be reviewed by a SCREENS.tv editor first.)

Big is beautiful...but small is beautiful too (2 comments)

There’s been quite a bit of attention paid recently to the potential “long tail” of  digital screen media users – the huge numbers of small businesses and other organisations which might need just one or two screens apiece, but which together add up to an enormous market.

(Some eye-popping stats: in the UK, 471,500 new businesses set up shop in 2007 alone. All but a few, of course, were very small. Some 19.5m businesses in the U.S., or a little over three quarters of the total, have no employees at all – unless you count the dogs. It would be interesting to see the profile, in terms of business size, of visitors to the big shows such as Digital Signage Expo last week or Screen Media Expo Europe in London this April.)

And it’s right not to ignore the long tail: after all, most of the things that screen media can do for large organisations it can also do for the tiniest ones (the notable exception being third-party advertising revenue, more of which below). But let’s not throw the figurative baby out with the conceptual bathwater and forget the value of networks.

There’s a phenomenon in economics called the network effect, which describes a situation where something – any product or service – delivers more benefit when more people are using it. The most famous example is the telephone (or strictly speaking, of course, the telephone network) – pretty pointless when there’s just one user, but growing in utility rapidly as more are added.

And it applies rather well to the world of digital screen media.

First, consider the benefits to a single organisation of having multiple screens – and by “multiple” here I mean anything from maybe 20 to tens of thousands. Obviously, the total cost of technology and of management is increased, but the unit costs will tend to come down. The unit cost of content on a like-for-like basis will plummet because the same content can be used over as many screens as desired. (In reality, of course, it doesn’t quite work that way because the owner of a large network is likely to commission much more bespoke content than the operator of a single screen; but the principle stands.)

But the network effect brings about intangible, non-financial benefits too. The screen can become an integral part of branding, messaging or information delivery across an organisation: the more screens there are in the more places, the greater their potential uses. For example, in retail large numbers of screens open up the possibility of targeting subgroups of customers with different content at different stages of their shopping journeys, whereas a single screen in each store has to do everything all the time.

And there is another important effect too, one which benefits everyone using screens – not just the particular network’s owner. It’s the bigger installations which raise the profile of the medium among the public and, crucially, educate people that screens are a sensible place to look for information when out of the home. This is still a young medium and in the long run we all gain when our publics become familiar with screens, see them as useful and helpful rather than intrusive, and know what to expect from them.

Finally, of course, the network effect really kicks in when we consider advertising. The vast majority of exposures to advertisements don’t result in a sale; therefore, advertisers need lots of exposures to get any worthwhile results. Other than in a few very high-profile locations like football stadia and major airports or railway stations, single screens can’t achieve this, but packaging together large numbers of screens for the advertiser can deliver sufficient viewers.

It’s this which has led not only to the development of many of the largest digital-signage networks across the world, but also to the rise of the aggregator, who doesn’t own or operate any screens  but provides a single point of purchase where advertisers can buy airtime on multiple networks.

So are the network effect and the long tail phenomenon two irreconcilable visions of how the future of screen media might look?

Not at all: while I anticipate that we will see a steadily-growing number of tiny users (how we’re going to count them is another matter...) I also think we’re going to see a lot more aggregation and collaboration, not only in advertising sales but on the supply and operations side – with content specialists, for example, offering bespoke feeds to specific user sectors, small-scale local collaboration on community and emergency messaging, and so on.

And as plug-in-and-go screen media technology gets cheaper and easier to use, there will be more network operators looking at putting their screens in lower-traffic or lower-value locations, partly because the high-traffic and high-value ones will eventually all be snapped up, but also because reduced technology and management costs will make a thousand minor locations as viable an advertising sell as a dozen major ones.

That's already happening, of course, with the spread of networks through individually small businesses like bars, but it will go further. The big networks will continue to enjoy all their economies and benefits of scale, but there’s no reason the little guys should be left out.

Are they by any chance related? (0 comments)

If they ever make a biopic on Bill Collins, we think Jack McGee is a shoo-in for the role.

Suggestions for other casting, especially for the pivotal role of the suspiciously youthful Bill Gerba, are most welcome.

Déjà vu all over again (1 comments)

I couldn’t make DSE in Las Vegas this year (there’s a plus side; at least I’ll be spared the “breakfast potatoes”), so I’m following events on the Web, and it’s tickling to see just how many companies are “introducing” “new” product that’s not really new at all.

To take just one example, Westinghouse said back in October, if not before, that its neonSource screen-splitter, neonNow design software and neonPlayer media player were available then...so why re-announce them at Expo???

You might say this is clever marketing, or clever PR at least, keeping your product in the public and media eye. But it’s also hugely confusing, doesn’t make for clarity in a market that’s already ridiculously overcrowded with product, and raises the suspicion that the kit is only being “announced” again because it hasn’t actually got any users.

Another example: Omnivex’s Moxie. We wrote about this nearly a year ago. So...was it actually no more than a twinkle in someone’s eye back then? And if not, why has Omnivex only this week said that Moxie “will be officially released to the market on March 1”?

At SCREENS.tv we do try to check that stuff we cover as new is reasonably so, but I don’t doubt we’ve fallen afoul of this a few times. So please, everyone, stop crowding out genuine developments with artificial ones.

Meanwhile, as we’re in mystified mood, we just don’t know what to make of MediaTile’s new ROM methodology. Sure, we get the underlying concepts spelled out in the white paper, and they don’t seem unreasonable. But as well as wondering whether the business really needs yet another sort-of-metric-which-just-a-few-people-will-adopt, we’re unclear as to how ROM actually works in practice.

Do you need to buy MediaTile kit to get access to its insights? Do you hire MediaTile consultants? Buy a DIY handbook? Or is it just a notional framework?

Perhaps all will become clear when they re-announce it next year.

Acronyms as a Gimmick (AaaG) (0 comments)

At least Zstream showed a little creativity when they tried to position what appears to be yet another me-too SaaS system as something new: Software as a Utility (SaaU). Pity they forgot to proofread the press release and left in a reference to Software as a Service...

When did you last hear “captive audience network”? (3 comments)

Certain phrases have the suggestive power of summoning up a vanished era as surely as the sight of flared trousers, or top hat and tails.

Phrases like “hep cat”, or “King and Country”, or “Tesco TV”.

Yes, it's difficult to believe that it's only five years since the launch of Tesco TV – the supermarket in-store TV network that was going to take on the British broadcasters at their own game in delivering audiences.

The logic seemed impeccable. Tesco could draw on vast footfall – in sheer numbers, the comparison of the supermarket's shoppers with the mainstream TV audience wasn't too fanciful –  and, even better, it was footfall near the point of sale. So what wasn't to love about Tesco TV as an advertising medium?

There are a few answers. In those early days we still hadn't fully comprehended the different natures of in-store and in-living-room television; the digital out-of-home sector was much less visible and credible to media planners than it is today; and, of course, Tesco may have compounded the difficulties by only ever rolling out the network to a fraction of its estate. (Statement of interest: I worked at the time for Instrumental Media Group, the now-disappeared company which produced much of Tesco TV's content, though I wasn't personally involved in that project.)

In any case, Tesco TV was ultimately taken in-house by the supermarket's Dunnhumby subsidiary (and away from JCDecaux, marking the end of its pretensions to being a mainstream advertising medium); rebranded as Tesco Screens; and repositioned as a promotional vehicle.

All this is now ancient history, or so it seems given the breathtakingly fast development of the medium. But what's interesting about the vanishing of Tesco TV is not so much that the supermarket made a mistake; Tesco rarely puts a foot commercially wrong, but nobody's perfect. It's that it ended the near-worship of the in-store TV concept, and may have helped bring about the much more rounded screen-media business we have today, in which retail is rightly perceived as only one potential user community.

Sure, there are still plenty of retail networks out there – including some we hardly ever hear of, like WHSmith's or the Co-op's, working hard for their stores every day. And the number will doubtless grow, because some areas of retail – convenience stores, for example, and music/video emporia – are particularly well-suited to digital out-of-home.

But for the screen-media sector as a whole, the high street is no longer the pinnacle of ambition. There are plenty of other territories being conquered, in railway stations and airports, gyms and cinemas, surgeries and hospitals, hotels and conference centres. There are large, and largely unexplored, markets in schools and universities, in libraries and museums, military bases and police stations, historic attractions and amusement parks...the list goes on and on.

Expanding the user base in this way can only be a good thing for the sector. Not only does it obviously grow the market for screen-media products and services in terms of sheer size: it also reduces the sector's vulnerability to changing fortunes, or business models, or marketing philosophies among its customers. And perhaps most positively, with a user base so varied that one size emphatically cannot fit all, it means there is scope for a much wider range of solutions and approaches: there is room for everyone from the vendor of tiny shelf-edge displays for the  supermarket to the supplier of huge video walls at football grounds, from the producer of five-minute mini-documentaries to the designer of static digital posters.

And looking at a broader user base has also allowed the truth of the long tail to begin emerging. You're familiar with the concept, I'm sure: in its most basic form it implies that a large number of disparate low-value sales can cumulatively rival a few huge ones. It's now starting to be realised that this is as true in screen media as in most markets, and it's healthy that many suppliers are now as enthusiastic about selling plug-and-play digital-signage systems driving just one or two screens as we were five years ago about deploying tens of thousands of displays in the hugest retail chains.

After all, every little helps.

PS: I forgot to mention that this post was also circulated by email with the first of Screen Media Expo Europe's fun introduction-to-DOOH videos: check it out here.

Judge not... (1 comments)

Much silliness afoot at the blog of Bill Gerba, head man at WireSpring (and the Dorian Gray of digital signage, it’s rumoured). Our only fear is that the Strategy Institute might launch a Digital Signage Contest Strategies Summit.

Big numbers that mean little (0 comments)

Is the downturn hitting out-of-home advertising badly? Yes, no, maybe so: the indications to date are so mixed that the only safe conclusion might be that the question itself is badly phrased: that out-of-home is not a single beast whose temperature we can take, but a whole herd of different businesses.

Take, for example, the experience of JCDecaux, the leading outdoor-advertising firm in Europe and Asia-Pacific and number two worldwide. Overall, its 2008 organic revenue growth (excluding the effects of acquistions and organic growth) was a healthy enough 6.3 percent. But JCDecaux’s transport media rose 14.4 percent, while billboards were only slightly up.

The picture varies dramatically by geography, too. British revenue actually shrunk 4.7 percent, the rest of Europe and North America rose roughly in line with the organic-growth figure, Asia-Pacific shot up 16.5 percent...and “rest of world” grew by 141.8 percent, with especially good performances in the Middle East, India and Algeria.

Of course, the flood of dinars into JCDecaux’s Algerian pockets is unlikely to compensate for the loss of revenue in the UK – small bases inevitably make for big year-on-year growth figures. But it goes to hammer home a point I’ve made a few times recently: averages for a world do not translate into real figures for an individual market; averages for an individual market do not translate into real figures for a company (JCDecaux revenue grew respectably in North America, yet the Outdoor Advertising Association of America is talking of an essentially flat 2008).

And the capacity of these exceptions to the rules to surprise us should never be underestimated. Britain’s a basket case as far as outdoor’s concerned, right?  Suffering more from the economic crisis than most, with an outdoor market so bad that it was JCDecaux’s only declining territory last year? No wonder all the smart money’s going to the emerging economies.

Well, don’t be so quick to write off the Sceptered Isles if it’s digital you’re interested in. For the digital out-of-home sector specifically, perhaps the most optimistic forecast has come from the Aegis-owned agency Posterscope in the UK, which sees the value of Britain’s digital OOH ad bookings growing 28.4 percent year-on-year to reach £92.5m ($131.4m) in 2009, or just over ten percent of all out-of-home spend.

You read that right – year-on-year growth of nearly 30 percent. And as for those emerging markets, take a glance at Pitch-Madison’s outlook for the Indian advertising sector in the coming year.

Overall ad-market growth, it says, will dip from 17 percent to just two percent...while cinema and outdoor will decrease in value. (Indeed, outdoor was already slowing down during 2008, with 11 percent growth against 28 percent in 2007.) Print and TV, precisely the media that are supposedly close to death in so many markets, will continue to dominate.

Of course, you may say that it’s misleading to expect digital out-of-home in India to follow the same trajectory as the broader outdoor-advertising market, and you’d be right – just as it’s mistaken to presume that because JCDecaux hasn’t been doing well in the UK, its London Torch isn’t selling.

For that’s the point: the experience of individual sub-sectors, individual companies and individual cities rarely conforms exactly to the overall trend. Which is why high-level figures on global out-of-home performance may be relevant to the likes of JCDecaux or Clear Channel who operate in so many media in so many markets – but mean very little to the average digital OOH firm.

Power struggles (0 comments)

The LA billboard row goes on and on: among the latest broadsides is CityWatch’s (mildly) interesting analysis of power consumption. And if that issue floats your boat, you might also want to look at our story on the greening of digital signage in London and Florida.

When is an ad sale not an ad sale? (0 comments)

There are some big numbers being bandied about right now in what seems to be an effort to prove that digital out-of-home can attract serious ad money. But the devil’s in the detail.

Most recently, U.S. golf-course network ProLink Solutions – which runs ads on the GPS navigation screens attached to golf carts – trumpeted a $3m deal with Active International.

Read closely, though, and you’ll see that Active is committed only to purchasing “up to” $3m worth of ads by the end of January 2010 – and that “as part of the agreement, ProLink will receive a guaranteed amount of trade credits. ProLink anticipates using the trade credits to reduce cash expenditures for logistics and freight, travel, entertainment, various services and material purchases.”

In other words, it looks like ProLink is getting some free stuff from Active clients in return for advertising airtime which may or may not be worth $3m.

Meanwhile, a reader has written to us to suggest that the $10m supposedly committed to the medium by Schering-Plough is purely notional and that the airtime is being given away free (the networks’ motivation presumably being to build credibility). We asked Schering-Plough’s press office to clarify the situation, but they told us they never commented on advertising; if you know what the bottom line really is, I’d love to hear from you.

What do customers look for in a supplier? (0 comments)

It’s illuminating to see the priorities of the Irish Defence Forces, which recently awarded a digital-signage contract to Radiant Ireland (competing against 16 other bidders). A post-tender document spells out exactly what weighting was given to each aspect of the job:

1. Price. Weighting: 25%.
2. Fitness for Purpose. Weighting: 40%.
3. Excess over specification. Weighting: 10%.
4. Ease of Installation. Weighting: 5%.
5. Support. Weighting: 5%.
6. Quality of Bid. Weighting: 3%.
7. Training. Weighting: 2%.
8. Site Reference. Weighting: 5%.
9. Financial Capacaty. Weighting: 5%.

So, if the price is right and the system does the job required of it (plus a bit more), you’re already three quarters of the way to perfection. The percentages won’t be the same for every user, of course, but it does imply that focusing on price-performance rather than add-ons like support and training is the smart choice. 

Interesting, too, to see how little importance was placed on the reference site.

Heady stuff (0 comments)

A long time ago, in a sector far far away, I was the guy who penned the headline Every Time You Say “Good”, Di, I Buy A Little.

So aren’t you impressed – come on, just a bit – that I managed to resist She Saw SeeSaw In The C-Store?

Always look on the bright side... (0 comments)

Many years ago, I worked for a magazine publisher (not involved in this sector) whose financial director took an unusual approach to the very obvious, and rapidly approaching, demise of the company in a cloud of unpaid bills: as the Monty Python song put it, when things seemed jolly rotten he'd laugh and smile and dance and sing, as if denial would save the day.

And as it turned out, he may have had good reason to look on the bright side – only after the receivers had come in did it emerge that most of the firm's cashflow difficulties were down to cash flowing in the direction of this gentleman's pockets, and that the authorities in several countries were terribly keen to have full and frank discussions with him.

Now, I wouldn't suggest taking his approach to corporate crises, or personal finance for that matter. But I do think there's a good case for looking on the bright side, or at least the less dark side, when it comes to the survivability of digital out-of-home through these tough times.

The downturn could be short and sharp, or long and shallow, or a truly toxic combo of long and deep. I don't know, and I don't really believe anyone does – too much still rests on unknowns ranging from the behaviour of the big banks, to Obama's New New Deal, to Russia's willingness to play nice again. But what I do know is that the misery will be far from equally spread, and that digital OOH has a good chance of suffering less than many sectors.

Yes, advertising spends will be down overall worldwide, although some territories will fare better than others – according to WPP's Group M, the headline figure of a 0.2 percent worldwide decrease hides a happy reality of 8.7 percent growth in the Middle East and Africa, and a grimmer one of six percent decline in the UK. (Averages can be misleading: remember that the average number of human legs, arms, ears or eyes, or the arithmetic mean if you want to be precise, is less than two.)

But digital OOH's story of reaching well-defined consumers close to the point of decision or purchase – exactly the qualities that the recent Peachtree Media Advisors report suggested make the medium attractive to investors – arguably positions it as a more attractive buy than scattergun mass media for those ad budgets that remain.

Which is where the rather curious math that could allow digital OOH to thrive in a recession comes in. The sector's strength is its size – or rather, its lack of size. It accounts currently for such a tiny fragment of worldwide advertising revenues that even in the context of a global total ad spend that is declining, a relatively small shift in favour of digital OOH could translate into healthy growth for the sector.

I stress relatively small; nobody should seriously believe that the Procter & Gambles and Unilevers of this world are going to utterly desert established media. But they don't have to for the effect to be profound.

That's not to say that digital OOH will escape the hurting altogether. I am sure that the ludicrously large number of lookalike technology offerings on the market today will be trimmed savagely, to  everyone's benefit. And experimental ad spend will all but dry up in many areas, meaning that only those networks which offer a persuasive return on advertisers' investment right now will gain from the shift to this medium.

But the pains will bring long-term gains for the medium, and indeed the venerable research firm DisplaySearch even believes that changing consumer patterns as a result of the downturn may bring actual benefits for digital OOH – larger mass-transit audiences as people seek a cheaper way to travel, larger cinema audiences as expensive vacations are ditched and replaced by less costly amusements.

For this medium, it could turn out to be like the dotcom crash – a corrective period that ultimately strengthened rather than weakened the sector. So don't go thinking just yet that cooking the books is the only answer, like that eternally, and foolishly, optimistic financial director.

What's wrong with this picture? (1 comments)

Lightning does strike twice in the same place, still waters don't run at all, and crime quite often pays: a notion may have entered the collective consciousness or even the realms of cliché, but that's no guarantee that it's true.

And the digital out-of-home sector, like probably every business, has its own misleading truisms – among them “it's not TV” and “content is king”.

“It's not TV.” Often pronounced with the smugness of someone who's uncovered an astounding secret, this can be a dangerously blinding concept, for a couple of reasons.

First, TV these days often isn't what they mean in the statement “it's not TV” - thanks to the proliferation of niche-interest channels and then the arrival of online viewing, the TV experience today isn't limited to the half-hour or hour-long big-budget narrative-oriented show. There's short-form TV, there's textual TV, there's rolling-news TV, and a whole lot of other modes of televisual presentation some of which are well-suited to digital OOH.

Perhaps, then, we should be saying “it's not network TV” or “it's not BBC1”?

That's true – sometimes. It would clearly be absurd to show that kind of programming on shopping-cart screens, say, or digital escalator panels. But there are digital OOH networks where the TV model is appropriate: think of the salon network i-vu with its little chair-side displays, or gym screens, or the screens on the Heathrow Express rail link in London. Indeed, think of pretty much any in-vehicle screen, or even in-flight entertainment systems for that matter.

In all of these situations, the typical audience exposure is measured in double-digit minutes rather than seconds. TV-style programming is ideal for these networks, perhaps in slightly shorter segments than most broadcasters work with, and it's a grave error to write it off – a symptom of ignoring the variations between different out-of-home media situations, often just as important as the similarities.

(Speaking of which...nobody's going to do it in a hurry because it doesn't have the obvious revenue impact of, say, the OVAB metrics guidelines, but we do badly need a taxonomy of digital OOH networks which recognises the huge gulfs between i-vu and Wal-Mart TV and an escalator panel, just the way that newspaper publishers, for example, differentiate among frees and dailies and Sundays and so on. Lumping it all into “digital OOH” in an effort to big up the sector is backfiring, leading to so many dubious generalisations – like “it's not TV”.)

So why is it important to recognise that mimicking TV has a place – could it be because “content is king”? After all, every PowerPoint presentation that reveals “it's not TV” also includes the “content is king” assertion (in fact, it's written into international law that all conferences on digital OOH must repeat these statements at least three times, as well as making a minimum of one Minority Report reference per day).

Unfortunately, content isn't king – or at least not on its own. While good content is, well, good, just as vital is targeted content: the right offering for the right audience. The New York Times, WALL-E, Dancing Queen, the Gospel According to St. John and Picasso's Guernica are all good – great – content in their place...and completely wasted in the wrong place, on the wrong audience, at the wrong time.

That sounds like a no-brainer, and maybe it is for many of us. But I see too many people in this sector – particularly those who don't come from a content-related background – supposing that there's some kind of absolute yardstick of content quality, and provided you score at the high end, your screens are showing the right stuff.

In truth, however, it's much, much better to schedule average-quality content that's perfectly targeted to your audience than to give them top-notch material that they don't want and won't appreciate. To use another well-worn phrase: quality content is in the eye of the beholder.

Man-eating digital billboards from outer space!!!!! (1 comments)

The sheer vehemence of opposition to digital billboards in some U.S. communities continues to bemuse me. What is it that people who’ve presumably lived with TV, and with conventional billboards, for most or all of their lives – and with the Internet for the past decade or so – suddenly have against a medium that in some ways combines the best features of all three?

And the latest tirade suggests that either the residents of Los Angeles have attained a new level of dainty refinement since I lived there a couple of decades ago, or this writer in the Los Angeles Times just can't resist a spot of purple prose.

“Degraded future-world with video screens everywhere assaulting me with propaganda”? A city resembling “a congested constellation of 900 drive-in movie theaters”?

Sure, there are legitimate reasons to raise questions (rather than jump to assumptions) about traffic safety and power consumption, and light pollution if you happen to live next door to one of the things. But come on, guys – it’s not as if LA is some prelapsarian bucolic paradise rudely assaulted by War of the Worldsesque monsters.

There are better things to worry about, and if you (understandably) have a problem with illegally-erected billboards, focus on that – and its implications for local government and urban planning –  rather than getting distracted by imaginary digital monsters.

BusinessWeek features digital OOH (0 comments)

Nothing here will be new to regular SCREENS.tv readers, but it is always nice to see the big business magazines covering this sector...

Fix Wikipedia and help save the world (0 comments)

Wikipedia’s article on digital signage is, frankly, a mess – and although a number of editors (the rather grand Wikipedia term for anyone who cares to contribute) have made efforts to correct this or at least stop it deterioriating into a mire of random statements and commercial Web links, no-one as yet has had the time to give it a major overhaul.

So: Wikipedia, and the noble cause of public understanding of digital signage, need you. Get over there and help improve the article! (You don’t even need to register, though it’s a good idea, and like everything on Wikipedia it’s free.)

One polite word of warning, though, if you’re a Wikinewbie: don’t be tempted to use it to hype, or link to, your company. Apart from any more high-minded considerations, it’s just not worth your time and trouble; another editor will come along a few hours, or even moments, later and remove the self-promotion.

Recession? What recession? (0 comments)

Okay, these three articles have little to do directly with digital signage, but they’re all worth a read to provide some context to this sector (and save some pocket change)...

Media Post has a fun update on what’s cooking at the MIT Media Lab plus some cheeky tips on how to get Wall Street Journal Web content for free.

Meanwhile, Advertising Age has been looking at what the Wall Street meltdown might mean for ad-dependent media. (My take on this: in theory, our medium should suffer comparatively little – and perhaps even thrive – thanks to superior ROI. Working against it, however, is the novelty factor; badly-bruised sectors might prefer to stay with what they know. So I’ll just sit on the wall for now...)

Thought for the day (0 comments)

Nice quote from YCD Multimedia’s Barry Salzman buried in a slightly predictable article on our market from today’s Guardian newspaper: “In 1996 it took three TV ads to reach 85% of women in America, in 2001 it took 100 TV ads and today it’s impossible.”

A pity, though, that the article overplays privacy concerns, which while legitimate are not really all that specific to digital signage; it’s not as if in-store technology is taking intrusiveness to a new level.

Companies gather data, and mine it, and crunch it; this is the world we live in; and if you want to avoid being monitored electronically in that world (as, perhaps, is your right), you have a whole lot more to worry about than a company that’s added a little intelligence to POS promotional technology.

Besides, it’s all too easy to forget that sometimes there are benefits to the consumer too.

Another day, another screen-size record... (0 comments)

Panasonic used the recent IFA event in Berlin to show off a 150-inch plasma display – the world's largest (for now). According to reports, the Panasonic Viera 150 has a resolution of 4096 x 2160 and stands 3.81m tall. No word on availability, but we expect it to reach major markets over the next six months or so.

Quality vs. quantity: more research (0 comments)

If you can stand the infuriating e-magazine interface, it’s worth taking a look at this article in Electronic Retailer Magazine on the need to draw distinctions between viewership and responsiveness. It’s another angle on the search for new ways to describe and assess the characteristics and value of audiences, which we featured in a special report last week.

Online conspicuous by its absence... (0 comments)

Out-of-home (not just digital, of course) was the third most popular medium in the shortlisted campaigns for the Effectiveness Awards from Britain’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. TV came first, print second.

Good reception for Wal-Mart move (0 comments)

Plenty of ink and pixels has been devoted to the next incarnation of Wal-Mart's in-store network; here is one of the more interesting discussions, from a retail rather than a digital-signage perspective. Encouragingly, 80 percent (so far) of those polled feel the Wal-Mart rollout will speed up the growth of in-store media. 

Another way of looking at digital billboards (0 comments)

The great U.S. digital billboards saga continues, and perhaps nowhere does the battle rage more fiercely than in San Antonio, Texas, where local opposition is surely balanced in politicians’ minds by the presence of Clear Channel as a significant employer in the city.

There’s a detailed account of the story so far in this article from a local alternative paper which, perhaps inadvertently, makes one point that the vendors of digital billboard tech would do well to consider. With sentiment in so many places turning against billboards (both conventional and digital) – if indeed sentiment was ever much in favour of them – the greater revenue potential per billboard of the digital variety starts to look very attractive from a PR/regulatory-compliance perspective.

We usually think of digital as a way to make more money – but it can also be a way to make the same money with many fewer sites, and gain a warm fuzzy community reputation along the way.

Of course, as the San Antonio article also points out, there’s the slightly less convenient green aspect to consider too...

Audience metrics: our top eight trends to watch (0 comments)

1. First and most importantly: don’t expect measurement to drift away as an issue. While some digital-signage networks are getting by nicely with few and crude metrics, for the sector as a whole the absence of a clear, standardised, reliable system of audience measurement is the single biggest barrier to going mainstream and gaining the trust of brands and ad agencies.

2. Expect the ultimate solutions to come from pan-industry bodies and very likely from organisations outside this sector, rather than from specialist screen-media metrics firms. Why? The answer’s simple: a means of comparing OOH screen metrics with those for other media is what the agencies really need, and bespoke measurement methods that can only be applied to screen media don’t provide that. Clever though many of them are, they’re likely to end up as useful adjuncts rather than the main methods of measurement.

3. Leaders will emerge. In the UK, look to Postar – the measurement organisation that already covers non-digital out-of-home – and researchers Ipsos MORI to provide the basic currency of screen-media measurement. But don’t hold your breath: it’s unlikely to be firmed up before the end of the decade. Organisations from the sector such as POPAIdigital and The Screen will have significant input.

In the States, meanwhile, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau (OVAB) is leading the way, with heavyweight support from an assembly of big screen-media players and other media firms – including, crucially, the measurement firms ACNielsen and Arbitron. Earlier this year, Nielsen committed to start providing ratings for networks including IdeaCast and Gas Station TV, while Arbitron’s Portable People Meter, devised for radio, can be applied to out-of-home too.

4. Accept that once the dust has settled on the great quest for metrics – around 2011, perhaps? – it’s very likely that there will be different methods for different kinds of screen media. After all, does it make much sense to measure a digital billboard in the same way as a salon chair-side screen? Content, dwell time, the mood of the audience and the trade-off between high numbers and high quality are dramatically different. Many in the sector argue that it’s a motley bag of rather disparate media lumped together under the heading “digital OOH”, and the development of metrics is likely to prove them right.

5. Don’t expect an international solution. Other media are measured in different ways around the world, and media planning and buying are largely done on a per-territory basis, so there’s not much precedent or incentive for an international metric. One possible exception comes from the world of in-store TV, though: Nielsen In-Store and the In-Store Marketing Institute (ISMI) have been working on PRISM (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric), which could provide a measurement standard for all in-store media on both sides of the Atlantic.

6. Look out for more technology innovation. The measurement accessory du jour is the camera, used by companies like Japan’s NEC, France’s QuiVidi, Canada’s Xuuk and Israel’s TruMedia. Some are combining it with face-recognition technology to enable truly accurate measurement of exactly how many people viewed a given screen and for how long, as well as making a stab at their age and gender.

But while such  high-tech measurement methods will undoubtedly prove useful in some applications – for example, validating short-term digital-signage installations, or testing potential screen venues – we don’t believe they’ll become the standard. In the end, brands and agencies will prefer metrics that can be easily applied to any network, without complex extra equipment at the site.

Meanwhile, pocket-sized devices like Arbitron’s Portable People Meter and Nielsen Outdoor’s Nielsen Personal Outdoor Device – which uses GPS to track the movements of a sample group of consumers and establish which advertising sites they have encountered – are likely to provide much of the basic data necessary for understanding trip patterns, while controlled experiments with gaze-tracking systems will make clear how consumers interact with advertising on a moment-by-moment basis.

In retail, ever-tighter integration of screen-media networks with POS and – eventually – RFID systems will lead to increasingly solid numbers on sales uplift.

7. Expect a growing emphasis on qualitative and behavioural aspects of the consumer, as well as audience numbers and demographics. (See the report we published today.) This will be especially true in the UK supermarkets sector, hugely competitive and able to fund the chunky research needed.

8. Don’t expect to attend many presentations on screen-media measurement without hearing references to (a) Google entering the market and (b) Minority Report coming true. Our money’s on (a) happening first, though if Google is eyeing this sector, it’s more likely to come in with an integrated local-advertising offer that combines online, newspapers, broadcast and outdoor than just with a measurement system. 

Focus: still waiting for the money... (0 comments)

A while back I wrote about worries that Focus Media in China might run up against cashflow issues...and it seems the grounds for concern are still there.

While Focus's latest quarterly results continue to show spectacular growth in most areas other than in-store TV (which should improve once the restructuring necessitated by the CGEN acquisition has been completed), accounts receivable are still sitting unpaid for an average 124 days, little better than in the previous quarter.

Grail-seeking (0 comments)

The next metrics buzzword may be "fusion". As this well-written article explains, it's a kind of data mining (though the article doesn't use the term) which compares media consumption and purchase patterns across a mass of individuals to determine which media will actually reach those who buy a given product category, with a degree of precision that even the best demographic targeting can't equal.

For example, the media planner can use fusion techniques to target "true heavy beer consumers, as opposed to men 18 to 34."

Sounds good, doesn't it? But like any other approach, it's going to need some fine-tuning. At least in its simplest form, it's less useful for campaigns that seek to change rather than reinforce behaviour (how do you target "people who don't drink beer at the moment, but would probably like it"?). And of course there are groups that by its nature it can't identify, for example the lucrative first-time parents market (who by definition have never bought baby products before; indeed, a whole lot of their consumption patterns are about to change abruptly).

Most likely, the real value will come through correlating multiple behaviours. For example, consumers who purchase white wine and cola drinks might be good potential converts to beer: they evidently like chilled alcoholic drinks and are also not averse to drinks from cans.

All this, of course, presupposes that the presumption underlying fusion is correct  – that people exhibiting these behaviours are not randomly spread all over the place in terms of media consumption.

But if there's a trend toward this analytic technique, digital signage stands to gain (as, I suspect, do all kinds of specialist and niche media, at the expense of big-numbers primetime TV). The place-based nature of the medium already implies a certain degree of behavioural similarity on the part of its consumers, which the fusion approach should confirm. 

The law of unintended consequences in action (0 comments)

An odd, but logical, side effect of the increase in fuel prices: U.S. consumers are pumping less gas, therefore spending less time at the fuel pumps, therefore watching less forecourt TV. The obvious way to address this (and thereby improve the C-store sales uplift of the gas stations, which are suffering already from the decreased fuel spend) is to slow down the flow of fuel; but I've no idea if that's possible. Answers, please, on the back of a five-dollar bill.

Mind you, there's a bright side. The CEO of Lamar, which needs all the positive spin it can get right now, reckons that higher gas prices mean more carpooling, and that means "more attentive eyeballs" for roadside billboards.

Implausible development of the month (0 comments)

The company's latest financials may have investors weeping, but one Oregon artist is finding laughs in Lamar with what we think may be the first ever comic strip on the theme of digital billboards.

Take a look at the latest strip here.

Can Disney be far behind? 

Focus: is cashflow an issue? (0 comments)

Well, I was wrong when I suggested that Focus's Q1 results wouldn't reflect the disappearance of the wireless business; indeed, the quarter's headline loss figure was entirely down to an accounting adjustment made for just that purpose.

Even so,  scepticism of Focus continues on Wall Street today after Friday's price plunge and massive trading volume. At around midday (U.S. time) today Focus stock had dipped to 30.12. That's very close to the 52-week low, and Focus's valuation is now a full 25 percent down on the 30 May figure.

Meanwhile, the influential Seeking Alpha Website makes a point that just could prove prophetic:

The company is clearly growing at exponential rates but an Achilles heel may be developing with the accounts receivable list growing and days sales outstanding heading the wrong way. A quarter is 90 days. So basically, on March 31 the company still had not been paid for sales from the last week of November 07.

I don’t care what you may say about cultural differences of operating in...China, all business cultures understand cash. This company may have a big problem.

We won't have a clear Focus for a while (0 comments)

In the past few months, we've carried a number of stories on new contenders for the role of China's top digital-signage company  – a role which just a couple of years ago few doubted would be occupied for the foreseeable future by Focus Media Holding.

So Focus's Q1 results, due after the U.S. markets close today (Focus is listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker symbol FMCN), will be much picked-over – and all being well, we'll have a detailed report in place on Friday It will be particularly interesting to see how digital-signage installations are progressing, and how much new business is coming in.

But it's worth noting that while the latest financials will give some indication of where Focus is heading, they won't reflect the blow dealt to its SMS business toward the very end of the quarter, when Focus was accused by Chinese authorities of spamming.

What's more, revenue figures for the second and third quarters (at the very least) are likely to be quite distorted by the Olympics effect.

It may not be until the beginning of 2009 that we can determine how strong Focus's position really is.

Ubiquitous networking (0 comments)

BT futurologist Nicola Millard has produced a white paper entitled The Multichannel Swap Shop: Exploring the Behaviour of the Multitasking, Multicultural, Multichannel Customer.  Much of it concerns the relationship of Internet to bricks-and-mortar retail, but there are some thought-provoking points for our sector, like this:

The biggest consideration for companies with respect to multichannel strategies is the increasing convergence of networked devices combined with the increasing ubiquity of the internet. Convergence will start to blur the physical and the virtual worlds through the use of GPS, RFI ID tags and machine readable physical objects such as ‘shortcodes’, ‘SMS codes’, ‘QR codes’ or ‘UPCODES’, which can be printed on packaging or advertising material.

Hypertag, where a code is embedded into advertising posters, has already been successfully trialled with users able to order products using their phone and a short code. ScanSearch and ScanZoom have been trialled in Japan and the US. ScanSearch, from Amazon Japan, allows the 27% of Japanese customers who currently own a mobile phone equipped with a barcode reader to compare prices on the go with those on Amazon.co.jp and, if lower, buy straight from Amazon via their phone. ScanZoom allows customers to take a photo of a product’s bar code and then get access to PriceGrabber or Amazon’s information for that product, from product descriptions and customer ratings to pricing.

Physical spaces can start to be embedded with social networks - stories, memories, opinions and other social information left by individuals, groups and businesses. This so-called “geo-web” will enable people with mobile devices to access information relevant to their current location – including information sensitive to locale and local culture. Imagine being able to post reviews of hotels or restaurants whilst actually still being there and instantly having that information available to all.

In this converged world, customers can simultaneously be present in both the physical and virtual world. So there need to be tools to manage presence markers (i.e. I am here), attention management tools (i.e. there is something that might be of interest to you here) and the ability to multicontext (i.e. switch between physical and, potentially multiple, virtual channels). For companies, this allows the possibility of helping customers to shop and get service using location data as well as the data in CRM systems.

In addition, products get social and services get smart – whether through the power of IP (Ipv6 addresses) or self-configuring sensor networks. Connected devices (phones, computers, mp3 players, TVs etc) increasingly become intelligent servicing platforms, diagnosing, updating, reordering and supporting an array of products and services without the need for any human intervention (unless, of course, they choose to be involved).

You can download the white paper here.

Silver screen? More like gold (0 comments)

To intermittently-sunny Brixton in south London today, wearing my other hat as an independent film exhibitor, for a conference with the inevitably punning title Independents' Day.

The news for Britain's cinema-exhibition sector is...well, let's put it this way: it's not as gloomy as it is for many of our mainstream media. Audiences are way way up on the grim days of the 1970s and 1980s, and ad revenue, while not exactly soaring Internet-style, is at least showing growth in good years. This year the annual growth rate should be more or less on a par with outdoor's, in fact.

And as well as the familiar pre-show reel, there's another aspect of cinema advertising that's attracting much interest: place-based promotions, including foyer screens. The digital side of this is not a huge market yet, but it can only be expected to grow as the move to digital projection leads cinemas to install more infrastructure, and as acceptance of screen media in general grows.

But the really nice thing about these ad opportunities is the audience. Not only is it younger and more affluent than the population as a whole, but it's in a great mood: the top five traits of cinema identified by audiences surveyed for the 2008 Film Audience Measurement and Evaluation survey were "glamorous", "clever", "trendy", "upmarket" and "sexy". Many marketers would kill for brand associations like those.

What's more, the same survey showed that not only do 85 percent of cinema visitors usually watch the (big-screen) advertisements, and a full half discuss them afterwards, they also spend an average of 18 minutes in the building but not in the auditorium itself - primarily, of course, in the foyer, refreshment, or cafe/bar areas.

The audience loves the environment, is in the mood to watch ads (very likely encouraged in this by the extremely high creative values and often intriguingly wacky concepts of British cinema advertising)....and hangs around for nearly 20 minutes. What better recipe for a screen-media location? 

Thought for the day (0 comments)

“Digital signage is coming almost to be an alternative name for our industry.”

Neil Weinstock of Be Media, writing about the commercial AV sector.

Casino signage: lots of innovation, lots of regulation (1 comments)

Digital Signage Expo Day Two, and there was too much happening on the news front to spend a lot of time in the conference sessions – not least Dynamax’s deal with Clear Channel, which really catapults the former company into the big leagues internationally and not just in the UK.

But there were a few interesting sessions going on upstairs at the Las Vegas Convention Center, not least a panel discussion on digital signage in the (U.S.) casino business. Chaired by Bill Yackey, who edits Another Website and I suppose ought to be my mortal enemy but isn’t, the panel also featured Brent Brown, VP of International Business Systems; Drew Topel, now director of media technology with Titan Outdoor in the U.S. and previously on the other side of the fence with CoolSign; and Lance Hutchinson, director of Digital Display Group.

The first thing that struck me was the incredible amount of regulation these guys have to put up with when installing their screen-media systems – not only from state authorities, but also from the administrations of the individual Native American tribal territories in which so many U.S. casinos are located. Essentially, it seems, any technology that physically or virtually touches the actual gaming systems has to be ratified before it can be installed, lest it affect the fairness of the games.

The underlying rationale of consumer protection behind this kind of regulation may be difficult to fault, but it means that even apparently innocent applications such as remote diagnostics, let alone real-time jackpot displays, have to get through the red tape.

But the specialists in this field clearly do manage to get through it, because Topel and Hutchinson pointed out some interesting gaming trends,which I offer in no particular order:

• “Proximity meters” visually indicate how close a given player is to a jackpot – not necessarily the big one, but enough to keep them playing. Increasing individuals’ playing time is a goal for casino operators.
• Devices like this may be necessary in order to create a buzz in today’s casinos, which are increasingly cashless, relying on ticketed plays instead. With the chunk-chink of a big prize paid in quarters gone from the soundtrack, can digital signage provide the same allure?
• To the same end, casinos are dividing screens into segments so that the current jackpot total is always present – rather than disappearing while other messages are shown.
• And all this, said Hutchinson, also ties in with the use of digital signage to “affect perception of luck and winning” – a big part, of course, of casinos’ psychological marketing.
• On a tech level, LCD screens actually mounted inside slot machines are on the rise, said Topel.
• Finally, digital-signage screens can also be used to show conventional TV during special events, such as big sports games. (If nothing else, this dual purpose should mean that the digital signage benefits from good screen size and quality.)
  

And they lived together happily ever after (0 comments)

Ad agencies love us. No, really, they do, according to Jack Sullivan, senior VP and out-of-home media director at Starcom Worldwide.

And all we need to do to take the affair to the next stage is give them the kind of insights they need to properly assess the effectiveness of our screen-media networks – assuming, that is, that they are effective in the first place.

Sullivan made these semi-reassuring points in a panel discussion at Digital Signage Expo on Wednesday (along with the ubiquitous Steve Platt of the eponymous institute and Brian Dusho of BroadSign, both of whom surely either have doppelgangers or never get into the office).

“Clients love this medium, they love the digital mindset,” he said. “There isn’t a plan at agencies where it isn’t thought about seriously.”

But agencies need more information, he pointed out, including a research currency that is consistent  with those used in other out-of-home media.

And qualitative info is important too, according to Sullivan.

Rather than just getting numbers, he said, “I’m more apt to want to know the mindset of the commuter as they travel malls, commute…there’s a huge field of behavioural science out there for advertisers”.

When contemplating a network buy for a client, said Sullivan, he looks beyond the simplistic claim that a screen in a venue constitutes coverage of that venue – after all, we’re all familiar with some terrible screen locations, like the one Sullivan mentioned in a corridor leading to the washrooms.

He considers factors including the geographical locations of the venues; the nature of the venue itself (footfall and so on); and the number and positioning of screens.

“You have to, at the end of the day, deliver impressions – not opportunities to see – I want  likely to see,” he said.

“Preach [that] we are the medium that sells – other media reach consumers, we reach decision-makers, we are the end-aisle display.”

Global AND local? Reuters manages it... (1 comments)

Reuters’ digital-signage supremo Christopher Burtt and JCDecaux North America’s CIO Eric Penot joined me on Wednesday for a panel discussion at Digital Signage Expo, on the refreshingly non-specific topic of digital signage around the world.

That didn’t rule much out, so I got to all but circumnavigate the globe (from China to Brazil), throwing in deeply prejudiced opinions on what’s hot and what won’t be, as well as a few neologisms (though I’ve just been disappointed to find that according to Google, about 300,000 people came up with “Chindia” before me).

And Penot had some fantastic pictures of JCDecaux’s transport installations which really brought home the power of some of the company’s airport work, in particular.

But it was the presentation from Reuters’ Burtt that highlighted better than any I’ve heard recently how the devil really is in the detail of a screen-media project.

Although one of its Times Square installations (the one opposite the NASDAQ) is revenue-generative, Reuters is using digital signage primarily to get its brand out there – particularly in front of the finance professionals who are the customers for its lucrative business-information service, now a much more important part of the company than the news agency for which it first became famous.

Typical of this approach is its Infopoint network (which uses Wireless Ronin technology), with units placed in, for example, the lobbies of large financial institutions. Infopoint units are also placed in Reuters’ own offices to keep staff aware of the range of Reuters’ information businesses.

So, with a network that includes many third-party sites around the world, how does Reuters ensure the whole thing keeps running smoothly?

Burtt’s key lessons: make it easy to install and support, ensure it is accepted locally, and follow a philosophy of “central control with regional flexibility”.

Sounds great. What does it mean in practice?

Central control means: a standard ordering process, plug-and-play installation, limited configuration options, instructions in simple English (for the benefit of non-native speakers), brand guidelines, and “push” rather than “pull” updates (that is, centralised network  control sends updates to the individual displays, rather than waiting for requests).

Flexibility, on the other hand, means: content in the local language; using local experts to customise content (getting little things like date formats and temperature scales right matters, says Burtt), and allowing local content within defined constraints.

All pretty obvious, eh? But I suspect the fact Burtt made it sound so easy is testament not to an easy ride for Reuters, but to plenty of sweat, tears and learning the hard way on the part of Burtt and his team. 

Beyond Chindia (0 comments)

So I’m sitting in Vegas, making some last-minute amends to my presentation at this week’s Digital Signage Expo, and waiting for a snail-slow AOL connection (for which thanks to fellow SCREENS.tv blogger Steve Gold, who leapt to the rescue after my…no, you really don’t want the soap opera of my laptop woes, do you? I’m sure you have your own.)

Anyway, this gives me time to think a bit laterally around the obvious topics of my presentation, which is going to focus on some of the more interesting recent deployments outside the American market.

And one of the questions which strikes me is: when asked about the next big markets for screen media, we’ve all said “China, India” so often that it’s becoming Pavlovian. But where else – specifically, not just in vague regional terms?

Here’s a shortlist to kick the discussion off, at least.

The Middle East is a no-brainer and indeed there are already signs of conference/expo activity there, which is a good indicator. The UAE and particularly (but by no means exclusively) the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are likely to be early hotspots; we’ve also reported recently on a flurry of activity in Turkey.

Among the other nations, I’d give serious attention to the potential of Egypt, Lebanon if or when stability permits, and Saudi Arabia for some applications, not forgetting either the small nations of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, which should all exhibit UAE-style demand. All these can be serviced from the Gulf relatively easily. Israel of course is also a likely player with a strong tech and media pedigree.

Latin America is a big place and I think we can separate it into three strong markets. First, Mexico. Second, Brazil. Third, Argentina (which is largely to say Buenos Aires) and Chile. Serving these may well require on-the-ground presence in multiple cities.

Central and eastern Europe, with its patchwork of languages, cultures and histories, is perhaps even less cohesive than LatAm. There’s been a fair bit of activity already in Poland, but there’s surely room for much more; Hungary has struck me as pretty quiet to date, an impression that a quick screen-media-hunt on a recent expedition to Budapest did nothing to dispel; the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Ukraine and of course Romania, where Monopoly Media is already so active, should all go on our shortlist too.

We're also hearing encouraging things about a ramp-up of activity in South Africa.

And I’d turn to the Antarctic market next, except the AOL download has finally finished. Maybe at DSE…

Don't tell the anti-billboard campaigners... (2 comments)

We've heard both sides of the argument surrounding digital roadside billboards' impact on safety, and it seems that if carefully designed without too much motion they don't have a deleterious impact on drivers' attention. But there's a new twist with this report in Time magazine suggesting that roads could be safer without (most) signage, full stop -- and yes, that includes road signs.

In a nutshell, the Dutch engineer whose concept this is believes that if you take away the signs, drivers will be forced to pay attention to their environment. (We thought paying too much attention to the environment was the supposed problem with digital billboards, but what do we know?)

The sincerest form of...something (1 comments)

I could have sworn that colleague Paul Mallaghan and I had left aka.tv for the verdant new pastures of SCREENS.tv, but comparing their piece on Wal-Mart's animated Lisa with our earlier reporting of the same story (read down a few paragraphs), not to mention their piece on the Tommy Hilfiger window touchscreens with our story -- again a few days earlier than aka's -- I had to wonder if it was all a dream...

Expo Day 2: the marketer, the adman and the designer (0 comments)

Harrods' advertising and sales promotion director Guy Cheston, Jon Lewen from CBS Outdoor's Alive operation and Mick Nash from design firm Sedley Place joined me this morning at Screen Expo Europe for a forum session in the Advertising Theatre, to a standing-room-only house.

The first question we looked at: are screens a medium for brand-building, for a POS call to action, or for both?

Cheston was adamant that in Harrods' experience they're good both ways. He said their brand-building value was particularly high when applied to international brands, but also pointed to uplift of as much as 58 percent during promotions for brands like Bulgari and Hermes, falling away after the on-screen activity ends.

Lewen, being from an outdoor firm, was understandably strong on the brand-building potency of the screen. He pointed out that screens in outdoor-advertising locations follow in the billboard tradition of engaging whole communities -- an answer to media fragmentation?

Nash, whose firm works on (among other things) the world-famous Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus, agreed with Cheston that screens have both brand-building and POS possibilities.

And he said it was time to start "treating public displays as a class of media in their own right", saying that it's the only one in which both the medium and the audience are simultaneously dynamic. (The video moves -- so do the viewers.)

Interaction

Speaking from the floor, Chris Borek of Target (the U.S. retailer) turned the discussion to interaction, and it soon emerged that -- despite the near-universal prediction of interactivity as a growing characteristic of screen media over the next year or two -- the devil's in the detail.

Target was sometimes finding the physical environment of its stores an obstacle in the way of interaction, Borek said.

Cheston suggested that from Harrods' experience, its best use was probably in directional and way-finding applications, while Lewen felt the key was to seamlessly link the interactive experience to what's happening on-screen. Anyone who's used a supposedly interactive screen that doesn't respond to user input in an expected and obvious way will know what a turn-off that is.

Content

Finally -- and a little off-agenda -- our panel looked at content, making some points that backed up what Rocketgroup's Christopher Eades and other speakers had been saying in the Content Theatre the previous day.

Just like Eades, CBS Outdoor's Lewen felt there had been a "huge step up" in the quality of content over the last year. But Sedley Place's Nash cautioned that some were still tempted to blindly repurpose from other media. Adaptation of existing executions for the giant Piccadilly Circus signage, he said, "fundamentally does not work".

Through the window

Elsewhere at Expo, there was a good no-nonsense presentation from 3M's Lloyd Cole in the Thought Leadership Pavilion -- talking through the benefits of the digital shop window.

On the average British High Street at least, he pointed out, window-dressing hasn't changed much in a century (we're not talking about showcase sites like Oxford Street here) so there's plenty of scope to make more of this, the retailer's most obvious point of visual contact with the outside world.

I was sorry to miss Duncan Ross of London & Continental Stations & Property talking about the new St. Pancras International Train Station, and Julian Treasure on the role of audio in screen media, among other speakers. We're planning to make at least some of the presentations available for download on SCREENS.tv, so watch this space. 

Screen Expo Europe 2008: concentrating on content (0 comments)

Content was inevitably going to play a big part in this Expo, with a dedicated Content Theatre and a growing awareness of its importance to network success.

Paul Maidment from BBC Motion Gallery had a few good pointers. Pick the right partner and develop the right brief; don't overlook the arduous process of obtaining clearances for associating famous names with your brand; and perhaps most importantly "know your audience -- don't give them fluffy content when they want factual content". That was a piece of advice that was to be repeated by several speakers. 

For example, Alex Hughes from AMiGO. "Do not annoy them [consumers]," he said. "Be sympathetic to their mindset -- understand their mission." And remember that "they're donating their time" to hearing your message.

It helps to remind yourself that you too are a consumer when trying to understand audiences, he added.

I'm sure Hughes would agree with Maidment that it's a mistake to deliver fluff when what your audience wants is seriousness. But he did point out that "there's nothing better than getting someone's attention by making them laugh or smile -- don't underestimate the power of entertainment".

Christopher Eades from Rocketgroup had some encouraging things to say for the content-creation side of the sector. It's been a positive year, he said, with quality improving -- partly because there are now more companies operating in the field, but also because the clientele is changing.

Eades has worked on the content-creation side for six years, he said, and until this year work mostly came his way from network owners. Now, it's coming from the advertising agencies, which are "finally realising the value that outdoor digital has".

With this shift in the content creators' client base come  correspondingly higher demands on content. Rocketgroup is therefore also adjusting its business model to be more client-facing -- "agencies won't settle for less than that".

Peter Miles from SUBtv was a predictably entertaining speaker, making the point (like so many others, not least Nancy Radermecher of ScreenRed) that technology is all very well, but "the main goal is engaging and communicating messages". Too many people focus on what can be done, not why, he said.

SUBtv continues to develop its innovative model that takes advantage of the characteristics of its very specific market -- university students. They're at a clearly-defined life stage, said Miles, leaving home for the first time and likely to be around their new location for three to four years.

To some extent I suppose this is the kind of audience that you don't always have to research to understand -- their student status by definition attributes certain characteristics to (the majority) of them. (One which may surprise many readers is that they spend more on personal-grooming products than the average consumer.)

Among SUBtv's latest wheezes is to distribute information on university sports personalities not only through its own network, but also through Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Setanta and so on.

And that's more evidence of a common theme emerging from today's sessions -- screens are a (sometimes great) means of delivery, but it's not so much the means as the content and the audience that count. 

Screen Expo Europe 2008: the future for retail (0 comments)

(This is the first of two posts today in which I'll report on some of the highlights of the speaker programme at Expo -- more tomorrow, I hope. Of course, I didn't get to hear everyone, so omissions don't mean anything.)

"If you have to predict the future, you're going to get it wrong." That's how Screen Media Magazine and SCREENS.tv's own Guy Kewney kicked off his keynote in the Advertising Theatre at Screen Expo Europe 2008 today -- and of course, predicting the future is precisely what he went on to do.

Among Kewney's prognostications was that "the Sainsbury's Lesson will at some point become the standard method of doing not just POS marketing, but promotional marketing". This lesson, in case you were wondering, comes from the world of (pre-digital) direct mail, where Sainsbury's figured out that thanks to data mining it could send mailshots only to people who were likely to buy.

And digital just enhances our ability to do that, said Kewney: "We will be able to promote our brands to the right market for a fraction of the cost we have today."

But he raised questions over the viability of the mobile phone as the answer to all a marketer's dreams -- questions that may reinforce the role that fixed screens have to play. When it comes to mobiles, said Kewney, "you have a choice -- either moving pictures or good battery life" -- and nothing is more likely to annoy consumers quickly than running down their batteries with your promotional messaging.

Some have proposed the theoretical possibility of actually transmitting power into a mobile device but, said Kewney, "I don't take it seriously".

Gavin Anderson from Retail Radar disagreed with Kewney on the role of mobile, and had some interesting insights to offer into the shop of the future.

"The single point of communication for the customer is the mobile phone," Anderson said, and -- although the view isn't universally shared -- he's a big proponent of Bluetooth as the means of delivering information (that's information, not mindless promotions) to shoppers.

It's information, Anderson believes, that conveys customers along the sales process. Historically this was offered by the shop assistant; now, for many consumers, it's coming off the Web. So where Bluetooth or similar technologies can add value is by dragging the customers back into the shop to give them information alongside the actual products.

Another interesting example of tech leading to sales uplift given by Anderson was the clothes retailer's changing room. Enhancing the changing room with interactivity can lead to more items being tried on -- and bought.
 

Bits from Shinoda (0 comments)

The LCD-vs-plasma-vs-everything-else debate totters on. Latest into the fray is Shinoda Plasma (which I misread at first as Shinola Plasma). Tech-On!, a pretty good site for tech news from Japan, reports that the chairman of Shinoda – which  is planning to start production of 142-inch plasma units later this year – sums up the contenders thus:

“To realize digital signage of more than 100 inches with current technologies, the following methods [other than plasma - BP] are possible: (1) projector, (2) LED display, (3) multi-vision LCD display and (4) PDP. However, Shinoda pointed out (1) has a low brightness, (2) has a low resolution and high cost, (3) has nondisplay areas between displays and (4) requires heavy equipment investments.”

Naturally enough, Shinoda favours plasma. Fine – all the competing technologies have their virtues. What does bug me, however, is this notion that there is a single perfect display for digital signage. Even at a given screen size, it all depends on the application and the location, and any vendor arguing otherwise is just misleading customers in a marketplace that’s already rather confusing to the newcomer. 

"Madison Avenue now runs through the Googleplex" (0 comments)

Fun and thought-provoking piece from that ever-readable finance Website, The Motley Fool, supposedly looking back at Google's growth from the perspective of the year 2010. Among predictions of the monster's steady progress in a range of spheres where it hasn't yet had much influence - from social networking to, yes, digital billboards - is this interesting comparison: "Google became the Focus Media of the West." A throwaway line, but one which makes you wonder about the scope of Focus's ambition, too...

What to expect in '08 (0 comments)

With 2008 now well and truly embarked upon, what can we expect in the screen-media sector this year?

More of the same, I think: growth rather than revolution.

Big screens will continue to get bigger, weirdly-shaped screens will continue to get weirder. Interaction will become ever more commonplace.

Sectors beyond retail will become ever more retail’s equal. Ad sales will increase in professionalism. Content will improve as the medium becomes better understood.

Small companies will consolidate; a few will go public. EnQii will be a name to watch,  and so, many predict, will Cisco. Other big names from outside the sector may enter it.

And the $64m question will remain: is Google really interested in us? 

Scala: still with us (0 comments)

The news that Scala posted record sales in 2007 will come as a surprise to some: there are those in the sector who tend to write it off as yesterday's company. It's interesting, then, that despite all the attention given to those players which are trying to offer some more exciting permutation of tech, content, management and sales, Scala has shown that two serviceable but unsexy software products along with a decent sales force can keep it happily in business.

Worth bearing in mind next time you hear a pitch for the Next Titanic Thing among screen-media suppliers. And don't forget all those juicy opportunities to upgrade long-standing clients, again, and again, and again...

Coming soon to a news vendor near you? (0 comments)

Take-up of screen media in the news retail trade has been surprisingly slow, despite WHSmith’s appealing network in Britain and a handful of Stateside examples. Comtech M2M’s Extra could be the device that changes that – and perhaps the most impressive aspect of its design is that it doesn’t require the retailer’s involvement.


Not only will this help avoid problems with stale news staying on-screen when an update is forgotten, but we expect it will soon be exploited – particularly by local publishers with their dense networks of dedicated vendors – as not only a promotional tool, but a news medium in itself.

Thanks to the Web, newsrooms are rapidly going multimedia; now they can add screen-media content to their output. 

Wearable media (0 comments)

I've just posted a great overview on wearable media, written by our regular contributor Alison Classe - it's here.

But I can't help thinking there's something of the emperor's new clothes about wearable media. And in this case, the great unspoken truth is that wearable screens look silly.

Of course, silly can be fun, and that's a point in the favour of wearable media for promoting fun products and services - which typically means promoting leisure to a youthful demographic that's comfortable interacting not only with digital media, but also with complete strangers on the street.