The SCREENS.tv Blog

No CAN DOOH? (3)

 

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...

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