2009 was AWESOME….as stressful as it may have been, it defined the future of our medium and the success we will see over the next 3 years

My best to all of you> Happy Holidays.

I’ll see you in 2010

The realities of today’s DOOH consideration inside of larger media strategies is that, once selected, the money to support the business has to come from somewhere.  For the purposes of this post, I will exclude “Digital Outdoor” (e.g. the really bright superboards or Time’s Square digital), which Erik alludes to in the piece, as not included in DOOH in general as it really is a different animal than retail or place based networks.

That somewhere is straight out of the pockets of print and outdoor.  Rarely have I seen dollars come in to DOOH from Internet (although occasional) or TV.  Money for our medium is being pulled out of print budgets.  It also is cannibalizing the existing OOH/Outdoor revenues.  Times are definitely turbulent in the Outdoor world, despite some great creative executions by some Outdoor companies and agencies.  In some cases, media decisions are being made to completely remove Outdoor from the mix, finding DOOH actually helps fill in gaps in reach and tactics that Outdoor can’t.  On the flip side, the decisions to execute media programs these days are made days before launching – not weeks.  The 4-6 week lead time required by traditional outdoor firms simply doesn’t fit into some of this year’s media realities.  Maybe this is why some folks are saying that the OOH business will be 100% digital in 10 years hmmm?

Check out Erik’s article here

Thought it was a good list and examples of decent creative and exploration run through 2009 to take a look at.  Looking forward to some of the advance use of the medium I expect to see in 2010!

Take a look here

I’ve said for some time that Digital OOH is the “Physical Manifestation of Digital” and we will become central as a medium to extending online programs, driving education and facilitating interaction on a one-2-one, data driven conversation level for brands and between consumers.

If you think you’ve seen what Digital OOH can really do, you ain’t seen nothing yet….as more and more money comes into the DOOH medium, new, better and cleaner content and technological capabilities will emerge making the medium stronger and increasingly relevant.  As Anderson states in the article:

“Connecting remote data to people and things in real-time will lead to a series of exciting new devices and applications. Possible examples: real-time comparison and recipe-driven shopping, facial recognition (in social spaces) linked to bios, self-guided tours by phone, voice-queried information about your personal environment. Many of these are technically proved out today, but they will start to emerge as an exciting and brand new trend in applications in 2010.”

You don’t have to BE the conversation in today’s world….you just need to be part of it…

Ad Age piece is here

TV’s back in bold (at least until DVR utilization reaches 50%). Newspapers are down and not coming back anytime soon….mainly due to fatigue with the medium and advertiser allocation of print $s towards exploration into other, newer mediums.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=140834

That being said, some other folks have been busy recapping recent events including the OVAB show, Ad:Tech, The Digital Signage Show, the ANA Masters of Marketing, Media Innovation Awards, etc.  It was great seeing folks at all of these and reconnecting.

Jeff, Graeme and team have got a number of recap posts up on DOOH over on the ADCENTRICITY blog. The Daily DOOH team and Haynes have also got pieces.  So I personally have nothing interesting to say right now but thought I’d point you at some people who do:

• Media Innovation Awards
• OVAB Show
• ANA Masters of Marketing
• KioskCom

1. Seth is a great author and speaker and always provides interesting insights
2. I loved how he starts off his talk relating the lack of wants for monks to use change because they’re busy and like how they’re doing things now.  While Seth was talking about the publishing industry, it just as easily relates to the media business – People don’t want to start to use a better mousetrap if they don’t have to and will let you go your own way until it becomes either a threat or beneficial to them.
3. As he says in his talk, the powers that be aren’t incented to be catalysts for change in any business – that’s YOUR job.  As smart as the folks are in ANY business, there is rarely a real incentive at the top to innovate or do a core job very differently.  This means that it’s up to the folks who are effecting the change to….
4. ….prove it.  Prove that your way of doing things is necessary and better than how I’m doing things now.  This is just as true in media…more research and metrics programs anyone? results?
5. Lastly, in listening to all of the strategies and tactics Seth has used over various books, he made mistakes – as you inevitably will when you innovate or “try stuff”.  He learned from those mistakes and improved on them and came out with a better model.  In media, I would relate this to some of the work I did in online advertising in the late 90s.  There were online campaigns we did that were abject failures for our clients…some of them large banks or telecommunication companies.   But we didn’t stop pushing use of the medium nor did my clients shy away from identifying mistakes and improving and going back out to try it again and they became more and more successful the further they got into the medium.  Mistakes are allowed….the first time

There is one part, about half way through that I believe in sooo much.  He discusses a test he did with a book he wrote called the “Dip”.  The test was to write a blog post about HIS new book and the same day write a post about a friend’s book.  That day he sold 3 times more of his friend’s book than his own. Why? because people assume that if he is writing about his own book, he’s “advertising” whereas if he is writing about a friend’s book, it must be because he really likes it and it’s worth buying.

Why is this important to Digital OOH?  I’ve discussed in the past how advertising/advertisers have to be a PART of the conversation in today’s media circus and not BE the conversation….i.e. you yelling about your own products is going to fall on deaf ears.  You using other peoples comments from various sources IN one of your ads adds credibility. Check out twitter to see who is speaking about, say, Orbit Gum.  Sure, there’s some raunchy/weird comments in there, but Orbit customers are generally extolling how much they love it….BY FLAVOR!

So how powerful would using some of their commentary be in an ad in an environment and screen like this:

Right when they get into the store? Using digital conversations on digital screens where products are bought or where conversations are relevant and beneficial to consumers?

We’re finding lots of interesting tidbits of successful DOOH ad use in ways like this and it’s helping to push that “prove it” mentality Seth mentioned.

The video can be viewed here.

Seeing any screen crashed like this is worriesome and does not promote confidence in the space as a whole.  One of the major complaints from agencies about the DOOH medium is that they go on tours and screens are down repeatedly for campaigns they’ve purchased.

While many work very hard to keep their properties up and try to be as responsible as possible, even being up 90% and overdelivering on campaigns is still off by 10% on the audience they are targeting which is 5% too much – minimum.  The media game is a fairly harsh world of “drive for perfection”.  I know others have addressed this before but I needed to bring it up again given I just saw this.

We need to strive to keep all screens up at least 95% of the time…it’s a tough standard but one we need to live for if we’re to build ongoing credibility as a medium.

• July 30 – http://www.robgorrie.com/2009/07/30/why-agencies-should-care-about-shopper-marketing-and-the-path-to-purchase/
• Mar 19 – http://www.robgorrie.com/2009/03/19/satchi-x-agrees-path-and-point-of-purchase/
• Sep 19 – http://www.robgorrie.com/2007/09/19/the-path-to-digital-signage-success/

there are more but that’s a start.

While P&G doesn’t call it the same thing I/ADCENTRICITY does, it has its own name for the way in which you need to consider creative and media executions when trying to speak to the consumer: Store Back

From the article on Ad Age:

store back is meant to be “a mind-set,” not another process in a company that already has plenty. But it’s also clear the mind-set could have a substantial impact on process, elevating the role of shopper marketing to also become a creative gatekeeper. “It means you have to have the end in mind when you’re coming up with the [marketing] idea,” she said. “If it doesn’t work at the store, it’s a miss.”

As Andy Murray from Saatchi & Saatchi X notes:

Andy Murray, CEO of Publicis Groupe shopper-marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi X, said he sees store back elevating the role of shopper marketing at P&G and elsewhere. “It will bring more shopper-marketing insight work into the upstream ideation process,” he said.

He’s sometimes seen initiatives where Saatchi X “has to do some rework to make it work at the store level, and we can probably eliminate that by having better insights about the store built into the front end.”

It’s easy to tack on a shopper-marketing component to most ideas, such as through an adaptation of an ad that runs on in-store TV or a packaging blurb. But store back is supposed to be about ideas designed from the start to resonate with shoppers.

Interesting how this whole shopper marketing and shopper insights stuff is being driven in at the agency level on all fronts.

Many in traditional media have a very hard time wrapping their heads around this whole concept, preferring to stay with what they know.  Shopper marketing, digital and anything that helps facilitate it are coming in strong.  As Andy also says:

“Search advertising is shopper marketing done online,”

The keys to why these changes are coming on so strong can be read in the Ad Age article, but the highlights are:

• PERCEIVED ROI IS UP
• SHOPPER-MARKETING DEPARTMENTS ON THE RIS
• CONVERGENCE WITH DIGITAL
• CONVERGENCE OF CONSUMER AND TRADE BUDGETS
• CONVERGENCE OF CONSUMER AND SHOPPER RESEARCH
• RETAILERS TAKE CHARGE

I recommend reading this article several times…very good insight and Coke and P&G are pushing hard for this type of approach and if you do business with P&G and don’t buy in to the concept of end-to-end creative and media plans, you’ll understand why business with them doesn’t get won as often

Coming originally from Ontario, Ontario Lottery Group was one of the original kids on the block (like 7 years ago!) that implemented a network like this.  Michael Tutton and the crew over there have done a fine job with it. It’s also 10,000 locations/screens strong!

I was a little disappointed in the quality of the hardware…thinking they could have gussied it up and made a pretty sexy unit with the learnings from the other lotto companies that have gone before them. Oh well.

What I got a kick out of is that this unit was at my local bodega and I know the guy well.  The first thing he said when I took a picture was:

I don’t get these guys. Why would they put an expensive screen in my shop just to flash lotto numbers. If they were smart, they’d be selling advertising and giving me a share”

I couldn’t agree more

There are a lot of issues around a state owned platform running commercial ads but that’s a story for another time.