Much has been done in “neuroscience” with regards to marketing and its effect on the human brain to try and understand human emotional response to messaging.  It’s used to make better ad creative and better media choices to enhance the impact of a campaign or advertiser spend.  while the tools aren’t generally used in everyday creative work, there are enough studies that are teaching the marketing community how to make better decisions about what we say and where we say it at a higher level to guide our hands.

What I loved about the article is that it actually covers off on supporting a few key things about DOOH screens and content that are important for marketers to understand:

1. Emotionally based creative on (DOOH) screens is actually more powerful in connecting with consumers (emotionally) than interactive screens although less “engaging” (I found this fascinating to learn)
2. The type of content displayed on a screen is an important variable in connecting with consumers emotionally
3. Empathy is a strong emotional motivator in connecting with screen content
4. Proximity plays an important role in how we perceive content (this was cool too!)

Joe actually alluded to political content during the article and I had to smile because I have personal experience in this “emotional response”, using DOOH screens, that ties right back to this article:

About 18 months ago, we were involved in some contextual political advertising and DOOH factored in heavily to how they were targeting constituents and voters.  One of the plethora of environments we used happened to be Universities….which tend to have more “left leaning” voters based on sheer age.  That being said, one of the ads that ended being digitally distributed to the DOOH screens was a bit of a personal “attack ad” on the character of one of the candidates. The ad was DESIGNED to spur an emotional response. To our great delight, the student reaction to the ads on the screens was so strong that the university was overwhelmed with calls and emails about the campaign message on the screens and how the students felt it was inappropriate messaging.  The party was forced to take down the ad.

Now that’s creating an emotional response using DOOH! This stuff really works if you use it properly.

When it comes to advertising, much of it is art and I loved this comment on how it affects consumers…although this obviously makes it even more difficult to measure the long term effect of campaigns! From the article:

In fact, it is because we are not aware of some of these sensory effects that they can have such a powerful effect on our brains.

Now if only we could figure out how to use DOOH to actually get people to feel the same way as a loved one getting “shocked” we’d be flying (read the article…you’ll get it)

Article can be read here

Katy Bachman reported this on Mediaweek yesterday but I haven’t heard much in the way of activity or overt interest in it yet…might have been because it was April 1st (April Fools! ).

OSI (now Outdoor Advertising Group – OAG) fronted most of the outdoor/alternative work/planning/buying for Interpublic agencies (UM, Mediabrands, etc) while Kinetic does the same for WPPs portfolio (Mediacom, Maxus & Mindshare).

We heard rumor of this back in December/January but it didn’t get “officially” confirmed until today.  Seems that some folks find it a bit of an… interesting move and I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a reactive response to the Chrysalis/Posterscope “partnership”.

Sad to see Steve Faso (fellow kiteboarder/windsurfer) leave the company but I wish him well.

Good (and popular) execution for the TV show the buried life.  No idea what the show’s about as I’ve never watched it but they did a media blitz for a bit in NY (and obviously other cities).  Check out the vid below and how many people were just standing around and captive.  It would be interesting to extend this content into other environments too…you could do great shocking content/messaging…all in near real time.

See the video below on people actually watching and entering things on a big touch screen 42″ keyboard.  It’s also streaming content from other locations (presumably) and from the web….all moderated of course

Video:

Take a look:

Wish my video camera had been working (media card full) as it woulda been much more impactful but…

Just like Bill back in January, no this blog isn’t dead.  I have a backlog of posts that likely aren’t even relevant this late in the game but I’m about to get back on the horse.  I think I probably have 40 1/3 written posts which are irrelevant by the time I finally get back to them

Q1 seems to be the most dramatic in the OOH/media game for time sucking.  Between predictions (which most smart folk avoid these days), the start of ad/media planning (in 2010…normally its done earlier) for an enormous amount of brands, prepping for DSE, launching new products (I swear, google alerts pumps out 300 new “entrants” and “media players” to the industry a day) and news on the other 30 events in Mar/Apr/May (Globalshop, Infocomm, Screen Expo, etc) I’m surprised we’re all able to even sell our wares, be they dreams, customers or hardware.

What I HAVE noticed and will start off this year with (3 months late, which is ok b/c the brands all said they weren’t spending until April 1 anyway) is good and bad.

I’ll try to detail some of this out over the next little bit.

Needless to say you should see me back on the horse a bit more as I get some of my time back

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