As a member of the OAAA Innovation Committee, I recommended Marta Kagan as a keynote speaker. Marta is a provocative speaker, well known for her self processed “potty mouth” aka plain speaking. But more to the point, in a world where anyone with a Twitter account can claim to be a social media expert, Marta actually is. Her presentation series “What the F*** is Social Media” has itself been a viral hit with over 1,000,000 views – not bad for a business prezzie.

Considering that the prior week in Miami was overcast, humid and rainy, the afternoon of our panel occurred when the sun finally came out and I expected to be facing empty seats. But thankfully the room filled out and it was certainly good to see many C level people interested in the impact of social media on the out-of-home industry.

Back to the plot…. Marta was presenting the keynote ahead of our panel – so she launched into her latest thesis – that brands approach social media like a 14 year boy approaches sex.

Now, while I’ve been evangelizing the 3Fs of engagement – Fun, Fame and Fortune, Marta of course introduced the 4th F. She warned us, but there it was in full glory in front of an otherwise quite stiff audience (maybe that’s the wrong choice of words). A slide with a young male proclaiming “Lets F***”.

Marta went on to describe brands’ use of social media as naive, crude, blunt and certainly not bed-worthy. In no way is it seductive. Just like a 14 year old boy tactics around sex.

Helpfully, Marta told us what it takes to sleep with a woman. Now that’s value for money, even if we were not interested in social media!

She claims a woman will sleep with you because:

1) You’re beautiful
2) You’re remarkable (you have something meaningful to say AND you listen)
3) You boost her status (she admits that’s shallow – but it’s true) and
4) Because she’s lonely and drunk (she admits it happens sometimes, but that we shouldn’t rely on that for a long term strategy).

So while I make no claims (publicly at least) about my powers of seduction, I do like to think that my understanding of and approach to social media is somewhat more mature than a 14 year old boy’s approach to sex.

Marta promises she’ll put her deck on slideshare soon.

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LocaModa pioneered and patented the connection between the social web and social places and this is just one of many applications we’re proud to be involved with. As is sometimes the case, (when brands want a one-stop shop for multi-screen engagement) we’re managing every aspect of the user experience including management of the brand’s Twitter and facebook accounts, as well as the Times Sq billboard.

One of the aspects we’ve focused on in this campaign is to make the brand’s engagement with the user even more connected.

The onramp to the engagement is when the user tweets #BeYourOwnT with a photo of themselves. Other than excluding the expected dubious submissions (inc. promos or inappropriate content) it’s as easy as it it gets.

Submitted photo’s get moderated then queued up to be posted for 10 minutes every hour. When a user’s photo’s goes live, a camera captures the real time event and posts it to a photo albumn on Gap’s official facebook page. The user’s photo also dynamically becomes part of the brand’s mosaic “T” at the end of every loop.

The brand tweets back to the user that their photo has been posted and is now available on facebook to be tagged and shared.

This is a nice way to directly thank your fans (and by the way, the brand doesn’t send the same message to every fan – we’ve been sensitive to maintain the brand’s voice and authenticity throughout the experience).

The entire end-to-end platform and experience is provided without any additional hardware requirements on the DOOH screens/networks or brand. Got an Internet connection, great, lets go. So again, being agnostic about the DOOH OS, players etc, makes these applications cost effective, efficient, scalable and repeatable solutions.

Expect similar executions to be rolling out in retail – this is marketing (DOOH is not just about Ad networks folks).

We’ll follow up post campaign with some stats – but suffice to say, in just the first few hours of the campaign, there’s been an immediate rise in brand likes, and a veritable love fest for the fame and fun in what we call the 3Fs of brand engagement (Fortune, being the the 3rd “F”).

Having just returned from the OAAA in Miami, I note that DOOH + Social/Mobile is really gaining traction and is talked up at every event and presentation. The many war wounds we’ve got from being first (those arrows can hurt) are starting to pay off. So I’d be remiss then if I didn’t tip my hat to some of the companies that I think we’ve inspired to do similar programs.

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Much of our market has been influenced by the whims of advertising agencies seeing or discovering DOOH as either an exciting new opportunity to engage mobile consumers in and around places, or as an extension of their other media – TV, OOH or Digital. Many campaigns run for a matter of weeks, and in my experience, most (national) campaigns run on around 1,000 venues, regardless of if you can offer 10,000, 100,000 or even 1,000,000 screens. At the end of the campaign, the sales process starts over. Ideally we have repeat customers that are more efficient/economic to close, but a majority are new accounts, reflecting the fact that the industry is still at an experimental stage (clients like to “first” or “different” but as someone one said, “you can only be a virgin once”).

But that’s not the whole story – there are other segments of our industry that are not ad-driven and are therefore potentially at least, able to be more strategic and longer serving/surviving. These businesses are predominantly marketing oriented and therefore our products and services are capable of becoming mission critical tools for businesses.

A business with millions of fans on Facebook wants to see those fans move from their web or mobile screens towards the POS screen. Connecting Facebook, DOOH, email etc is not a one month campaign but hopefully 1-3 year strategy.

As Techcrunch reported here, Starbucks’ mobile app has generated $110 million in card cash transfers, a tiny drop in the ocean for them (even their gift card transactions are worth $2.4 billion!). But it’s a meaningful drop – and as a strategy, it’s here for the long haul, not a four week run. Certainly any DOOH business would be delighted to be part of that opportunity.

So be honest, is your DOOH business model tactical or strategic? Are you enabling advertising or marketing?

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Jason has his detractors, but he’s been in the industry longer than most of us and has deep experience (and war wounds) of all the problems we still stubbornly have in our industry. He’s been a platform guy, a signage guy, a network guy and most recently, an ad platform guy. He’s smart, and understands the influence of the web on media. Something not enough people in DOOH do. He might not be completely right about Social TV, but I suspect he’s not completely wrong. So I prefer to look at what he might be right about.

Many people misunderstand what interactivity in DOOH means. Outside of touch screens, it is rarely about literally interacting in front of a screen. Of course a screen can trigger interaction, but that is by far the less common case for engagement. And if that literal version of interactivity is what people think about when they dismiss social engagement, they are barking up the wrong tree.

Most DOOH doesn’t have the dwell time or spot length for engagement. There are exceptions (bars and sports stadiums) but they are unlikely to be business cases for the next Google.

Interactivity to me at least (and to the growing number of people not focused on DOOH, but on screens that engage regardless of acronym) means that there’s some pulse somewhere on a network. When someone interacts, that interaction, be it a fan, a follow, a tweet, a text, a photo, a game play, a song play etc, can be reflected on multiple screens to help those screens be more interesting. A passive screen might then display What’s Playing Here, Who’s Here Now, What’s On Offer, What’s Happening…

A screen that doesn’t do this is dead. Dead to audiences, dead to advertisers and dead to investors.

That’s why TV is trying to redefine itself. At least it’s trying! And that’s why DOOH needs to do the same.

If DOOH practitioners don’t understand the scope and potential of 360 degree interactivity, they will have a blind spot for how social and mobile actually impact DOOH.

Ken Goldberg gets it right here in my opinion.

We have to find better ways to make DOOH relevant.

Let’s not get (conveniently) distracted by the definition of Social TV – it already means different things to different people. I am confident that companies like Bluefin Labs could disrupt Neilson. I am also confident that Twitter and Facebook will be mainstays of DOOH content (when done right and not infringing patents!)

So, assuming we all have a healthy respect for an argument, I do not agree with our favorite Brit (well he has more followers than me) Adrian Cotterill, when he tweeted his response to Jason’s open letter that “SocialTV is kinda orthogonal to the whole DS/DOOH issue I have never ever read such RUBBISH…”

Like Mr Kates, I suspect Adrian is not completely right. There’s more to Social TV than 140 characters can say.

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And so did I.

THE GOOD:

Bill Gerba’s workshop was full of really valuable advice, borne of years of experience, backed up by real data and examples. If anyone wants to get it right – please, please speak to Bill first!

Lesson: Some smart and persistent folks are here for the long haul. Stick close to them.

THE BAD:

I sat through one workshop presentation (by a lady I will not mention) that I can honestly say was THE WORST I have ever witnessed – THE WORST – She was supposed to be helping the audience understand interaction and engagement and clearly had little digital experience. As the audience took copious notes, I could only imagine that some if not all would waste time, money and possibly entire businesses if they naively did anything she recommended.

Lesson: Just because someone can spell DOOH, doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. Ask them more probing questions about their Digital experience.

On the floor I saw nothing new and nothing inspiring. DOOH for many is still technology driven rather than solution driven.

As a client of mine observed as we walked around the show “Same as last year. Nothing new. Where’s the innovation?

Lesson: Innovation and solutions are the life blood of vibrant industries – Let’s make sure we have a pulse.

THE UGLY:

Setting aside my agenda of getting everyone up to speed on mobile and social – There were no good examples of either technology in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t about being cool, if your network isn’t connected to important channels, it’s going to be irrelevant. But poor execution (e.g. QR codes that are too small, too fast or too far away to be scanned) is worse than being irrelevant as they perpetuate the notion that the technology doesn’t work.

Example: Twitter walls that were unreadable from more than 10 ft away with little understanding of how to grab attention. They don’t get any better with the add-on of gimmicky gestural technology – that simply doesn’t solve the problem of grabbing attention. Again, it’s just technology for technology’s sake.

Lesson: Great technology + Poor execution = Fail

GLASS HALF FULL

With the self professed curmudgeon, David Haynes, and the super smart David Weinfeld, I was delighted to take part in a different kind of panel. It should have been called the “Cut The Crap” panel or the No BS panel, but the sensible folks at DSE, tamed the title slightly and branded it an “Interactive Shootout”. Our mission was to debate the merits of interactive technologies in a deliberately polarizing way to show all sides of the issues – and we were under orders to NOT be diplomatic, to NOT pitch and to NOT play safe. Well of course the three of us are not known for playing safe…

Coming out of the Interactive Shootout, which was packed, I felt optimistic. The questions (not just at that session but in general) show a more enlightened community. And I think the people sticking around are now only too aware of the challenges as well as the opportunities.

Lesson: With more open/honest discussions and less hype or BS, we might actually learn how to grow as an industry.

Conclusion: Yes, we have our work cut out for ourselves with the “F” challenges of our industry: Friction, Fragmentation, and for the time being at least, its Fragilty – but it isn’t F!@#$ed.

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OK – this is NOTHING to do with LocaModa, or DOOH.

Can I claim it’s relevant to The Web Outside as it was filmed outside? Well, it’s a Friday, and I’m a proud dad. And there are some learnings around social media here….

Here is a video of my 15 year old daughter Scarlet, playing her own song “Back Where We Started”. It’s starting to get airplay in Romania – well that’s the power of Facebook and YouTube – it’s a small world after all.

Please spread the word. Because that’s what friends do :)

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I am a speaker in what’s been billed an “Interactive Shootout” at 9.00 am, Thursday March 8th at DSE.

Details here

The fight debate will take a deeper look at the realities of interactive technologies and will (if I’m anything to do with it) cut the crap to expose the good bad and ugly.

This will be a no pitch zone, warts ‘n all, crash course for the red hot area of how adding the words “mobile” “social” or “local” to DOOH, might or might not mean a damn.

To help expose the BS and provide an engaging and provocative learning experience, I will be joined by two of the brightest and non-BS people in our industry – David Haynes (Sixteen:Nine blog, pressDOOH and The Preset Group) and David Weinfeld (Digital Signage Insights blog and CSO at Screenreach).

David Weinfeld and I will take opposing sides of each question lobbed at us by Mr Haynes – we may not even know which side we’ll be asked to take until Mr Haynes directs us – that way, the audience will gain perspective into the pros and cons of otherwise hyped areas of our industry.

I’m confident that attendees will leave with a rounder sense of the challenges and opportunities – rather than a sales pitch. And if we can save anyone from getting at any of the war wounds that we have got in the past 10+ years of DOOH, then it’ll be time well spent.

Hope to see you there.

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When LocaModa launched Wiffiti some 4 years ago, it was designed as an engagement tool for audiences to express themselves on screens at events or venues.

Wiffiti continues to serve us well and has been used in several hundred campaigns (with brands such as Pepsi, Coke, Verizon, GM etc) political events (such as a fund raiser for the then presidential candidate Barack Obama) and events/concerts (including major trade shows such as CES, American Idol tours and the Black Eyed Peas).

But a strange thing started to happen about 18 months ago.

Where LocaModa was focused on monetizing media on digital out-of-home screens, our platform unpredicatbly started to be embraced by teachers.

Like brands, teachers realized that their “audience” wasn’t always paying attention! Instead of telling their pupils to turn their phones off, enterprising teachers recognized the potential to use the phone as an engagement tool and communication channel.

What may well have started out as a “cool” idea or gimmick worked, and soon we saw tens of thousands of screens being made by users who were not exactly LocaModa’s target customers.

Today over 90,000 Wiffiti applications have been made by teachers.

Scolastic even published a lesson on text messaging in class via Wiffiti.

And that is why we not only had to listen to the wisdom of the crowd, but also work out where new markets for Wiffiti could be.

So today at Wiffiti.com, there is an invitation to a beta program that is being rolled out in the coming weeks to the many thousands of teachers, event/conference organizers and smaller digital networks who have been outside our core market.

The key features that teachers have been asking for have previously only been available to customers paying many thousands of dollars – but those features including the ability for a screen to be private and moderation tools, will soon be available to a much wider group of users.

And for event/conference organizers, who need more flexibility to customize screens to market to their audiences, there will be affordable Wiffiti Pro versions.

Our media clients and digital networks have a very different set of requirements for customized campaigns and/or hundreds or thousands of localized nodes, and these clients will be unaffected by the changes going on with Wiffiti. They will soon be offered a range of applications and features more easily tailored to their specific requirements.

So stay tuned – and if you want an invite to the Wiffiti beta program, you can get one here.

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2011 has for LocaModa, and I suspect for many of our partners, been a solid but challenging year.

LocaModa’s revenues in 2011 grew 25% year on year on year. We have a great team, patented IP and our platform continues to generate revenue and engagement for some of the largest DOOH networks and agencies in USA, Europe and Japan.

However, my overall impression of the DOOH market in 2011 is that is has been a lot tougher than it needed to be.

Growth (which should be celebrated in such a difficult economy) has happened in a background where the friction of buying DOOH media has not materially changed during the last 12 months and there is little evidence that it will be easier in the next 12 months.

Yet if I look at the DOOH predictions made at the end of 2008, 2009 and 2010, I’d have to predict that we could blow the dust off of those lists again this year. Yes, 2012 will see more interactive, more mobile, more social DOOH deployments, BUT if most of these deployments are tactical, 30 day campaigns, the market is not learning how to leverage the true value of DOOH as a strategic engagement tool. I don’t want to be a humbug at this time of the year, but the sobering truth as far as I’m concerned, is that our industry has not done enough to make itself a cohesive, easy to purchase, strategic component for marketers, brands, and venues.

So humbug or not, I think that any self respecting DOOH 2012 prediction that cuts and pastes the same old hogwash about consolidation, interactivity, mobile, social blah blah needs to self destruct! Such lists are obvious and not useful or informative and don’t deserve a single pixel on our screens – mobile or otherwise.

As if I have to say this – it was never about QR codes (see these QR codes that didn’t compute ). It’s about the “currency of attention” and understanding how to make that a sustainable and strategic tool for businesses.

DOOH Ad networks are too often focused on 30 day campaigns. And elsewhere, deployment of screens in non-ad environments is still expensive (even with falling costs), slow and difficult, and therefore has to be strategic. Deployments still need much better content strategies and ideally cross-channel approaches. This isn’t an easy economy to convince a company to spend a $1M on screens (The CapEx, even with falling costs, is significant, especially when multiplied over 10, 100 or 1000+ venues) with little motivation for the internal champion to risk their careers.

On the bright side, nothing has changed about the opportunity of solving such challenges, but if the DOOH/DS pitch is getting a little tired and investors are looking at prettier girls, we have consider what we can all do to help the market.

So my biggest prediction for 2012 is that those of us serious enough to want to make a difference in our industry will have put in more effort to collaborate. Because if we don’t, more DOOH companies will fail in 2012.

Some might think that being silent is better than being critical – but not me. I think that more 2012 DOOH predictions should be informed by the hard fought lessons of the year. At least it seems that much of the self promotion and ridiculously over-bullish market data that is ever present in our market has died down somewhat over the past 3 months. I suspect (or hope) DOOH practitioners are focusing on following the money more than trying to get Twitter followers (but feel free to follow me on Twitter @stephenrandall).

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On the foursquare website, there are a number of case studies showing the innovation springing up around “location” – and I use that word in the broadest sense – i.e. those who think foursquare = checkins, should think again.

foursquare is being adopted by real businesses to help loyalty, marketing and customer engagement in many creative, measurable and monetizable ways.

Of course, LocaModa was an early foursquare developer so it’s also gratifying to be found on the first page of the foursquare developer showcase alongside Instagram, American Express, and Conan (the comedian, not the barbarian).

NOTE: foursquare has dropped the use of any caps in their brand and will surely regard offending capitalizers as being decidely unhip.

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