Below you will see the great creatives for each campaign and the strong messaging that can be portrayed in a short but effective 15-second ad. Each campaign was hyper-targeted using ADCENTRICITY’s platform ADVenue and are currently playing on hundreds of screens across North America, reaching their desired audiences on the go!

I’m surprised and concerned then with the number of compliance issues we’ve run across in the past several weeks while flighting campaigns. I always thought that selling the campaigns was the hard part –the flighting of them should be a piece of cake. (Laurie Freudenberg, our Vice President of Operations, is throwing heavy objects at me right now. Or is at least thinking about it.)

The good news is that the big media agencies are now taking DOOH seriously as a medium. They recognize the potential for delivering their clients’ messages to consumers while they’re traveling through their day.

Even better news is that the story we’ve been telling of the benefits of DOOH – micro targeting, immediacy, context appropriate messaging, for example – is resonating with the agencies. However, they have high expectations of the DOOH industry to deliver campaigns as contracted, and they are becoming increasingly vigilant in ensuring that they are getting value. This means that physical venue audits by the agencies are now becoming commonplace, and the results aren’t always casting DOOH in a favorable light.

Screens not installed in listed venues. Dark screens. Mismatched dwell and loop times. Screens not playing ads as scheduled. Screens with error messages. Screens that have been obstructed in some way by venue staff, or have had the volume turned off. These are a few of the concerns Adcentricity, and our agency clients, are discovering everyday.

As an industry, we all need to get better at execution. When an agency executive, or the advertiser, walks into a venue to proudly view their ad, it isn’t just a black eye for the specific network if there is a problem. It’s a hit in the head with a 2 x 4 for the entire industry. The question being asked in the agency offices today isn’t “should we use network A over network B for this campaign?” – it is “should DOOH be on our plan at all?”

Advertisers and agencies have the right to expect top-notch execution from the industry. We’ve established ourselves as a real ad medium. Now let’s deliver on the potential.

At Adcentricity, we realize that we play an important part in this process. We’re soliciting your feedback from our agency friends and our network partners. How are we doing? Are we making your lives simpler? What could we be doing better? Feel free to comment below on this blog post, or email me directly at graeme@adcentricity.com any time.

Graeme Spicer

Digital Hispanics in a Physical World focuses on the challenges of Hispanic marketing based on today’s changing media capabilities, consumer behavior and digital media utilization. The context and content of the paper is a great example of how we can collaborate with your agency to provide hyper-targeted campaigns providing strategic results. The Hispanic population is one of many target populations we have the ability of reaching through the use of our platform and our growing digital out-of-home network partners. We hope that this paper provides insight and helps you in support of your digital OOH advertising efforts.

Click here to access this limited release white paper: ADCENTRICITY’s Digital Hispanics in a Physical World white paper.

I’ve had this conversation with many after recent announcements have come out on the mobile marketing front. I’m very cautious when talking about mobile and where it will go and how we need to be cautious in its introduction into the culture and execution of digital OOH’s success.

Case in point? Look at the Internet.  While Internet advertising has grown by leaps and bounds and makes lots of people very rich, the fact of the matter is, because it went to a “success is a click-through” model (aka direct response) as fast as it did, it leaves 100s of millions of dollars on the table as click throughs rarely actually lead to the execution of a “sale” that is trackable.  As today’s Ad Age article from Hernan Lopez details on a statement from Randall Rothenberg:

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has called for a “creative renaissance” on the internet, which he said has been “an unthinking hostage to a direct-marketing culture and tradition that devalues creativity and its long-term effect on brands.”

While I’m a big proponent of Mobile in digital OOH -warning: registration required- (actually I’m a proponent of its use in many places with the right solution and thought process behind it), I’m very hard on the idea that it be used for any form of true “measurement” in the space.  This is for a couple of reasons:

1.    It takes the all of the onus off the need for a quality product and brand strategy around the product and puts it on the digital OOH medium.
2.    It takes all of the onus off of creative agencies to understand how to use our medium and execute quality creative strategies that attracts consumers in the first place
3.    Calls to action and value to the consumer are typically terribly weak even when #1 and #2 ARE addressed, further putting the onus on digital OOH to perform better for potentially crappy products with bad creative AND add no value to the consumer experience
4.    I’ve already seen this happen in the Internet ad business who decided to move to click based measurement ALONE and they never got out of that funk and it is now affecting their ability to be considered anything but “DR”

Don’t get me wrong.  Mobile can be used as an INDICATOR of success, it’s just that it should never be considered the SOLE test of a digital OOH’s campaign’s success if we value long term growth of a successful new medium. i.e. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

ADCENTRICITY, was actually founded on many of Erwin Ephron’s theories and comments – hence our approach towards Path-2-Purchase and Point-of-Purchase based continuity programs and strategies.  Erwin is considered the founder of recency theory who, as Hernan stated in the article in answering an advertising paradox:

Consumers act on ads for products they’re ready to buy and ignore the rest. That called for a shift in scheduling, from flighting to continuity; being off the air was “like being off the shelf.

Basically, you never know when someone is going to be ready to buy your new tube of toothpaste so you have to have continued, targeted advertising in order to best support ongoing sales and profits as consumers become more receptive as they become more prepared to make a purchase.  In the digital OOH world, this also means that if a consumer is not ready to buy a product and the call to action is weak then they definitely won’t engage with you via mobile, further downward skewing mobile measurement.

I especially liked one of Hernan’s supporting comments on this front:

Advertising can work in subtle ways. It can boost profitability, even for large brands in developed markets, which are normally sluggish and rarely see sustained sales increases. Advertising is not as weak as it seems, just difficult to measure.

Unfortunately, in today’s world to many, something that’s difficult to measure, is too difficult to sell to the new CMO…the CFO – the guy who is willing to pay for something he can see today – not down the road.

Fortunately, there are studies like those referenced in the article from comScore, that are showing display ads online (not clicked) with real world purchases.

We as an industry are not quite there yet.  Much more research has yet to be done on this front to prove this type of behavior, although we’re already seeing these forms of results.  What I will say, however, is don’t be so quick to abandon all of the other forms of success measurement (3rd party brand/recall based studies, sales lift, campaign activity lift, etc, and most importantly CASE STUDIES) in favor of a medium measurement solution that could significantly harm your agency or network efforts going forward.

Mobile will be a very important part of our medium going forward and help shepherd in an era of consumer behavioral grooming and brand loyalty and connectedness, you just have to know how to use it and when in order to effect the results – both short and long term – that you want.

Last point that Hernan referenced in his article was one on the creative front to make ads in mediums work for you best.  I wanted to address these in lieu of my earlier comments on creative and strategy in the medium:

1.    They are entertaining and amusing;
2.    They are visual rather than verbal; and
3.    They say something important and meaningful about the brand being advertised

More recently, he added the expression “rational arguments enclosed in emotional envelopes”

Choose your mobile strategy wisely!

AGENCY SPOTLIGHT. This is a good cover article that tells a straight forward story about the Digital OOH scene. Thanks to Media Buzz for the review.

Check out the article to learn more!

The Samsung Omnia campaign launched two weeks ago in several convenience store, entertainment, grocery, hospitality, office buildings and personal care locations throughout Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. The creative is a great promotion of consumer electronics by demonstrating the user experience and features within 13 seconds.  Samsung has really been a leader in using digital out-of-home (OOH) and, as evidenced by the results from their case study (49% increase in unaided brand recall using JUST digital out-of-home), are reaping the rewards.

Another recently launched campaign that has good use of creative is the Vaspar Paint campaign running within convenience store, entertainment, health care, hospitality, office buildings and personal care locations.  A relevant ad spot was created by utilizing components of Valspar’s existing broadcast TV spot and applying some good After Effects features to static brand assetts to bring together the 15 second ad. The client simply provided us with the assets and a sketch – a quick conversation about their vision and we were able to provide them with a really nice looking spot for modest budget. This is a great example of using different sources of creative (broadcast, static) paired with experience in the medium and an understanding of working with shorter captive periods to create great visual content for digital out-of-home advertising. Broadcast creative is not always an option but it this case worked very well and the relative costs were extremely efficient.

By combining two of the fastest growing categories in advertising – digital out-of-home and mobile – advertisers can now take advantage of the unique opportunities within digital out-of-home executions and activate consumer dialogues where they live, work and play. By providing marketers with a holistic approach to their planning needs, ADCENTRICITY makes campaigns more powerful and dynamic with this added mobile component.

With Impact Mobile as the mobile service provider, this offering will provide advertisers with hyper-targeting capabilities to increase interaction with audiences on the go through mobile devices and help extend campaigns across even more channels. Capabilities include:

•    Call-to-Action: SMS, votes, polls, sweepstakes, contests, promotions, coupons, call-back request, text4info, surveys
•    Retail & Redemption: Mobile coupons, viral couponing, unique PIN numbers (drive2web), ticketing
•    Content Deliver: Rich content, ring tones, wallpapers, games, videos
•    Mobile Applications: Mobile Internet Sites (WAP) & Smart Phone Applications (more comprehensive and customized solutions)

Consumers engaging in digital out-of-home media are on-the-go and the interaction with mobile can be used for example, to send pre-programmed, customized messages to specific geographic targets throughout the life of the campaign. A mobile component to any digital out-of-home campaign can also help to drive a call to action, increase brand awareness and encourage point-of-purchase sales.

For complete information and supporting media kit materials visit the mobile marketing page on our website.

The show floor and conference sessions at the recent Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas showed a very different picture – that of an increasingly confident medium continuing to flourish in troubling times. ExpoNation, the show long-time producers, must have been happy (relieved?) by the turnout of both exhibitors and attendees. The floor bustled the entire two days, and the number of industry executives paired off in the cafeteria seating area were indicative of the constant meetings as new alliances were forged and existing business deals cemented.

I won’t here go into detailed descriptions of conference sessions or new announcements (Lyle Bunn, Laura Davis-Taylor and Bill Gerba, amongst others, have done a thorough job already), but a few highlights for me were:

The legendary Paco Underhill from Envirosell told us that many, even most, current digital signage networks within retail environments were poorly executed;

In Seminar 8 – “How To Sell Advertising on Your Out-of-Home Digital Network” – the panel, led by Dave Krupp from Kinetic, openly supported the role of companies like Adcentricity in facilitating DOOH buys;

And finally, Session 19, “Critical Measurement Options at Retail: Strategies for Success” – in my opinion still failed to clearly put forward the one meaningful barrier to the success of DOOH – the adoption of an industry-wide currency that is audited by a credible industry body. We all need to get on board with the implementation of the OVAB metrics guidelines as quickly as we can manage.

Congratulations to Chris Gibb, Angelo Verrone and the rest of the ExpoNation team. The DSE has become the one annual must-attend event for those involved in the DOOH business from a hardware, software, or network operations perspective.

You may see this release (below) across the wires this week. I wanted to take a moment to comment and open the lines of communication.

I’m very excited about where the digital out-of-home medium is heading this year. There will be significant advances and movement in the industry all presenting opportunity. We posted a quick “Outlook for 2009” through our newsletter a couple weeks ago here in case you missed it. With my new post at ADCENTRICITY, I welcome and encourage those in the media / advertising and digital out-of-home industry to contact me to explore ideas that can deliver added value for advertisers relevant to digital out-of-home media.

I look forward to sharing more news with you in the coming weeks on exciting announcements and developments from ADCENTRICITY’s Biz Dev. division. Until then..be well.

Jeff Atley

ADCENTRICITY’S CO-FOUNDER JEFF ATLEY SEEKS INNOVATION AND DEVELOPMENT FOR DIGITAL OOH MEDIA

Atley promoted to VP of Marketing and Business Development to Further ADCENTRICITY’s Digital OOH Media Capabilities and Awareness

Toronto, New York, Chicago, January 21, 2009 – ADCENTRICITY, North America’s foremost Digital Out-of-Home media planning and buying firm announced today that it has appointed co-founder, Jeff Atley, to the position of Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. Atley, along with co-founder, Rob Gorrie, is responsible for elevating the company as a leader in Digital Out-of-Home media since inception in early 2007.

As VP of Marketing and Business Development, Atley will be developing strategic alliances and evaluating key value-add services that complement ADCENTRICITY’s core Digital Out-of-Home competencies. Multiple advertising and media disciplines are included in the consideration to expand ADCENTRICITY’s growth plans for North America and advance the company’s media planning and buying services.

More at www.adcetnricity.com

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