With over 25 years of advertising sales management and business development experience, Ian most recently worked as the Vice President – Sales, Digital Media at Cineplex Entertainment where he participated as part of the management team in the successful sale of Onsite Media Network to Cineplex Entertainment Inc. Prior to his position at Cineplex Entertainment, he was the Senior Vice President – Sales at On Site Media Network. During his tenure at Onsite Media Networks, Ian developed and executed a short term sales strategy that resulted in increased sales revenue by over 225% in just three months. In 2007, Ian as Vice-President – Sales, participated as part of the management team in the successful sale of Digital Advertising Network (DAN) to Neo Advertising Inc. Ian holds a degree from the University of Western and is a member of the Canadian Outdoor Membership Bureau, Toronto Ad & Sales Club and Canadian Association of Advertising Professionals. Other past employers include: Resort Media Group, Inc., Club Intrawest and Rogers Publishing.

We all look forward to working with Ian and hope many of you will have the same opportunity. Please feel free to contact Ian directly at ian@adcentricity.com, or alternatively at 416-597-6663. Welcome to the team Ian!

*housekeeping item

One of Canada’s oldest and largest retailers decided to take us up on it: they asked us one day to assemble a proposal for offering a branded ISP service to their loyalty card members.

Things progressed pretty much as you would expect with presentations and glossy marketing materials all speaking to the benefits of partnering with AOL/Netscape: revenue, increased loyalty, higher engagement by customers, and so forth. Then one day came the question from the client that has shaped the way I think about service delivery ever since.  “So, Laurie, this is all great, but tell me about the not so happy path – how are you going to respond, and what is our experience going to be, when things don’t go well?”

This question is one I think about a great deal in DOOH, particularly since the size and complexity of Adcentricity’s many network partners spans the full range from start-ups to well-established, mature organizations.  I have long believed, and my DOOH experience confirms, that our service response to customers when things go wrong is more important than trying to guarantee things will never go wrong in the first place.

Ours is a complex industry with lots of potential points of failure. Scheduling mistakes, miscommunication, and plain-old human error sometimes upset the carefully timed launch of an ad campaign. While challenging and frustrating, this is somewhat to be expected and, by and large, our advertising clients understand.  What they don’t understand is when they walk into a venue expecting to see their ad running, and instead see a blue screen of death, or a screen that has been switched off by an employee… or even worse, no screen at all.

It’s how we deal with the not-so-happy path that counts, no matter how large or small the problem.  To build and keep trust, bring the client into the loop as soon as you know there is an issue, let them know what you are doing to resolve the problem, and keep them informed of your progress along the way.

What does that look like? Here’s the minimum benchmark.

Technology:

-Run your network using a high-quality, scalable, IP-connected technology platform from one of the industry leaders (or one that delivers at least the same core features and functionality).

Policies and Procedures:

-Negotiate strong contracts with venue owners so that they have a clear incentive to let you know when there is an issue at one of your locations.

-Establish quality control processes so that you really know what’s happening out there in your venues. This goes beyond technology – it’s about scheduled and recurring physical site audits as a regular part of your service delivery.

-If you are at all in doubt about the ability to deliver against contract at a particular venue – don’t include it in the buy.

Customer Service:

-Most importantly, inform the client when you do encounter a problem.  Own up early and pro-actively, even if it’s “just one screen” in a campaign of 450 screens. Ensure that you follow up with an exception report detailing the problem, the solution and any necessary reparations (the so-called “make goods”) agreed to with the client.

Added overhead?  You bet. Critical for repeat revenue from aggregators, advertisers, and long-term success?  Absolutely.

Lon Otremba, Access 360 Media
Scott Lyon, Captivate Network
Joyce Myers, Indoor Direct
Jeff Atley, ADCENTRICITY

The Marketing Committee is responsible for developing OVAB’s brand position, as well as activities that build awareness and promote the use of out-of-home advertising networks and their stakeholders. The Committee provides marketing advice and expertise in support of all OVAB programs and initiatives.

Congratulations Jeff! We all look forward to the great work you and the rest of the Committee are sure to provide.

Check out the article to learn more!

The forum continued into the evening with the first ever Digital Out-of-Home awards where ADCENTRICITY was a finalist in two categories. We were ecstatic to win for the Barack Obama “Change” campaign we produced in conjunction with GMMB this past fall. Congrats to all other nominees and winners! You can watch the award ceremony below.

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.

Where others fail on targeting front, digital out-of-home delivers, CEO says

April 15, 2009 8:17 AM ET
By Sarah Barry

ADCENTRICITY, an aggregator in the digital-out-of-home advertising sector, unveiled on April 13 a full-service, cross carrier mobile marketing offering. In tandem with the launch, SNL Kagan spoke to ADCENTRICITY CEO Rob Gorrie about the digital-out-of-home industry in general and how it is evolving to find new ways of reaching customers in new places. An edited transcript of that conversation follows:

Can you tell me a little about the digital-out-of-home environment and ADCENTRICITY’s place within it?

From an industry perspective, the digital-out-of-home space is LCD screens in various environments — meaning gas stations, convenience stores, grocery stores, pharmacies, doctors’ offices, the list kind of goes on. These screens provide both customized content and advertising opportunities to speak to consumers in sort of captive environments where consumers spend about 30% of their time, which is on the go.

There’s been sort of a convergence of decreasing technology costs and an increase in fragmentation that has led to the entire industry growing up and people needing much more targeted and much more localized ways of being able to reach people. It’s getting to a point now where there is a great, larger, national-scale opportunity to be able to use each of these various environments to be able to speak to clients or consumers in a way that is less obtrusive, but still be able to sort of be around your consumers in what I call the warm-fuzzy-media-blanket effect — really staying with consumers and being with them as they’re on their path to purchase to help facilitate increased sales or just increased engagement with consumers.

So what is ADCENTRICITY’s role?

ADCENTRICITY is what would be called an aggregator in the space. There are hundreds of these digital-out-of-home networks. It’s almost like back in the early days of Internet advertising when there were hundreds and hundreds of Web sites that were all looking to offer advertising and we are the equivalent of what would be the Advertising.com.

We’ve got right now over 80 networks and more than 140,000 screens in North America. And those are in 16 different categories and 72 different subcategories. So a category might be medical and a subcategory in there might be pediatrician offices, or OBGYN offices or chiropractic offices. So you can target right down to a specific type of medical venue if you so desire.

We also have an enormous piece of proprietary software that we’ve developed in-house that allows us to cut the time it takes to buy and manage these ads from three weeks to 30 minutes.

The idea behind it is when you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of networks out there, you’ve got six key points of pain: One — actually understanding what it is that you’re buying from an audience perspective. Two — buying. No brand or agency really has the time to deal with 100 different networks to buy from so we are a single-source provider. Three — creative. Four — distribution is a big one. Once you’ve actually made this buy, how do you get all of this creative to all of the locations and manage it effectively. Five — reporting. It ends up being 3,500 pages of affidavit that we all summarize from the various networks and deliver as a proof of performance. Six — billing. We provide one bill, so instead of the internal accounting departments having to deal with 100 different networks, they get to deal with one person who is chasing them for money.

We’re trying to take all of those pains out and make this medium really accessible to everyone.

Does the digital-out-of-home sector have trouble getting advertisers to move beyond seeing the out-of-home sectors as just billboards and street furniture?

Up until now, the whole industry has sort of been slotted into the out-of-home group, which is a fairly small portion of the media spend that’s out there. That is starting to change fairly dramatically. All of the sudden, there are little political wars that are about to start because the digital guys are going: ‘Wait a minute. All of these screens are IP-connected and anything I am doing on my Web site or on my social networking sites or on Twitter can all be used in here, so why isn’t this a digital property?’ It’s a huge benefit to the industry because there’s a lot of dough in the digital sector that doesn’t exist in the out-of-home sector right now.

Can you give me an example of how an advertiser can use the digital-out-of-home medium to provide targeted advertising?

As an example, somebody like a Samsung, with one of their creatives, they’ll show somebody typing on a phone. In bar environments, it may say, “By the way, you look hot,” but in convenience stores, they’ll use the exact same creative so it doesn’t cost that much more, and just change the message on the phone to say, “Honey, don’t forget to pick up the milk.”

There are other opportunities, like with the Skittles-Twitter homepage takeover that happened a couple of weeks ago. To give you an idea of how you could use that more effectively from a targeting perspective, obviously Skittle’s products are sold in convenience stores everywhere and there is digital-out-of-home media in each of these environments. Well, why don’t we take each of those Twitter feeds and integrate them into a Skittles ad that’s actually at the point of purchase? While some of the comments were negative, some of them were absolutely hilarious and you can use those in the digital-out-of-home environment to have a hell of a lot of impact.

For the rest of this SNL Q&A session click here.

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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