The West Coast Digital Media Summit was held on Wednesday, March 25th in conjunction with thinkLA, the Los Angeles marketing and advertising non-profit. The venue was the august Beverly Hills Hotel, and Graeme Spicer, our VP of Strategic Partnerships, represented ADCENTRICITY.

Graeme counted over 240 in attendance, with a good mix of network and agency representatives. The presentations were largely updates of October’s content – an overview of the successful Team Fox DOOH initiative from last summer and OVAB President Suzanne Alecia’s overview of the OVAB metrics guidelines.

Of most interest was the agency panel discussion. On the stage: Jonathon Haber from OMD; Chris Harder, Starcom; Tim Farish, NBC; and Lindsay Wong from Razorfish West.

A few comments from the panel as reported by Graeme on Twitter:

Harder: “We need incentives (read price reductions) to help us sell DOOH into our clients.”

Harder: “Starcom will spend over $20 million in out-of-home digital video this year.”

Farish: “We’ve moved beyond demographic targeting. We want and expect psycho graphic targeting.”

Harder: “We want our cake and to eat it too. We want targeted media, but we don’t expect to pay a large premium for it.”

POPAI’s Digital Signage Awards highlight and acknowledge the very best in retail digital signage. These awards are a contributing factor to the standards of digital OOH as well as the recognition of digital signage as an important medium. All of the judges participating in the award selection are industry professionals with a minimum of five years experience in Digital Signage. We are expecting Graeme to be one hard-hitting judge! The awards will be presented at the POPAI Marketing at-Retail Awards Gala on Tuesday between 5:00 and 7:30 pm. The gala is expected to bring together close to 600 industry professionals in order to recognize the most innovative and effective marketing at retail displays.

For anyone attending GlobalShop this year and is interested in meeting up with Graeme please send him an email at grame@adcentricity.com. He looks forward to hearing from you!

We started looking at Facebook about 8 months ago as an opportunity to have a single place – or launchpad – to keep everything up to date.  It turns out it’s just about perfect.  From general info, connections, events, case studies, research, campaign videos, event photos, etc…it manages it all and allows everyone to tune their settings about how much they want to hear about – and more importantly – what they want to say back to us.

It turns out that about 50% of who we do business with is on Facebook anyway, so it made the decision fairly easy.

You can catch us HERE.  We’ll be paying a lot of attention to this side of our business.  It’s nice to have a single place to do it all.  If you have questions or comments, post them in the forums or on the Wall at facebook – although you can always respond here on this blog as well.

There are a lot of reasons for this situation but, needless to say, the buyer at the agency was a little lost in where to spend the money (Internet just wasn’t relevant enough to reallocate it all there).  Two of his major tools were taken away and the client never did print.  The client had some other issues that run deeper but for the economic situation and this particular product, they just felt TV was no longer something that was relevant for their brand.  Apparently they decided to react quite strongly to this new revelation, much to the agency’s chagrin.

If the old media triad is TV + Radio + Print, the new (and VERY different) triad is Internet + Mobile + Digital OOH.  Stephen Randall over at Locamoda has a great presentation that speaks to this quite well if I remember correctly.  Success in anything is always about relevance and, as the “media” keeps telling us, consumers are not finding TV, Radio or Print media as relevant to them as it used to be – not even close.

Network TV isn’t going away any time soon (ever) but it’s not that hard to understand why certain brands/products are getting antsy about continuing to use a medium that doesn’t come with the measurability of other, newer mediums, is the most expensive product on the market and is losing audience at an astounding rate without the reflection showing up in pricing at the same pace. Wayne Friedman over at Mediapost just wrote an article highlighting this when he says:

In just the last two years, 25% of network TV’s prime-time viewers have departed, and, odds are, they aren’t coming back. At the same time TV program costs have skyrocketed.

Wonder why NBC is going with Leno every day at 10 p.m.?

…

New TV estimates say prime time will see a major contraction in advertising dollars — some 7% to 8% overall — this year. At last year’s $9.2 billion dollar upfront broadcast prime-time level, that could come to a disappearance of some $732 million dollars.

Wayne’s article can be found here

There’s another great article highlighting issues in TV, declining audience and TV loss of identity by Frank Maggio here that is a great read. Frank sums it up well when he says:

Beyond the abysmal state (and credibility) of its accounting and metrics, any honest student of media must acknowledge that TV is losing audience to the Internet — the one televisual medium that provides searchable choice, intuitive transactional functionality, and perhaps most importantly, the ability for the dispersed audience to be heard, at least a little bit.

Do keep in mind that most people in the media and creative business hardly know what Digital OOH is, so I wouldn’t fret too much that he focuses in on Internet – we’re close behind and a part of the same winning formula

Interestingly, a week later, another client from a different agency did the exact same thing – a severe change in their ’09 plans resulting in a decrease in broadcast media.

Hmm.  If this is a pattern I’m starting to see, it’s one I like. When I was at the ANA show in Orlando in October, one of the very forceful commentaries from ALL of the CMOs who spoke was that they need to be doing different things and for agencies to stop bringing them “TV” as the only solution.  Apparently we found 2 of them that decided to take things into their own hands.

While pundits continue to cry “woe is me”, folks like my VP Graeme’s opinion and mine are of a cautiously optimistic and even quite excited about what we’re starting to see play out in the media landscape.  There’s gold in them hills, you just need to know where to look.

Somehow, we got a little distracted and getting this blog into the wild took a back seat to the job of partnering with networks, educating agencies and brands on DOOH, building a very large single source platform to support 8 different iterations of each plan, assembling research data on 70 categories of venue type, perfecting our message and collateral and growing the ADCENTRICITY team.  Oh…right…and selling media.

Well…that’s about to change – I probably didn’t have that much credibility on my personal blog to begin with anyway.  I’ll still maintain my personal posts over there and keep them separate and will likely do some cross posting every once in a while.

We’re excited to get this blog going as there’s so much that happens to us on a daily basis it’s sometimes hard to absorb.  When I say “we”, that’s not the Royal We, that’s the team from ADCENTRICITY who contributes to this space. This is a place where Laurie can talk about her dog, Graeme can make fun of me for something or other that I’ve said recently and Jeff can pontificate about the best restaurant to eat at in Vegas during the month of February.

Eventually, we’ll likely get around to some material on ADCENTRICTY and the Digital OOH space as well. Events, content, creative, research, attitudes, growth and more are on the table for discussion.

We hope you participate and look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers

Rob
President
ADCENTRICITY