Barnaby Page's SCREENS.tv Digital Signage Blog

Man-eating digital billboards from outer space!!!!! (1 comments)

The sheer vehemence of opposition to digital billboards in some U.S. communities continues to bemuse me. What is it that people who’ve presumably lived with TV, and with conventional billboards, for most or all of their lives – and with the Internet for the past decade or so – suddenly have against a medium that in some ways combines the best features of all three?

And the latest tirade suggests that either the residents of Los Angeles have attained a new level of dainty refinement since I lived there a couple of decades ago, or this writer in the Los Angeles Times just can't resist a spot of purple prose.

“Degraded future-world with video screens everywhere assaulting me with propaganda”? A city resembling “a congested constellation of 900 drive-in movie theaters”?

Sure, there are legitimate reasons to raise questions (rather than jump to assumptions) about traffic safety and power consumption, and light pollution if you happen to live next door to one of the things. But come on, guys – it’s not as if LA is some prelapsarian bucolic paradise rudely assaulted by War of the Worldsesque monsters.

There are better things to worry about, and if you (understandably) have a problem with illegally-erected billboards, focus on that – and its implications for local government and urban planning –  rather than getting distracted by imaginary digital monsters.

BusinessWeek features digital OOH (0 comments)

Nothing here will be new to regular SCREENS.tv readers, but it is always nice to see the big business magazines covering this sector...

Fix Wikipedia and help save the world (0 comments)

Wikipedia’s article on digital signage is, frankly, a mess – and although a number of editors (the rather grand Wikipedia term for anyone who cares to contribute) have made efforts to correct this or at least stop it deterioriating into a mire of random statements and commercial Web links, no-one as yet has had the time to give it a major overhaul.

So: Wikipedia, and the noble cause of public understanding of digital signage, need you. Get over there and help improve the article! (You don’t even need to register, though it’s a good idea, and like everything on Wikipedia it’s free.)

One polite word of warning, though, if you’re a Wikinewbie: don’t be tempted to use it to hype, or link to, your company. Apart from any more high-minded considerations, it’s just not worth your time and trouble; another editor will come along a few hours, or even moments, later and remove the self-promotion.

Recession? What recession? (0 comments)

Okay, these three articles have little to do directly with digital signage, but they’re all worth a read to provide some context to this sector (and save some pocket change)...

Media Post has a fun update on what’s cooking at the MIT Media Lab plus some cheeky tips on how to get Wall Street Journal Web content for free.

Meanwhile, Advertising Age has been looking at what the Wall Street meltdown might mean for ad-dependent media. (My take on this: in theory, our medium should suffer comparatively little – and perhaps even thrive – thanks to superior ROI. Working against it, however, is the novelty factor; badly-bruised sectors might prefer to stay with what they know. So I’ll just sit on the wall for now...)

Thought for the day (0 comments)

Nice quote from YCD Multimedia’s Barry Salzman buried in a slightly predictable article on our market from today’s Guardian newspaper: “In 1996 it took three TV ads to reach 85% of women in America, in 2001 it took 100 TV ads and today it’s impossible.”

A pity, though, that the article overplays privacy concerns, which while legitimate are not really all that specific to digital signage; it’s not as if in-store technology is taking intrusiveness to a new level.

Companies gather data, and mine it, and crunch it; this is the world we live in; and if you want to avoid being monitored electronically in that world (as, perhaps, is your right), you have a whole lot more to worry about than a company that’s added a little intelligence to POS promotional technology.

Besides, it’s all too easy to forget that sometimes there are benefits to the consumer too.

Another day, another screen-size record... (0 comments)

Panasonic used the recent IFA event in Berlin to show off a 150-inch plasma display – the world's largest (for now). According to reports, the Panasonic Viera 150 has a resolution of 4096 x 2160 and stands 3.81m tall. No word on availability, but we expect it to reach major markets over the next six months or so.

Quality vs. quantity: more research (0 comments)

If you can stand the infuriating e-magazine interface, it’s worth taking a look at this article in Electronic Retailer Magazine on the need to draw distinctions between viewership and responsiveness. It’s another angle on the search for new ways to describe and assess the characteristics and value of audiences, which we featured in a special report last week.

Online conspicuous by its absence... (0 comments)

Out-of-home (not just digital, of course) was the third most popular medium in the shortlisted campaigns for the Effectiveness Awards from Britain’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. TV came first, print second.

Good reception for Wal-Mart move (0 comments)

Plenty of ink and pixels has been devoted to the next incarnation of Wal-Mart's in-store network; here is one of the more interesting discussions, from a retail rather than a digital-signage perspective. Encouragingly, 80 percent (so far) of those polled feel the Wal-Mart rollout will speed up the growth of in-store media. 

Another way of looking at digital billboards (0 comments)

The great U.S. digital billboards saga continues, and perhaps nowhere does the battle rage more fiercely than in San Antonio, Texas, where local opposition is surely balanced in politicians’ minds by the presence of Clear Channel as a significant employer in the city.

There’s a detailed account of the story so far in this article from a local alternative paper which, perhaps inadvertently, makes one point that the vendors of digital billboard tech would do well to consider. With sentiment in so many places turning against billboards (both conventional and digital) – if indeed sentiment was ever much in favour of them – the greater revenue potential per billboard of the digital variety starts to look very attractive from a PR/regulatory-compliance perspective.

We usually think of digital as a way to make more money – but it can also be a way to make the same money with many fewer sites, and gain a warm fuzzy community reputation along the way.

Of course, as the San Antonio article also points out, there’s the slightly less convenient green aspect to consider too...

Audience metrics: our top eight trends to watch (0 comments)

1. First and most importantly: don’t expect measurement to drift away as an issue. While some digital-signage networks are getting by nicely with few and crude metrics, for the sector as a whole the absence of a clear, standardised, reliable system of audience measurement is the single biggest barrier to going mainstream and gaining the trust of brands and ad agencies.

2. Expect the ultimate solutions to come from pan-industry bodies and very likely from organisations outside this sector, rather than from specialist screen-media metrics firms. Why? The answer’s simple: a means of comparing OOH screen metrics with those for other media is what the agencies really need, and bespoke measurement methods that can only be applied to screen media don’t provide that. Clever though many of them are, they’re likely to end up as useful adjuncts rather than the main methods of measurement.

3. Leaders will emerge. In the UK, look to Postar – the measurement organisation that already covers non-digital out-of-home – and researchers Ipsos MORI to provide the basic currency of screen-media measurement. But don’t hold your breath: it’s unlikely to be firmed up before the end of the decade. Organisations from the sector such as POPAIdigital and The Screen will have significant input.

In the States, meanwhile, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau (OVAB) is leading the way, with heavyweight support from an assembly of big screen-media players and other media firms – including, crucially, the measurement firms ACNielsen and Arbitron. Earlier this year, Nielsen committed to start providing ratings for networks including IdeaCast and Gas Station TV, while Arbitron’s Portable People Meter, devised for radio, can be applied to out-of-home too.

4. Accept that once the dust has settled on the great quest for metrics – around 2011, perhaps? – it’s very likely that there will be different methods for different kinds of screen media. After all, does it make much sense to measure a digital billboard in the same way as a salon chair-side screen? Content, dwell time, the mood of the audience and the trade-off between high numbers and high quality are dramatically different. Many in the sector argue that it’s a motley bag of rather disparate media lumped together under the heading “digital OOH”, and the development of metrics is likely to prove them right.

5. Don’t expect an international solution. Other media are measured in different ways around the world, and media planning and buying are largely done on a per-territory basis, so there’s not much precedent or incentive for an international metric. One possible exception comes from the world of in-store TV, though: Nielsen In-Store and the In-Store Marketing Institute (ISMI) have been working on PRISM (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric), which could provide a measurement standard for all in-store media on both sides of the Atlantic.

6. Look out for more technology innovation. The measurement accessory du jour is the camera, used by companies like Japan’s NEC, France’s QuiVidi, Canada’s Xuuk and Israel’s TruMedia. Some are combining it with face-recognition technology to enable truly accurate measurement of exactly how many people viewed a given screen and for how long, as well as making a stab at their age and gender.

But while such  high-tech measurement methods will undoubtedly prove useful in some applications – for example, validating short-term digital-signage installations, or testing potential screen venues – we don’t believe they’ll become the standard. In the end, brands and agencies will prefer metrics that can be easily applied to any network, without complex extra equipment at the site.

Meanwhile, pocket-sized devices like Arbitron’s Portable People Meter and Nielsen Outdoor’s Nielsen Personal Outdoor Device – which uses GPS to track the movements of a sample group of consumers and establish which advertising sites they have encountered – are likely to provide much of the basic data necessary for understanding trip patterns, while controlled experiments with gaze-tracking systems will make clear how consumers interact with advertising on a moment-by-moment basis.

In retail, ever-tighter integration of screen-media networks with POS and – eventually – RFID systems will lead to increasingly solid numbers on sales uplift.

7. Expect a growing emphasis on qualitative and behavioural aspects of the consumer, as well as audience numbers and demographics. (See the report we published today.) This will be especially true in the UK supermarkets sector, hugely competitive and able to fund the chunky research needed.

8. Don’t expect to attend many presentations on screen-media measurement without hearing references to (a) Google entering the market and (b) Minority Report coming true. Our money’s on (a) happening first, though if Google is eyeing this sector, it’s more likely to come in with an integrated local-advertising offer that combines online, newspapers, broadcast and outdoor than just with a measurement system. 

Focus: still waiting for the money... (0 comments)

A while back I wrote about worries that Focus Media in China might run up against cashflow issues...and it seems the grounds for concern are still there.

While Focus's latest quarterly results continue to show spectacular growth in most areas other than in-store TV (which should improve once the restructuring necessitated by the CGEN acquisition has been completed), accounts receivable are still sitting unpaid for an average 124 days, little better than in the previous quarter.

Grail-seeking (0 comments)

The next metrics buzzword may be "fusion". As this well-written article explains, it's a kind of data mining (though the article doesn't use the term) which compares media consumption and purchase patterns across a mass of individuals to determine which media will actually reach those who buy a given product category, with a degree of precision that even the best demographic targeting can't equal.

For example, the media planner can use fusion techniques to target "true heavy beer consumers, as opposed to men 18 to 34."

Sounds good, doesn't it? But like any other approach, it's going to need some fine-tuning. At least in its simplest form, it's less useful for campaigns that seek to change rather than reinforce behaviour (how do you target "people who don't drink beer at the moment, but would probably like it"?). And of course there are groups that by its nature it can't identify, for example the lucrative first-time parents market (who by definition have never bought baby products before; indeed, a whole lot of their consumption patterns are about to change abruptly).

Most likely, the real value will come through correlating multiple behaviours. For example, consumers who purchase white wine and cola drinks might be good potential converts to beer: they evidently like chilled alcoholic drinks and are also not averse to drinks from cans.

All this, of course, presupposes that the presumption underlying fusion is correct  – that people exhibiting these behaviours are not randomly spread all over the place in terms of media consumption.

But if there's a trend toward this analytic technique, digital signage stands to gain (as, I suspect, do all kinds of specialist and niche media, at the expense of big-numbers primetime TV). The place-based nature of the medium already implies a certain degree of behavioural similarity on the part of its consumers, which the fusion approach should confirm. 

The law of unintended consequences in action (0 comments)

An odd, but logical, side effect of the increase in fuel prices: U.S. consumers are pumping less gas, therefore spending less time at the fuel pumps, therefore watching less forecourt TV. The obvious way to address this (and thereby improve the C-store sales uplift of the gas stations, which are suffering already from the decreased fuel spend) is to slow down the flow of fuel; but I've no idea if that's possible. Answers, please, on the back of a five-dollar bill.

Mind you, there's a bright side. The CEO of Lamar, which needs all the positive spin it can get right now, reckons that higher gas prices mean more carpooling, and that means "more attentive eyeballs" for roadside billboards.

Implausible development of the month (0 comments)

The company's latest financials may have investors weeping, but one Oregon artist is finding laughs in Lamar with what we think may be the first ever comic strip on the theme of digital billboards.

Take a look at the latest strip here.

Can Disney be far behind? 

Focus: is cashflow an issue? (0 comments)

Well, I was wrong when I suggested that Focus's Q1 results wouldn't reflect the disappearance of the wireless business; indeed, the quarter's headline loss figure was entirely down to an accounting adjustment made for just that purpose.

Even so,  scepticism of Focus continues on Wall Street today after Friday's price plunge and massive trading volume. At around midday (U.S. time) today Focus stock had dipped to 30.12. That's very close to the 52-week low, and Focus's valuation is now a full 25 percent down on the 30 May figure.

Meanwhile, the influential Seeking Alpha Website makes a point that just could prove prophetic:

The company is clearly growing at exponential rates but an Achilles heel may be developing with the accounts receivable list growing and days sales outstanding heading the wrong way. A quarter is 90 days. So basically, on March 31 the company still had not been paid for sales from the last week of November 07.

I don’t care what you may say about cultural differences of operating in...China, all business cultures understand cash. This company may have a big problem.

We won't have a clear Focus for a while (0 comments)

In the past few months, we've carried a number of stories on new contenders for the role of China's top digital-signage company  – a role which just a couple of years ago few doubted would be occupied for the foreseeable future by Focus Media Holding.

So Focus's Q1 results, due after the U.S. markets close today (Focus is listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker symbol FMCN), will be much picked-over – and all being well, we'll have a detailed report in place on Friday It will be particularly interesting to see how digital-signage installations are progressing, and how much new business is coming in.

But it's worth noting that while the latest financials will give some indication of where Focus is heading, they won't reflect the blow dealt to its SMS business toward the very end of the quarter, when Focus was accused by Chinese authorities of spamming.

What's more, revenue figures for the second and third quarters (at the very least) are likely to be quite distorted by the Olympics effect.

It may not be until the beginning of 2009 that we can determine how strong Focus's position really is.

Ubiquitous networking (0 comments)

BT futurologist Nicola Millard has produced a white paper entitled The Multichannel Swap Shop: Exploring the Behaviour of the Multitasking, Multicultural, Multichannel Customer.  Much of it concerns the relationship of Internet to bricks-and-mortar retail, but there are some thought-provoking points for our sector, like this:

The biggest consideration for companies with respect to multichannel strategies is the increasing convergence of networked devices combined with the increasing ubiquity of the internet. Convergence will start to blur the physical and the virtual worlds through the use of GPS, RFI ID tags and machine readable physical objects such as ‘shortcodes’, ‘SMS codes’, ‘QR codes’ or ‘UPCODES’, which can be printed on packaging or advertising material.

Hypertag, where a code is embedded into advertising posters, has already been successfully trialled with users able to order products using their phone and a short code. ScanSearch and ScanZoom have been trialled in Japan and the US. ScanSearch, from Amazon Japan, allows the 27% of Japanese customers who currently own a mobile phone equipped with a barcode reader to compare prices on the go with those on Amazon.co.jp and, if lower, buy straight from Amazon via their phone. ScanZoom allows customers to take a photo of a product’s bar code and then get access to PriceGrabber or Amazon’s information for that product, from product descriptions and customer ratings to pricing.

Physical spaces can start to be embedded with social networks - stories, memories, opinions and other social information left by individuals, groups and businesses. This so-called “geo-web” will enable people with mobile devices to access information relevant to their current location – including information sensitive to locale and local culture. Imagine being able to post reviews of hotels or restaurants whilst actually still being there and instantly having that information available to all.

In this converged world, customers can simultaneously be present in both the physical and virtual world. So there need to be tools to manage presence markers (i.e. I am here), attention management tools (i.e. there is something that might be of interest to you here) and the ability to multicontext (i.e. switch between physical and, potentially multiple, virtual channels). For companies, this allows the possibility of helping customers to shop and get service using location data as well as the data in CRM systems.

In addition, products get social and services get smart – whether through the power of IP (Ipv6 addresses) or self-configuring sensor networks. Connected devices (phones, computers, mp3 players, TVs etc) increasingly become intelligent servicing platforms, diagnosing, updating, reordering and supporting an array of products and services without the need for any human intervention (unless, of course, they choose to be involved).

You can download the white paper here.

Silver screen? More like gold (0 comments)

To intermittently-sunny Brixton in south London today, wearing my other hat as an independent film exhibitor, for a conference with the inevitably punning title Independents' Day.

The news for Britain's cinema-exhibition sector is...well, let's put it this way: it's not as gloomy as it is for many of our mainstream media. Audiences are way way up on the grim days of the 1970s and 1980s, and ad revenue, while not exactly soaring Internet-style, is at least showing growth in good years. This year the annual growth rate should be more or less on a par with outdoor's, in fact.

And as well as the familiar pre-show reel, there's another aspect of cinema advertising that's attracting much interest: place-based promotions, including foyer screens. The digital side of this is not a huge market yet, but it can only be expected to grow as the move to digital projection leads cinemas to install more infrastructure, and as acceptance of screen media in general grows.

But the really nice thing about these ad opportunities is the audience. Not only is it younger and more affluent than the population as a whole, but it's in a great mood: the top five traits of cinema identified by audiences surveyed for the 2008 Film Audience Measurement and Evaluation survey were "glamorous", "clever", "trendy", "upmarket" and "sexy". Many marketers would kill for brand associations like those.

What's more, the same survey showed that not only do 85 percent of cinema visitors usually watch the (big-screen) advertisements, and a full half discuss them afterwards, they also spend an average of 18 minutes in the building but not in the auditorium itself - primarily, of course, in the foyer, refreshment, or cafe/bar areas.

The audience loves the environment, is in the mood to watch ads (very likely encouraged in this by the extremely high creative values and often intriguingly wacky concepts of British cinema advertising)....and hangs around for nearly 20 minutes. What better recipe for a screen-media location? 

Thought for the day (0 comments)

“Digital signage is coming almost to be an alternative name for our industry.”

Neil Weinstock of Be Media, writing about the commercial AV sector.

Casino signage: lots of innovation, lots of regulation (0 comments)

Digital Signage Expo Day Two, and there was too much happening on the news front to spend a lot of time in the conference sessions – not least Dynamax’s deal with Clear Channel, which really catapults the former company into the big leagues internationally and not just in the UK.

But there were a few interesting sessions going on upstairs at the Las Vegas Convention Center, not least a panel discussion on digital signage in the (U.S.) casino business. Chaired by Bill Yackey, who edits Another Website and I suppose ought to be my mortal enemy but isn’t, the panel also featured Brent Brown, VP of International Business Systems; Drew Topel, now director of media technology with Titan Outdoor in the U.S. and previously on the other side of the fence with CoolSign; and Lance Hutchinson, director of Digital Display Group.

The first thing that struck me was the incredible amount of regulation these guys have to put up with when installing their screen-media systems – not only from state authorities, but also from the administrations of the individual Native American tribal territories in which so many U.S. casinos are located. Essentially, it seems, any technology that physically or virtually touches the actual gaming systems has to be ratified before it can be installed, lest it affect the fairness of the games.

The underlying rationale of consumer protection behind this kind of regulation may be difficult to fault, but it means that even apparently innocent applications such as remote diagnostics, let alone real-time jackpot displays, have to get through the red tape.

But the specialists in this field clearly do manage to get through it, because Topel and Hutchinson pointed out some interesting gaming trends,which I offer in no particular order:

• “Proximity meters” visually indicate how close a given player is to a jackpot – not necessarily the big one, but enough to keep them playing. Increasing individuals’ playing time is a goal for casino operators.
• Devices like this may be necessary in order to create a buzz in today’s casinos, which are increasingly cashless, relying on ticketed plays instead. With the chunk-chink of a big prize paid in quarters gone from the soundtrack, can digital signage provide the same allure?
• To the same end, casinos are dividing screens into segments so that the current jackpot total is always present – rather than disappearing while other messages are shown.
• And all this, said Hutchinson, also ties in with the use of digital signage to “affect perception of luck and winning” – a big part, of course, of casinos’ psychological marketing.
• On a tech level, LCD screens actually mounted inside slot machines are on the rise, said Topel.
• Finally, digital-signage screens can also be used to show conventional TV during special events, such as big sports games. (If nothing else, this dual purpose should mean that the digital signage benefits from good screen size and quality.)
  

And they lived together happily ever after (0 comments)

Ad agencies love us. No, really, they do, according to Jack Sullivan, senior VP and out-of-home media director at Starcom Worldwide.

And all we need to do to take the affair to the next stage is give them the kind of insights they need to properly assess the effectiveness of our screen-media networks – assuming, that is, that they are effective in the first place.

Sullivan made these semi-reassuring points in a panel discussion at Digital Signage Expo on Wednesday (along with the ubiquitous Steve Platt of the eponymous institute and Brian Dusho of BroadSign, both of whom surely either have doppelgangers or never get into the office).

“Clients love this medium, they love the digital mindset,” he said. “There isn’t a plan at agencies where it isn’t thought about seriously.”

But agencies need more information, he pointed out, including a research currency that is consistent  with those used in other out-of-home media.

And qualitative info is important too, according to Sullivan.

Rather than just getting numbers, he said, “I’m more apt to want to know the mindset of the commuter as they travel malls, commute…there’s a huge field of behavioural science out there for advertisers”.

When contemplating a network buy for a client, said Sullivan, he looks beyond the simplistic claim that a screen in a venue constitutes coverage of that venue – after all, we’re all familiar with some terrible screen locations, like the one Sullivan mentioned in a corridor leading to the washrooms.

He considers factors including the geographical locations of the venues; the nature of the venue itself (footfall and so on); and the number and positioning of screens.

“You have to, at the end of the day, deliver impressions – not opportunities to see – I want  likely to see,” he said.

“Preach [that] we are the medium that sells – other media reach consumers, we reach decision-makers, we are the end-aisle display.”

Global AND local? Reuters manages it... (1 comments)

Reuters’ digital-signage supremo Christopher Burtt and JCDecaux North America’s CIO Eric Penot joined me on Wednesday for a panel discussion at Digital Signage Expo, on the refreshingly non-specific topic of digital signage around the world.

That didn’t rule much out, so I got to all but circumnavigate the globe (from China to Brazil), throwing in deeply prejudiced opinions on what’s hot and what won’t be, as well as a few neologisms (though I’ve just been disappointed to find that according to Google, about 300,000 people came up with “Chindia” before me).

And Penot had some fantastic pictures of JCDecaux’s transport installations which really brought home the power of some of the company’s airport work, in particular.

But it was the presentation from Reuters’ Burtt that highlighted better than any I’ve heard recently how the devil really is in the detail of a screen-media project.

Although one of its Times Square installations (the one opposite the NASDAQ) is revenue-generative, Reuters is using digital signage primarily to get its brand out there – particularly in front of the finance professionals who are the customers for its lucrative business-information service, now a much more important part of the company than the news agency for which it first became famous.

Typical of this approach is its Infopoint network (which uses Wireless Ronin technology), with units placed in, for example, the lobbies of large financial institutions. Infopoint units are also placed in Reuters’ own offices to keep staff aware of the range of Reuters’ information businesses.

So, with a network that includes many third-party sites around the world, how does Reuters ensure the whole thing keeps running smoothly?

Burtt’s key lessons: make it easy to install and support, ensure it is accepted locally, and follow a philosophy of “central control with regional flexibility”.

Sounds great. What does it mean in practice?

Central control means: a standard ordering process, plug-and-play installation, limited configuration options, instructions in simple English (for the benefit of non-native speakers), brand guidelines, and “push” rather than “pull” updates (that is, centralised network  control sends updates to the individual displays, rather than waiting for requests).

Flexibility, on the other hand, means: content in the local language; using local experts to customise content (getting little things like date formats and temperature scales right matters, says Burtt), and allowing local content within defined constraints.

All pretty obvious, eh? But I suspect the fact Burtt made it sound so easy is testament not to an easy ride for Reuters, but to plenty of sweat, tears and learning the hard way on the part of Burtt and his team. 

Beyond Chindia (0 comments)

So I’m sitting in Vegas, making some last-minute amends to my presentation at this week’s Digital Signage Expo, and waiting for a snail-slow AOL connection (for which thanks to fellow SCREENS.tv blogger Steve Gold, who leapt to the rescue after my…no, you really don’t want the soap opera of my laptop woes, do you? I’m sure you have your own.)

Anyway, this gives me time to think a bit laterally around the obvious topics of my presentation, which is going to focus on some of the more interesting recent deployments outside the American market.

And one of the questions which strikes me is: when asked about the next big markets for screen media, we’ve all said “China, India” so often that it’s becoming Pavlovian. But where else – specifically, not just in vague regional terms?

Here’s a shortlist to kick the discussion off, at least.

The Middle East is a no-brainer and indeed there are already signs of conference/expo activity there, which is a good indicator. The UAE and particularly (but by no means exclusively) the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are likely to be early hotspots; we’ve also reported recently on a flurry of activity in Turkey.

Among the other nations, I’d give serious attention to the potential of Egypt, Lebanon if or when stability permits, and Saudi Arabia for some applications, not forgetting either the small nations of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, which should all exhibit UAE-style demand. All these can be serviced from the Gulf relatively easily. Israel of course is also a likely player with a strong tech and media pedigree.

Latin America is a big place and I think we can separate it into three strong markets. First, Mexico. Second, Brazil. Third, Argentina (which is largely to say Buenos Aires) and Chile. Serving these may well require on-the-ground presence in multiple cities.

Central and eastern Europe, with its patchwork of languages, cultures and histories, is perhaps even less cohesive than LatAm. There’s been a fair bit of activity already in Poland, but there’s surely room for much more; Hungary has struck me as pretty quiet to date, an impression that a quick screen-media-hunt on a recent expedition to Budapest did nothing to dispel; the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Ukraine and of course Romania, where Monopoly Media is already so active, should all go on our shortlist too.

We're also hearing encouraging things about a ramp-up of activity in South Africa.

And I’d turn to the Antarctic market next, except the AOL download has finally finished. Maybe at DSE…

Don't tell the anti-billboard campaigners... (2 comments)

We've heard both sides of the argument surrounding digital roadside billboards' impact on safety, and it seems that if carefully designed without too much motion they don't have a deleterious impact on drivers' attention. But there's a new twist with this report in Time magazine suggesting that roads could be safer without (most) signage, full stop -- and yes, that includes road signs.

In a nutshell, the Dutch engineer whose concept this is believes that if you take away the signs, drivers will be forced to pay attention to their environment. (We thought paying too much attention to the environment was the supposed problem with digital billboards, but what do we know?)

The sincerest form of...something (1 comments)

I could have sworn that colleague Paul Mallaghan and I had left aka.tv for the verdant new pastures of SCREENS.tv, but comparing their piece on Wal-Mart's animated Lisa with our earlier reporting of the same story (read down a few paragraphs), not to mention their piece on the Tommy Hilfiger window touchscreens with our story -- again a few days earlier than aka's -- I had to wonder if it was all a dream...

Expo Day 2: the marketer, the adman and the designer (0 comments)

Harrods' advertising and sales promotion director Guy Cheston, Jon Lewen from CBS Outdoor's Alive operation and Mick Nash from design firm Sedley Place joined me this morning at Screen Expo Europe for a forum session in the Advertising Theatre, to a standing-room-only house.

The first question we looked at: are screens a medium for brand-building, for a POS call to action, or for both?

Cheston was adamant that in Harrods' experience they're good both ways. He said their brand-building value was particularly high when applied to international brands, but also pointed to uplift of as much as 58 percent during promotions for brands like Bulgari and Hermes, falling away after the on-screen activity ends.

Lewen, being from an outdoor firm, was understandably strong on the brand-building potency of the screen. He pointed out that screens in outdoor-advertising locations follow in the billboard tradition of engaging whole communities -- an answer to media fragmentation?

Nash, whose firm works on (among other things) the world-famous Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus, agreed with Cheston that screens have both brand-building and POS possibilities.

And he said it was time to start "treating public displays as a class of media in their own right", saying that it's the only one in which both the medium and the audience are simultaneously dynamic. (The video moves -- so do the viewers.)

Interaction

Speaking from the floor, Chris Borek of Target (the U.S. retailer) turned the discussion to interaction, and it soon emerged that -- despite the near-universal prediction of interactivity as a growing characteristic of screen media over the next year or two -- the devil's in the detail.

Target was sometimes finding the physical environment of its stores an obstacle in the way of interaction, Borek said.

Cheston suggested that from Harrods' experience, its best use was probably in directional and way-finding applications, while Lewen felt the key was to seamlessly link the interactive experience to what's happening on-screen. Anyone who's used a supposedly interactive screen that doesn't respond to user input in an expected and obvious way will know what a turn-off that is.

Content

Finally -- and a little off-agenda -- our panel looked at content, making some points that backed up what Rocketgroup's Christopher Eades and other speakers had been saying in the Content Theatre the previous day.

Just like Eades, CBS Outdoor's Lewen felt there had been a "huge step up" in the quality of content over the last year. But Sedley Place's Nash cautioned that some were still tempted to blindly repurpose from other media. Adaptation of existing executions for the giant Piccadilly Circus signage, he said, "fundamentally does not work".

Through the window

Elsewhere at Expo, there was a good no-nonsense presentation from 3M's Lloyd Cole in the Thought Leadership Pavilion -- talking through the benefits of the digital shop window.

On the average British High Street at least, he pointed out, window-dressing hasn't changed much in a century (we're not talking about showcase sites like Oxford Street here) so there's plenty of scope to make more of this, the retailer's most obvious point of visual contact with the outside world.

I was sorry to miss Duncan Ross of London & Continental Stations & Property talking about the new St. Pancras International Train Station, and Julian Treasure on the role of audio in screen media, among other speakers. We're planning to make at least some of the presentations available for download on SCREENS.tv, so watch this space. 

Screen Expo Europe 2008: concentrating on content (0 comments)

Content was inevitably going to play a big part in this Expo, with a dedicated Content Theatre and a growing awareness of its importance to network success.

Paul Maidment from BBC Motion Gallery had a few good pointers. Pick the right partner and develop the right brief; don't overlook the arduous process of obtaining clearances for associating famous names with your brand; and perhaps most importantly "know your audience -- don't give them fluffy content when they want factual content". That was a piece of advice that was to be repeated by several speakers. 

For example, Alex Hughes from AMiGO. "Do not annoy them [consumers]," he said. "Be sympathetic to their mindset -- understand their mission." And remember that "they're donating their time" to hearing your message.

It helps to remind yourself that you too are a consumer when trying to understand audiences, he added.

I'm sure Hughes would agree with Maidment that it's a mistake to deliver fluff when what your audience wants is seriousness. But he did point out that "there's nothing better than getting someone's attention by making them laugh or smile -- don't underestimate the power of entertainment".

Christopher Eades from Rocketgroup had some encouraging things to say for the content-creation side of the sector. It's been a positive year, he said, with quality improving -- partly because there are now more companies operating in the field, but also because the clientele is changing.

Eades has worked on the content-creation side for six years, he said, and until this year work mostly came his way from network owners. Now, it's coming from the advertising agencies, which are "finally realising the value that outdoor digital has".

With this shift in the content creators' client base come  correspondingly higher demands on content. Rocketgroup is therefore also adjusting its business model to be more client-facing -- "agencies won't settle for less than that".

Peter Miles from SUBtv was a predictably entertaining speaker, making the point (like so many others, not least Nancy Radermecher of ScreenRed) that technology is all very well, but "the main goal is engaging and communicating messages". Too many people focus on what can be done, not why, he said.

SUBtv continues to develop its innovative model that takes advantage of the characteristics of its very specific market -- university students. They're at a clearly-defined life stage, said Miles, leaving home for the first time and likely to be around their new location for three to four years.

To some extent I suppose this is the kind of audience that you don't always have to research to understand -- their student status by definition attributes certain characteristics to (the majority) of them. (One which may surprise many readers is that they spend more on personal-grooming products than the average consumer.)

Among SUBtv's latest wheezes is to distribute information on university sports personalities not only through its own network, but also through Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Setanta and so on.

And that's more evidence of a common theme emerging from today's sessions -- screens are a (sometimes great) means of delivery, but it's not so much the means as the content and the audience that count. 

Screen Expo Europe 2008: the future for retail (0 comments)

(This is the first of two posts today in which I'll report on some of the highlights of the speaker programme at Expo -- more tomorrow, I hope. Of course, I didn't get to hear everyone, so omissions don't mean anything.)

"If you have to predict the future, you're going to get it wrong." That's how Screen Media Magazine and SCREENS.tv's own Guy Kewney kicked off his keynote in the Advertising Theatre at Screen Expo Europe 2008 today -- and of course, predicting the future is precisely what he went on to do.

Among Kewney's prognostications was that "the Sainsbury's Lesson will at some point become the standard method of doing not just POS marketing, but promotional marketing". This lesson, in case you were wondering, comes from the world of (pre-digital) direct mail, where Sainsbury's figured out that thanks to data mining it could send mailshots only to people who were likely to buy.

And digital just enhances our ability to do that, said Kewney: "We will be able to promote our brands to the right market for a fraction of the cost we have today."

But he raised questions over the viability of the mobile phone as the answer to all a marketer's dreams -- questions that may reinforce the role that fixed screens have to play. When it comes to mobiles, said Kewney, "you have a choice -- either moving pictures or good battery life" -- and nothing is more likely to annoy consumers quickly than running down their batteries with your promotional messaging.

Some have proposed the theoretical possibility of actually transmitting power into a mobile device but, said Kewney, "I don't take it seriously".

Gavin Anderson from Retail Radar disagreed with Kewney on the role of mobile, and had some interesting insights to offer into the shop of the future.

"The single point of communication for the customer is the mobile phone," Anderson said, and -- although the view isn't universally shared -- he's a big proponent of Bluetooth as the means of delivering information (that's information, not mindless promotions) to shoppers.

It's information, Anderson believes, that conveys customers along the sales process. Historically this was offered by the shop assistant; now, for many consumers, it's coming off the Web. So where Bluetooth or similar technologies can add value is by dragging the customers back into the shop to give them information alongside the actual products.

Another interesting example of tech leading to sales uplift given by Anderson was the clothes retailer's changing room. Enhancing the changing room with interactivity can lead to more items being tried on -- and bought.
 

Bits from Shinoda (0 comments)

The LCD-vs-plasma-vs-everything-else debate totters on. Latest into the fray is Shinoda Plasma (which I misread at first as Shinola Plasma). Tech-On!, a pretty good site for tech news from Japan, reports that the chairman of Shinoda – which  is planning to start production of 142-inch plasma units later this year – sums up the contenders thus:

“To realize digital signage of more than 100 inches with current technologies, the following methods [other than plasma - BP] are possible: (1) projector, (2) LED display, (3) multi-vision LCD display and (4) PDP. However, Shinoda pointed out (1) has a low brightness, (2) has a low resolution and high cost, (3) has nondisplay areas between displays and (4) requires heavy equipment investments.”

Naturally enough, Shinoda favours plasma. Fine – all the competing technologies have their virtues. What does bug me, however, is this notion that there is a single perfect display for digital signage. Even at a given screen size, it all depends on the application and the location, and any vendor arguing otherwise is just misleading customers in a marketplace that’s already rather confusing to the newcomer. 

"Madison Avenue now runs through the Googleplex" (0 comments)

Fun and thought-provoking piece from that ever-readable finance Website, The Motley Fool, supposedly looking back at Google's growth from the perspective of the year 2010. Among predictions of the monster's steady progress in a range of spheres where it hasn't yet had much influence - from social networking to, yes, digital billboards - is this interesting comparison: "Google became the Focus Media of the West." A throwaway line, but one which makes you wonder about the scope of Focus's ambition, too...

What to expect in '08 (0 comments)

With 2008 now well and truly embarked upon, what can we expect in the screen-media sector this year?

More of the same, I think: growth rather than revolution.

Big screens will continue to get bigger, weirdly-shaped screens will continue to get weirder. Interaction will become ever more commonplace.

Sectors beyond retail will become ever more retail’s equal. Ad sales will increase in professionalism. Content will improve as the medium becomes better understood.

Small companies will consolidate; a few will go public. EnQii will be a name to watch,  and so, many predict, will Cisco. Other big names from outside the sector may enter it.

And the $64m question will remain: is Google really interested in us? 

Scala: still with us (0 comments)

The news that Scala posted record sales in 2007 will come as a surprise to some: there are those in the sector who tend to write it off as yesterday's company. It's interesting, then, that despite all the attention given to those players which are trying to offer some more exciting permutation of tech, content, management and sales, Scala has shown that two serviceable but unsexy software products along with a decent sales force can keep it happily in business.

Worth bearing in mind next time you hear a pitch for the Next Titanic Thing among screen-media suppliers. And don't forget all those juicy opportunities to upgrade long-standing clients, again, and again, and again...

Coming soon to a news vendor near you? (0 comments)

Take-up of screen media in the news retail trade has been surprisingly slow, despite WHSmith’s appealing network in Britain and a handful of Stateside examples. Comtech M2M’s Extra could be the device that changes that – and perhaps the most impressive aspect of its design is that it doesn’t require the retailer’s involvement.


Not only will this help avoid problems with stale news staying on-screen when an update is forgotten, but we expect it will soon be exploited – particularly by local publishers with their dense networks of dedicated vendors – as not only a promotional tool, but a news medium in itself.

Thanks to the Web, newsrooms are rapidly going multimedia; now they can add screen-media content to their output. 

Wearable media (0 comments)

I've just posted a great overview on wearable media, written by our regular contributor Alison Classe - it's here.

But I can't help thinking there's something of the emperor's new clothes about wearable media. And in this case, the great unspoken truth is that wearable screens look silly.

Of course, silly can be fun, and that's a point in the favour of wearable media for promoting fun products and services - which typically means promoting leisure to a youthful demographic that's comfortable interacting not only with digital media, but also with complete strangers on the street.