Screenmedia Magazine - digital signage, digital out-of-home, convergent media, screenmedia magazine

A couple of the new stories on Screenmediamag.com this week illustrate how a little creative thinking can lead you to digital out-of-home that transforms a location, or even helps create a new business.

First, to Tel Aviv, where what are typically among the dullest corners of any airport terminal – the foreign exchange desks – are getting the digital equivalent of a new lick of paint thanks to video walls from YCD Multimedia.

They do triple duty: not only do they bring a smart, contemporary feel to the booths, they also communicate current exchange rates to customers (have you noticed how at some forex outlets you have to be pretty much sitting on the shoulder of the guy being served in order to read these?), and they should additionally act as attractors.

It’s a good contract for Israel’s YCD Multimedia, too, with an international player in currency exchange, and looks like the kind of quality execution that should lead to more.

Next, to Bangalore, where a local firm is using a trio of inducements – in-store discounts, e-commerce discounts, and free Internet access – to get consumers interacting with its mall kiosks. The twist on the common mall model, however, is that this is not so much a marketing project to promote the stores there as an advertising-funded venture.

It’ll be interesting to see how it fares. I predict that consumer engagement will be pretty high (though it might be disadvantageous if everyone uses their full 20 minutes allocation of Internet access); the hard bit, as always, will be selling ads on the back of that.

As many a failed startup (and a few surprise successes) will testify, people don’t always behave in a predictable – or rational – way. So it’s good to see that the latest big trial of QR and NFC in Britain is concentrating not on “does the technology work?” but on “what will consumers do with it in their real lives?”.

People often act very differently to the way they predict, and believe, that they will when they’re questioned in focus groups, and this project should deliver invaluable intelligence on the benefits that consumers actually want and are able to derive from interaction with outdoor advertising.

These benefits may well not be the most technically sophisticated that the platforms can deliver, but they will be the ones on which successful business models can be built.

A salutary reminder of this comes in another story this week from Boston, Massachusetts, where public transportation officials rolling out a new network of advertising screens to station platforms have learned some lessons from their disastrous foray into place-based radio a few years ago. That idea doubtless looked great on paper, but the plug was pulled after less than a month thanks to overwhelmingly negative public response.

The moral: don’t assume that just because you can provide it, consumers want you to.

Acting as a judge over the last few weeks for one of the major industry awards programmes has been a heartening experience, on the whole. It’s confirmed that the standard of real, live digital out-of-home deployments is continuing to improve, and that in the best cases the sector is providing near-faultless executions that work for consumers and work for the businesses striving to communicate with them.

There were a handful of all-too-common errors, though. I’m not going to name names, but next time you’re planning a rollout – or putting together an awards submission – please do bear these in mind.

First, screen position is absolutely critical.

I saw some sad cases of clever, potentially very effective networks let down by screens that were just in the wrong place for easy viewing. (But remember, too, that when it comes to touchscreens you may want to limit easy viewing to the interacting individual: for some applications, they won’t want the neighbourhood watching.)

Second, the proposition to the consumer has to be simple. Throwing together digital billboards and smartphones and Facebook and Twitter and Dogs.com (okay, nobody actually used Dogs.com) is very nice and cutting-edge and makes a sexy presentation, but if it’s not easy for a busy – or only marginally interested – person to grasp what benefit they’re going to get from all this texting and tweeting, they’re not going to engage.

Third, consider delaying your competition entries until you’ve got some real metrics. You don’t have to publish all of them, but selected highlights are a lot more persuasive in telling your story than an unsupported assertion that the client/their customers love what you’ve done. I didn’t actually mark anyone down for not having metrics or KPIs, but they do help.

Highlights on the site this week: a possible big rollout on the New York subway, and the bank that's using digital signage to do away with paper.

Just when the U.S. digital outdoor advertising business might have thought things couldn’t get any worse, in terms of opposition to its rollouts, a new and unlikely foe has emerged: Arizona’s astronomical community, worried that light pollution from roadside installations will hinder the work of telescopes.

This may prove to be a solar storm in a teacup. Legislation that would once again allow digital billboards on the state’s highways has already passed both houses of the legislature (although the governor could still quash it, as recently happened in South Dakota).

However, it’s another illustration of the struggle that digital billboards face to gain acceptance. The problem is circular: digital is not by any objective measure – or must subjective ones – any more dangerous to traffic, or intrusive upon neighbourhoods, than non-digital. (Indeed, the digital billboards I see regularly around London are if anything a good deal nicer-looking than their oft-decrepit predecessors.)

But because communities worry about them, they all too frequently won’t allow them, and never have an opportunity to see that these concerns are misplaced. The solution has to lie in education, targeted at law-makers and activist groups, but it is going to be a long and arduous task.

Also on the site today: Posterscope scoops a big DOOH prize in India, and China’s Focus continues to reap the rewards of abandoning mobile and online to concentrate on its core out-of-home activity.

Spring must be here: believe it or not, Screenmedia Expo in London is now only six weeks away, and once again we’ll be helping you make the most of Europe’s biggest DOOH event with a comprehensive series of previews alongside our normal news coverage.

Today, we take a first look at the impressive range of topics covered in the learning programme, and over the weeks to come we’ll also be giving you more insight into speakers’ plans for some of these unmissable sessions.

We also kick off our look at the new products on show with details of some displays from DynaScan.

But is there other information that would help to make your visit to Expo more productive? Let me know, and we’ll try to include it in our coverage of the run-up.

This week, we finally gave in and used a still from Minority Report to illustrate a story on facial recognition. But it’s the only thing that’s funny about our report. The Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. has become sufficiently perturbed by the potential for misuse of facial recognition in tandem with social networking – where people link pictures of their faces with their real identities – that it’s warned publicly about the dangers.

There is a nightmare scenario here for the digital out-of-home sector. Not the FTC warning itself, which will probably not be read by many outside Washington or the industries involved, but the risk that some unscrupulous digital signage operator, somewhere, will decide to give this a go – and, when exposed as they undoubtedly would be, tarnish the entire medium, frightening away consumers and brands alike.

It’s a reminder that although most digital out-of-home raises zero real privacy issues, we could all be profoundly affected by them; if that nightmare scenario came to pass, the public wouldn’t be drawing nice distinctions between screens that recognise faces and screens that don’t.

There’s happier news Stateside, though, from Dunnhumby, whose latest research suggests that in-store marketing greatly magnifies the effect of TV advertising; and in Europe from CBS Outdoor, which has found that consumers are pretty keen to use their smartphones for interaction with digital out-of-home (even if they’re not actually doing it much, yet).

Good news from Screenmedia Expo, too, on Europe’s first NFC Bootcamps, plus a chance to win free consultancy on your digital signage project. Just don’t suggest you want to scrape the social networks...

Do you produce creative content for digital out-of-home, or operate a network which runs it?

Then do consider entering the LoveContent Awards, celebrating the best in DOOH creative across a range of categories including advertising campaigns, non-advertising content, mobile interaction and social integration.

The 23 April deadline’s drawing close, but it’s a great chance to get your work out there in front of the whole sector.

And a high-profile awards ceremony at Screenmedia Expo in May will ensure not only that the winners get the recognition they deserve, but also that the value of high-quality creative to DOOH communications of every form is brought to the forefront. And that’s good news for anyone involved with content.

For more details on the LoveContent Awards, see our story today.

The eyes of the digital out-of-home world are on London this year for one very big reason: the Olympics, which have already prompted one of the most impressive shopping mall installations we’ve seen, and are likely to be the first Games featuring ubiquitous digital out-of-home.

But there are other reasons for DOOH media owners to deploy in the British capital too, and one of them is the large concentration of high-end businesspeople, particularly in the financial and media sectors and especially in the City of London. That’s the rationale behind a recent upgrade and relaunch for Executive Channel Europe, now known as ECNlive.

Also new on the site this week: yet another reason to visit London in the form of an intriguing Screenmedia Expo presentation from Eyetease’s Richard Corbett, which promises to cut to the core of what makes DOOH work (or not) as a medium, plus a new blog from our regular guest Scott Anthony.

Sometimes, patting yourself on the back is justified. And I think that’s the case with Esprit Digital, which has produced an impressive video tracing some of the digital out-of-home world firsts that it’s deployed in Britain over the past half-dozen years or so, many of which have since become mainstream approaches.

But besides the company’s general wonderfulness, there’s also a more general lesson to be drawn from the Esprit video, and that’s the critical importance of designing screens for their environment (in terms of both hardware and content) and for likely audience characteristics, in terms of physical behaviour as much as demographics.

The digital escalator panels (DEPs) which Esprit developed for CBS Outdoor in London Tube stations are perfect examples of this. They’d make precious little sense in many settings, but on an escalator there are a few very specific things you know for sure about your audience that you don’t in most other situations: just how far they are from the display, the direction that they’re travelling, and (usually) the speed of their movement.

Esprit and the media owner capitalised cleverly on this with a configuration that enables the on-screen messaging seen by each consumer to change as they move up or down the escalator – and thus makes the very brief exposure to each display a positive advantage rather than a limitation.

It’s a classic example of exploiting the physical environment to maximise the effect of digital out-of-home, and well worth that pat on the back.