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

 

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. 

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