As some in the Out of Home (OOH) world head out to Vegas for DSE2014 (Digital Signage Expo), Monster Media today announced that it has been granted a patent for social media on Out-of-Home screens.
The patent, 8,615,565 “Automatic content retrieval based on location based screen tags,” relates to the automatic retrieval and display of social media on location-based screens such as Out-of-Home networks and signage at venues, events and arenas.
Monster Media’s growing intellectual property (IP) portfolio contains two issued patents and numerous other applications focused on interactive engagement technologies primarily for Out-of-Home applications covering mobile, social, touch and gesture technologies.
The granted patent describes how to amplify audience engagement on Out-of-Home screens. LocaModa, a company acquired by Monster Media in August 2013 (full disclosure, I was the founder and CEO of LocaModa) invented a number of products that improve engagement for Out-of-Home networks.
Automatically creating a sustainably interesting screen was a problem that needed to be solved for our industry. Simply using local messages or single content sources gets boring very quickly as audiences lose interest if content is repeated. We solved the problem by leveraging conversations across multiple networks and tagging those conversions with keywords that the local screens then subscribe to. Of course we filter the content to make sure that it is appropriate for each venue, but the result is an automatic system that increases interest in and value of the media.
Monster Media’s IP, which pre-dates the now popular use of hashtags in social media, is regularly used to systematically aggregate, filter and display Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram on Out-of-Home and event-based screens. The company’s technology platform enables Out-of-Home campaigns reaching more than 100 million people every month for brands including AT&T, Clorox, ESPN, Levis, Gap, Pepsi, Sony, Paramount, Tide, New York Rangers, Miami Dolphins and Ciroc.
As some know, LocaModa, the company I founded over 10 years ago, developed a number of firsts for the OOH and DOOH market. Way ahead of our time, we patented a suite of technologies that made screens more engaging and measurable.
In my opinion, this is a biggie - it’s a core part of Monster Meida’s value proposition and it’s fundamental to the best practices and industry standard that I helped draft for the OAAA (that Stephen Freitas will be speaking to at the OOH session at DSE2014 this week).
In essence, the predominant way social media is being used on OOH networks and at events hits this patent and clearly, as our market get serious about leveraging real time media to enable more engaging OOH screens and events, it has to be mindful about IP issues.
One side impact of this patent is that it can help remove friction from our market. By way of an example, assume network A and network use different content management systems, have different screens formats, but use the same standardized method of deploying social media. A brand or agency can now deploy social media to both networks without needing to worry about their different CMSs and screen formats. This means we (finally) get less friction in our market.
In much the same way as the internet exploded only once the browser sat on top of different platforms - and resulted in the revolution of frictionless media, we can only hope that something similar happens in the OOH industry.
