All over the world, passive media is becoming interactive. But in America, we tend to ignore trends unless they happen here. In 2003, some five years after SMS was ubiquitous all over the world except USA, American Idol introduced SMS voting. Almost overnight, SMS took off in USA. It took a mass medium to validate what was already obvious to people outside USA. Communications is two way and passive media needs to get with the program.

This week, American Idol announced it was extending it’s interactively to the web with online voting via AmericanIdol.com and Facebook.

Here we go again. You’ve known for some time that passive media is being disrupted by the web, but what have most “passive media” businesses done about it? Apart from a few innovators, most have continued to do what they always have done - because learning something new and taking risks seemed to be the harder option. But now that more old school businesses are doing something about it, being interactive has tipped.

Interactive is the new passive.

Passive media has to connect to the web to be more accountable, and to be where the audience is. And now, it’s mainstream, it’s do or die.

To be more relevant, engaging and accountable, DOOH businesses must connect to real time sources like Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare etc. That means dealing with content curation, moderation and accountability at scale. That’s a big problem to deal with.

LocaModa has been banging on this drum for four years. It’s certainly been painful to be that early - but the advantage has been that we’ve patented solutions directed at connecting DOOH to the web and social streams. Make no mistake, DOOH has it’s own unique challenges - e.g. different screen formats, network ops, granular content distribution and rules - but these have all been solved. So no more excuses.

We think the future is connected. Apparently so does American Idol. Maybe more people will recognize this now.

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