The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. ~Norman Mailer

And with that, I’m turning the blog over to CEO Stephen Randall today for his take on this past week in Loca-Land. Take it away, Stephen…

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Following DSE 2010 in Vegas, the LocaModa train keeps rolling along…

We used DSE as a platform to launch the industry’s first app store – dedicated to solving the problem of helping networks find revenue generating media that engages audiences, attracts advertisers and adds value to venues.

I’m happy to say that our message and proposition was received loud and clear! It’s great to see so many companies coming over to our booth and telling us that we had the exact solution they were looking for. I was also delighted to see so many inquiries coming from major networks outside the US.

We also announced our relationship and integration with Foursquare.

The Foursquare announcement was timed to coincide with our launch on another Clear Channel screen – this one happens to be the largest on the strip, outside Miracle Mile Shops. This was great timing with the DSE show less than one mile away, and various events occurring at the Paris, next to the screen. This story keeps on getting bigger for good reason. Applications like Foursquare will become the on-ramp for loyalty programs in venues and are perfect for DOOH screens. Not surprising then that both Techcrunch and Mashable covered it yesterday afternoon. You should have seen our web stats spike!

Back to DSE, where we also announced that UCView has integrated LocaModa Apps directly into their software offering (they have hundreds of licensees collectively reaching thousands of locations).

The show itself was a great success with hundreds of leads from networks globally representing tens of thousands of venues. Our booth was always well attended and our applications were also on display at UCView, Eventful and CoolSign booths, as well as being used by the event organizers as a communications tool, showing tweets, hashtags and text messages from attendees.

LocaModa’s position as thought leaders was further strengthened when it was announced that we had won two gold awards for our work – a Gold Apex award in the Hospitality category and a Gold Content award in the Interactive category. Both awards were for applications that ran on Zoom Media and Marketing’s network – which was also great news for our partners.

Luckily we managed to fly back to Boston missing the massive Nor’ Easter that dumped 18 inches of snow along the east coast and delayed flights up to New York. We made it back with no delays. Our team was great – Jake, Tim and Gabi were first timers at DSE and now know what it’s like to stand and talk to customers until you don’t have a voice. Jayne, Bill, Steve and I, are long time supporters of DSE so we already knew what to expect – but even we were very surprised by how the event went. Thanks Chris and team over at DSE.

More Vegas photos available on Gabi’s Flickr.

As we prepare for NYE, the anticipated busiest day of our cross-channel campaign with Vans, we’re faced with the question of measurement. Multi-multi-measurement.
To put it mildly.

Let’s back up. Single-modal campaign stats can be broken down into fairly standard tables with the traditional cast of characters: users, pageviews, impressions…

Even digital or otherwise ‘dynamic’ campaigns have become digestible enough over the past few years; interactions like clicks and txts have accumulated the necessary precedence to be adopted into the common marketing vernacular and hold meaning at face value. In most cases, digital numbers can be chopped finely enough to be contained within a traditional analytic structure (with possibly a few relational clauses and an asterisk or two).

But what about a campaign that asks users to click, txt, view, visit, watch, write, submit, photograph, playback, share, and embed? And do so in their own particular way, using whatever combo of devices they want, globally, 24/7?

Welcome to our world.

Cross-channel campaigns like Vans BeHere require an entirely new measurement rubric- one that involves far more than Excel tables and line graphs. User engagement becomes a complex equation involving all of the verbs above, some multiplied, some summed. But here’s the kicker: the three-click rule still applies, and it’s no longer confined to just the web or the mobile phone. When ’spreadability’ reigns, you just better make sure that you let the user decide which three clicks (or txts, or playbacks, or embeds) he wants to make.

From a brand perspective, the ultimate success of a campaign like this isn’t raw numbers; that’s far too compartmentalized and myopic to mean much of anything. The ‘win’ here is verifying that the audience has been given the tools to craft their own user experience in an instinctual way, and can then pass these tools to friends (so that they can then use them in their own way…) Boiled down, it’s a matter of containing viral spread to the point that it captures and engages a critical mass of target users without losing effect.

Toss that in your pie chart.

It’s been quite the year for Jumbli! It became one of the first 100 verified Facebook apps, took off in popularity on the Times Square Jumbotron (hitting 5.8 plays per second!), launched as an iPhone app on iTunes, found a very devoted audience both online and in bars and restaurants, and even spurred the creation of a Jumbli Addicts support group!

Here’s to another year of growing audiences and engaged addicts players!

LocaModa was in the house (which, incidentally, was right behind our “house”…) at the BIMA Social Media Strategy Forum this morning. This was a great gear-up for the 2009 MITX Interactive Awards Ceremony, where LocaModa is a finalist for our cross-channel work with VH1 and also a gold sponsor. Check out the list of other sponsors- We’re certainly in good company!