I admit it. I wanted to shake up the audience at last month’s OAAA event at Miami Beach’s swanky Fontentbleu Hotel. My brief was a rerun of my earlier participation at DSE for a “no holds barred” discussion about the truth or BS of social media and DOOH. (See this post).

As a member of the OAAA Innovation Committee, I recommended Marta Kagan as a keynote speaker. Marta is a provocative speaker, well known for her self processed “potty mouth” aka plain speaking. But more to the point, in a world where anyone with a Twitter account can claim to be a social media expert, Marta actually is. Her presentation series “What the F*** is Social Media” has itself been a viral hit with over 1,000,000 views – not bad for a business prezzie.

Considering that the prior week in Miami was overcast, humid and rainy, the afternoon of our panel occurred when the sun finally came out and I expected to be facing empty seats. But thankfully the room filled out and it was certainly good to see many C level people interested in the impact of social media on the out-of-home industry.

Back to the plot…. Marta was presenting the keynote ahead of our panel – so she launched into her latest thesis – that brands approach social media like a 14 year boy approaches sex.

Now, while I’ve been evangelizing the 3Fs of engagement – Fun, Fame and Fortune, Marta of course introduced the 4th F. She warned us, but there it was in full glory in front of an otherwise quite stiff audience (maybe that’s the wrong choice of words). A slide with a young male proclaiming “Lets F***”.

Marta went on to describe brands’ use of social media as naive, crude, blunt and certainly not bed-worthy. In no way is it seductive. Just like a 14 year old boy tactics around sex.

Helpfully, Marta told us what it takes to sleep with a woman. Now that’s value for money, even if we were not interested in social media!

She claims a woman will sleep with you because:

1) You’re beautiful
2) You’re remarkable (you have something meaningful to say AND you listen)
3) You boost her status (she admits that’s shallow – but it’s true) and
4) Because she’s lonely and drunk (she admits it happens sometimes, but that we shouldn’t rely on that for a long term strategy).

So while I make no claims (publicly at least) about my powers of seduction, I do like to think that my understanding of and approach to social media is somewhat more mature than a 14 year old boy’s approach to sex.

Marta promises she’ll put her deck on slideshare soon.

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LocaModa today launched an innovative campaign with Gap that connects the brand’s fans to the MTV 44.5 screen in Times Square.

LocaModa pioneered and patented the connection between the social web and social places and this is just one of many applications we’re proud to be involved with. As is sometimes the case, (when brands want a one-stop shop for multi-screen engagement) we’re managing every aspect of the user experience including management of the brand’s Twitter and facebook accounts, as well as the Times Sq billboard.

One of the aspects we’ve focused on in this campaign is to make the brand’s engagement with the user even more connected.

The onramp to the engagement is when the user tweets #BeYourOwnT with a photo of themselves. Other than excluding the expected dubious submissions (inc. promos or inappropriate content) it’s as easy as it it gets.

Submitted photo’s get moderated then queued up to be posted for 10 minutes every hour. When a user’s photo’s goes live, a camera captures the real time event and posts it to a photo albumn on Gap’s official facebook page. The user’s photo also dynamically becomes part of the brand’s mosaic “T” at the end of every loop.

The brand tweets back to the user that their photo has been posted and is now available on facebook to be tagged and shared.

This is a nice way to directly thank your fans (and by the way, the brand doesn’t send the same message to every fan – we’ve been sensitive to maintain the brand’s voice and authenticity throughout the experience).

The entire end-to-end platform and experience is provided without any additional hardware requirements on the DOOH screens/networks or brand. Got an Internet connection, great, lets go. So again, being agnostic about the DOOH OS, players etc, makes these applications cost effective, efficient, scalable and repeatable solutions.

Expect similar executions to be rolling out in retail – this is marketing (DOOH is not just about Ad networks folks).

We’ll follow up post campaign with some stats – but suffice to say, in just the first few hours of the campaign, there’s been an immediate rise in brand likes, and a veritable love fest for the fame and fun in what we call the 3Fs of brand engagement (Fortune, being the the 3rd “F”).

Having just returned from the OAAA in Miami, I note that DOOH + Social/Mobile is really gaining traction and is talked up at every event and presentation. The many war wounds we’ve got from being first (those arrows can hurt) are starting to pay off. So I’d be remiss then if I didn’t tip my hat to some of the companies that I think we’ve inspired to do similar programs.

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If I allow myself to stand back from the daily business of closing clients, keeping applications current and humming 24/7 and scaling the business, I can see the DOOH market in an entirely different light.

Much of our market has been influenced by the whims of advertising agencies seeing or discovering DOOH as either an exciting new opportunity to engage mobile consumers in and around places, or as an extension of their other media – TV, OOH or Digital. Many campaigns run for a matter of weeks, and in my experience, most (national) campaigns run on around 1,000 venues, regardless of if you can offer 10,000, 100,000 or even 1,000,000 screens. At the end of the campaign, the sales process starts over. Ideally we have repeat customers that are more efficient/economic to close, but a majority are new accounts, reflecting the fact that the industry is still at an experimental stage (clients like to “first” or “different” but as someone one said, “you can only be a virgin once”).

But that’s not the whole story – there are other segments of our industry that are not ad-driven and are therefore potentially at least, able to be more strategic and longer serving/surviving. These businesses are predominantly marketing oriented and therefore our products and services are capable of becoming mission critical tools for businesses.

A business with millions of fans on Facebook wants to see those fans move from their web or mobile screens towards the POS screen. Connecting Facebook, DOOH, email etc is not a one month campaign but hopefully 1-3 year strategy.

As Techcrunch reported here, Starbucks’ mobile app has generated $110 million in card cash transfers, a tiny drop in the ocean for them (even their gift card transactions are worth $2.4 billion!). But it’s a meaningful drop – and as a strategy, it’s here for the long haul, not a four week run. Certainly any DOOH business would be delighted to be part of that opportunity.

So be honest, is your DOOH business model tactical or strategic? Are you enabling advertising or marketing?

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I am a speaker in what’s been billed an “Interactive Shootout” at 9.00 am, Thursday March 8th at DSE.

Details here

The fight debate will take a deeper look at the realities of interactive technologies and will (if I’m anything to do with it) cut the crap to expose the good bad and ugly.

This will be a no pitch zone, warts ‘n all, crash course for the red hot area of how adding the words “mobile” “social” or “local” to DOOH, might or might not mean a damn.

To help expose the BS and provide an engaging and provocative learning experience, I will be joined by two of the brightest and non-BS people in our industry – David Haynes (Sixteen:Nine blog, pressDOOH and The Preset Group) and David Weinfeld (Digital Signage Insights blog and CSO at Screenreach).

David Weinfeld and I will take opposing sides of each question lobbed at us by Mr Haynes – we may not even know which side we’ll be asked to take until Mr Haynes directs us – that way, the audience will gain perspective into the pros and cons of otherwise hyped areas of our industry.

I’m confident that attendees will leave with a rounder sense of the challenges and opportunities – rather than a sales pitch. And if we can save anyone from getting at any of the war wounds that we have got in the past 10+ years of DOOH, then it’ll be time well spent.

Hope to see you there.

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When LocaModa launched Wiffiti some 4 years ago, it was designed as an engagement tool for audiences to express themselves on screens at events or venues.

Wiffiti continues to serve us well and has been used in several hundred campaigns (with brands such as Pepsi, Coke, Verizon, GM etc) political events (such as a fund raiser for the then presidential candidate Barack Obama) and events/concerts (including major trade shows such as CES, American Idol tours and the Black Eyed Peas).

But a strange thing started to happen about 18 months ago.

Where LocaModa was focused on monetizing media on digital out-of-home screens, our platform unpredicatbly started to be embraced by teachers.

Like brands, teachers realized that their “audience” wasn’t always paying attention! Instead of telling their pupils to turn their phones off, enterprising teachers recognized the potential to use the phone as an engagement tool and communication channel.

What may well have started out as a “cool” idea or gimmick worked, and soon we saw tens of thousands of screens being made by users who were not exactly LocaModa’s target customers.

Today over 90,000 Wiffiti applications have been made by teachers.

Scolastic even published a lesson on text messaging in class via Wiffiti.

And that is why we not only had to listen to the wisdom of the crowd, but also work out where new markets for Wiffiti could be.

So today at Wiffiti.com, there is an invitation to a beta program that is being rolled out in the coming weeks to the many thousands of teachers, event/conference organizers and smaller digital networks who have been outside our core market.

The key features that teachers have been asking for have previously only been available to customers paying many thousands of dollars – but those features including the ability for a screen to be private and moderation tools, will soon be available to a much wider group of users.

And for event/conference organizers, who need more flexibility to customize screens to market to their audiences, there will be affordable Wiffiti Pro versions.

Our media clients and digital networks have a very different set of requirements for customized campaigns and/or hundreds or thousands of localized nodes, and these clients will be unaffected by the changes going on with Wiffiti. They will soon be offered a range of applications and features more easily tailored to their specific requirements.

So stay tuned – and if you want an invite to the Wiffiti beta program, you can get one here.

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