This week’s Digital Out Of Home Forum in New York has produced at least one great sound bite and therefore an opportunity for a “punny” headline and some fighting words…

As reported by MediaPost, keynoter Trevor Kaufman, said, “Frankly, we don’t care about digital out-of-home.” He went on to explain in a sentence what I’ve spent more than three years screaming – “the value of digital media is not “distribution” per se, so much as it is about getting people to interact with stuff.” Learn from the web. e.g. Google, Netflix, eBay.

Enable an audience to interact when and where they choose – on-line or off – not just in front of your screen, but in front of anyone’s screen and you might even attract interactive budgets and sustain your DOOH business – otherwise, my DOOH, I don’t give a damn. And nor will anyone else.

I’m too fond of reminding people that we never used to rush home to watch advertising – we might have rushed home to watch Sienfield, or American Idol. Well, now we don’t even do that, becuase we can get content where and when we want. Content has had to go where the party is – Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook. What do those brands have in common? WEB WEB WEB WEB WEB.

TV isn’t dead, it’s getting reinvented as a multi-screen experience. So must DOOH.

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I’m a huge fan of the TED conferences. I find much of their content inspiring and I’m happy to spread the word by tweeting and blogging with links to their presentations. That’s good for TED as it helps increase their brand awareness and demand for their tickets.

My experience is that most conferences are not like TED.

Many conferences operate with the old school mentality that little or nothing is shared outside of the event. Of course, this reduces the potential impact of a conference’s marketing, sustainability and ultimate value. The opposite of the TED strategy.

Furthermore, (and this a pet peeve of mine) many speakers at many conferences think it’s ok to give sales pitches when the audience has paid (with their time and/or money) to gain insights. Except for talks explicitly centered around a company’s products or services and excusing a brief introduction that can include an elevator pitch, speakers at conferences are there as “knowledge brokers” first and company representatives second.

Our industry – whether that’s Place-Based Networks, DOOH, OOH, Location-Based Services, Digital Signage, Narrowcasting… is moving so fast we need more openness and sharing of best practices at conferences rather than sales pitches.

I’d like to promote the following three guiding principals in the interests of getting better and more valuable conferences.

1. Conference collateral (e.g. presentations, papers, videos) should be freely available and spreadable. I use Slideshare. You can find my conference presentations here and various other documents (white papers and articles) here. This is neither difficult nor expensive to implement.

2. Conferences should be as connected as possible. 1. Don’t ban or charge extortionate sums for WiFi! 2. Have real-time streams displayed on screens and websites displaying conference messages, related hash-tags and checkins. This helps promote and extend a conference’s impact and could even be up-sold to sponsors. Again, it’s easy and inexpensive and can more than pay for itself in terms of marketing and enhanced user experience.

3. Conference speakers should not be allowed to pitch on a stage set up to help educate, engage or entertain. Maybe a brave conference organizer could use a gong on stage – if a speaker pitches, they get gonged. That will definitely stop pitches!

I’m speaking at the following conferences in the coming weeks (and am happy to connect with you at any of those events or via email at srandall at locamoda dot com or via twitter stephenrandall):

- Geoworld Summit, May 12th 2011, Brooklyn, NYC
- ScreenMedia Expo 2011, May 18-19th, Earls Court, London
- Digital Signage Forum, May 24th Sydney
- Digital Signage Forum, May 26th Melbourne
- Digital Signage Forum, May 31st Auckland

I believe I walk the walk as well as talk the talk – so by all means, heckle me if you don’t agree!

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Mixed in with the continuing positive DOOH market data from PQ and others, the truth for high tech start ups and entrepreneurs in DOOH is that it’s still an industry with more questions than answers.

OK – that’s why we’re excited about it – there’s so much room for innovation and disruption, but, is the industry really destined to be big enough, or is it a collection of struggling small networks, fragmented infrastructure, apathetic agencies and tactical sales people?

Ouch.

Well sometimes, the truth hurts – and that pain gets us closer to what we actually need to do to change the world.

Before the web, the Internet looked a little like DOOH – the big players (Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe…) had little or no interoperability and seemed unassailable. We know how that story played out. The invention of the web browser effectively reduced infrastructure companies to utility businesses and enabled companies like Amazon and Google to disrupt and dominate on top of new standard interfaces.

Hasn’t looking over the fence at the web taught us anything? DOOH’s infrastructure needs to be flattened and platformised in a similar way. Only then will new applications, ad platforms, commerce and marketing platforms enjoy the huge economic success their counterparts have enjoyed on the web.

The endless prattling on in our industry about QR codes, 3D, Augmented Reality, Bluetooth, Near Field Communications, and frankly anything mobile and/or social is misplaced enthusiasm, naivety or just noise. Yes, some of these technologies deserve a place in our future BUT they are solutions that can only make a BIG difference when they work for the entire market – not just a single proprietary network or tactical campaign.

Until then, DOOH innovators will bear the pain of becoming the Google of Out of Home.

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There’s an excellent blog post at GigaOm about Enchantment and Utility.

Some products/services focus on utility, others focus on wow – but the combination is where a business can maximize its value. This is why many great clubs come and go (they enchant for a while but don’t offer a sustainable utility for their members. MySpace anyone?)

So maybe we can state:

Sustainability = Enchantment + Utility

This could be a rally cry for everyone in the digital signage value chain.

In other words, “Content Is King” is only one side of the equation – the Enchantment side. Focusing only on Content does not deliver a sustainable business. Connectivity (to other screens and audiences via mobile and social networks) is arguably the other side of the equation. (Perhaps where Content Is King, Connectivity is the Kingdom?) But as before, focusing only on connectivity is not enough to sustain a business.

Digital signage MUST provide Enchantment AND Utility. i.e.

Content + Connectivity = Sustainability.

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I keep seeing DOOH articles that refer to Mobile and Social as if they are interchangeable. There are good reasons why Apple isn’t Facebook and visa-versa.

Mobile is often a great communications channel for a social layer, but it is not the only one, and frequently not the best one.

When talking about “mobile” companies servicing the DOOH market – e.g. they specialize in mobile marketing, smart phone apps, blue tooth proximity marketing, mobile games etc., it is not a given that they can also deliver or address requirements for social engagement.

A social layer for DOOH that requires the distribution and curation of multiple real-time (or otherwise) social streams to hyper localized screens is not something that mobile marketing platforms have been designed to address.

This is particularly true at scale, where the tools to direct real-time social media to hundreds or thousands of screens, each with it’s own rules, filters, cms systems etc require an enterprise-grade robust solution that better be the focus of the company providing it.

Likewise, a mobile marketing platform will include features that might be over-kill for a DOOH application.

The DOOH market has its own unique challenges, and it is therefore even more critically important that DOOH practitioners understand the very different capabilities of mobile and social platforms and the DNA of companies offering either.

As always, you need the right tools for the right job.

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