A brief introduction: Hi there. I’m Gabi Schaffzin, Director, Creative Development at LocaModa. I’ll be posting alongside LocaJayne on The Web Outside. Feel free to bug me with questions or comments about anything; I’ll gladly talk digital, creative, dooh, sports, food, movies. Whatever you’d like.

Enough of about me, though:

Now that the highly touted Arbitron Out-of-Home Digital Video Display Study has been out for over a week, we here at LocaModa thought it was about time to chime in.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the aforementioned study can be found, free, online [pdf link]. It gives a great overview of the number of American adults who recall seeing a digital out of home display in the last month (spoiler alert: 67%, or more than 155 million). While these figures have lead to an overwhelmingly positive industry-wide reaction (and deservedly so), we think it’s time to start asking some harder questions. Bill Gerba begins to scratch the surface when he notes that this study will not “put to rest any lingering doubts over our medium’s viability as a communication channel.”

Over 155 million seeing your screen is great. But do they see your content? Do you even know who is seeing it and when? And if so, do they find it relevant? Neither a large study, nor a recorded stream of viewers looking at your screen could provide this level of granular insight. Instead, it is making sure your screens are dynamic and interactive that will get you there.

Digital out of home provides us with the greatest mix of television’s attention-grab and the web’s contextual relevance and measurability. We know that. But are we taking advantage of it? Arbitron’s study was a great first step to understanding who may be looking at DOOH screens. As Mr. Gerba puts it, “it’s solid research from a reputable firm.” But it’s up to the networks and content developers to bring the granular – and extremely necessary – analytics to their screens, be it through mobile, physical, or online interactivity.

By now, most of you (especially the mac-ophiles) have probably heard the anecdote of Obama’s new media team entering the White House faced with 6-year-old versions of Windows, nary a laptop in sight, and no social networking tools in place. More than giving me a chuckle and pause – and encapsulating the huge technological overhaul ushered in by the Obama team – the story points up a new dilemma for an administration that’s carving a niche of not only being ultra-current, but more importantly, who is claiming to be transparent.

So, what’s the dilemma? Well, it’s actually more of a fear than a dilemma. I worry that bloggers (from either side of the fence, to be fair) will criticize the Obama team for not treating the new WhiteHouse.gov blog as a traditional blog (or, rather, how we’ve come to define a traditional blog… with open comments, strikethrough edits and the like). I anticipate that closed comments, highly-filtered info, and heavily-edited prose may be thrashed by critical eyes (and countered with unforgiving keystrokes).

I hope this fear is unfounded. I hope that the blogging community can accept that the use of social networking tools in this capacity must be politicized (such a gloppy, misused word anyway). This is not a case of the Obama team trying to talk the talk and tripping over their own priggish walk… They get it; it’s clear from how they ran the campaign that they get it. I just hope that the community takes the social networking and blog push from the Obama team for what it is – a measured, accountable, pulling-back of the executive curtain in a fitting way – and not for what it’s not and never can be…

This ain’t no JenniCam on the WH Master Bedroom, folks. Media transparency in the White House is (and needs to be) a relative term.

So, a toast to you, Obama New Media Team… Here’s to responsible openness within a rapidly changing mediascape:

(Amazing pic courtesy of Boston.com’s Big Picture feature)

Just a quick LocaModa shout-out for Stephen’s quote in AdAge today:

Boon for Billboards: Digital Leads Growth for Out-of-Home Ads

The article cites some staggering numbers for DOOH growth in 2009 and beyond (“finishing 2008 with an 11% increase in ad dollars”), but I’ll throw in a caveat:
Unless those digital out-of-home screens are part of a larger picture (yep, I’m going to mention the New Media Triad again), those numbers attenuate pretty darn quickly…

Ever wonder what an engineering meeting looks like at LocaModa?
Well, a little like this (and, no, I’m not being hazed… well, not really)…

And when we’re not doing as many push-ups as we can before our face turns red and we collapse on the carpet…

We’re encouraging you to read this great blog post over at Advertise Here. Rob Gorrie discusses the transition from old media to the New Media Triad, a shift we’ve been championing for years.

To quote Rob:

“Network TV isn’t going away any time soon (ever) but it’s not that hard to understand why certain brands/products are getting antsy about continuing to use a medium that doesn’t come with the measurability of other, newer mediums, is the most expensive product on the market and is losing audience at an astounding rate without the reflection showing up in pricing at the same pace.”

In sum… as we say ’round these parts, “Undivided attention is so last year.”

Rob has a great discussion going, so I urge you to toss in your two cents. Tell him the girl with the lame push-up form sent you…

I came across this amazing excerpt this morning on Smart Mobs, which quite elegantly sums up the integrated, convergent vision of LocaModa and The New Media Triad.

The passage, taken from a longer work by Teemu Arina, explores How Mobile is Changing Our Society:

I have a feeling that the question we pose today is wrong. It’s not about mobile anymore. For some people, mobile means the devices that we carry around as we move, usually hooked up to a cellular network. The truth is, the activities we go through online with computers and what we do with our “mobiles” cannot be seen as separate anymore. This convergence means our language needs to change or our culture will never understand its future. . .

The mobile is like the horse wagon. If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.” It’s the language and our experience of the past that limits our understanding of the future of “mobile.”

Arina’s Mobile Monday Amsterdam event sold out its 400-seat capacity in 2 hours.

I’m not surprised.

[flickr cred]