Escaping multiple snow storms this week in Boston, I’ve joined James Davies, Chief Strategy Officer, Posterscope on a week long series of thought leadership talks in London with leading agencies about the opportunities and lessons around social media and OOH. James and I had jointly written a paper on the subject which you can download here.

I get pretty inspired when I meet clients and get insights about local issues/challenges/opportunities, and this trip is no exception. Happily, I’ve also been more than a little suprised by the fast pace, innovation, responsiveness and attitude that I have experienced here.

My big takeaway is that the DOOH market in USA is not just attracting global attention, it’s also encouraging global companies to participate and innovate in the market (LocaModa’s partnership with Fujifilm Imagetec is one example). Companies far and wide are inspired by what’s going on in USA and are doing something about it. In many cases, they can move faster - their markets have less baggage, less fragmentation and often (as is the case with Posterscope) already have excellent tools to simplify the DOOH media planning and buying process.

I’ve also seen some beautifully executed DOOH here - for example in major underground stations. My gut feel from just a week in my old stomping ground is that the UK DOOH market is primed and ready to move.

USA DOOH is leading by example - now we need to make sure we continue to innovate, execute and drive a global industry forward.

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Thanks to our partners Fujifilm Imagetec for this great photo of LocaModa’s Foursquare and Twitter in Japan.

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Click picture to enlarge

Not all screens are created equal. I’m not talking about the whiz-bang of 3D or electronic ink, or flexible LEDs or other tantalizing technologies. I’m talking about the connective tissue that relentlessly reduces the friction for media to find a screen near you.

The money is in the HOW and WHO controls the access rights for media to find us.

On private screens, such as PCs or mobile screens, users’ access to media is broadly via search or browsing links - in other words it’s driven by a user’s INTENT. A marketer cannot force their way in front of a user’s face without hoping to influence their intent or be paying (e.g. Google or Facebook) for the results of their intent.

On a public screen, such as a place-based digital screen, access to media is broadly via a user’s “MOBILE CONTEXT” - mobile in this sense is not a technology but a behavior - shopping, meeting, traveling, drinking, waiting etc. Subject to a user’s mobile context, marketers can force their way in front of the user’s face BUT that does not give them permission to go any further. There is no automatic path (push) to a user. The user has to have the intent to pull the marketer’s message in.

Connecting these two paradigms; intent-based screens to mobile-context-based screens is how to unleash the latent value in the DOOH ecosystem.

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In 15 Seconds Or More Part 1, I covered the three different types of place-based social media. In Part 2, I covered the seven steps in the user engagement path. In this final excerpt of the white paper of the same name (I’ll have to get around to finishing it now!), I’ll cover how place-based social media maps to different digital out-of-home channels.

Not all place-based social media is applicable to all channels. Some channels only have short dwell times or content loops (e.g. gas pumps) while others have longer dwell times and content loops (e.g. bars and events).

A guide to the type of place-based social media best suited to specific digital out of home channels can be seen in Fig 1 below.

Fig.1. Mapping Place-Based Social Media to Channels (Click to enlarge).

For short dwell times, or content slots of a maximum of 15 seconds, I’d recommend using passive place-based social media (e.g. displaying localized Twitter messages about a city, sports/team or news.) Zoom Media and Marketing Sport’s Bites and RMG Networks’ NYTimesToday.com are examples of passive applications built by LocaModa designed to grab attention and inform and/or entertain. True to their passive nature, these applications do not have call to action so do not support any DOOH user interactions.

For longer dwell times and content slots of 15-30 seconds, DOOH networks can use active place-based social media that support user participation features, subject to the capabilities of the DOOH network. As previously described, active place-based social media can be influenced by the DOOH audience but not in real time – either due to limitations of infrastructure or time required by brands/venues to ensure content is adequately filtered, moderated and/or curated. Example applications include trending Twitter topics or changes in existing accounts such as celebrities, to show which celebrities are more or less popular. Such applications can be used in supermarket check-out lines to entertain shoppers as described in this post about LocaModa and PRN.)

For long dwell times and content slots over 30 seconds, DOOH networks can use interactive place-based social media. Interactive applications include real-time Twitter, text/photo-to-screen, real-time polls, and check-ins (e.g. displaying check-in info and tips for services such as Foursquare, Facebook Places or Gowalla). Well designed and inexpensive moderation/curation tools make interactive applications easy to deploy these days.

There are plenty of application examples available via the LocaModa App Store and there will be more examples and information in the white paper which I’m aiming to finish before the end of this month.

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LocaModa Ninjas

Bill Nast, LocaModa VP Business Development and I have just returned to Boston from a week in Japan, and brought home some headbands for the team. The meanings of the symbols we’re wearing are Success, Victory, Ninja, Number One and Coming Happiness.

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