Taking content designed for a desk-based user experience and displaying it on a place-based screen meant for an audience more than 10 feet away is stupid a common mistake made by many DOOH practitioners.

A good real-time social feed for events or venues needs to:

a) Attract attention
b) Sustain interest
c) Be easily readable by the entire intended audience.

I’d like to address these points using a real example of a feed used at one of our very own industry’s key events, last weeks DPAA Media Summit event in NYC (which I wrote about here).

The screen shot below (taken from my Hootsuite setup) is similar to the initial experience that greeted me on a Twitter screen at last week’s DPAA event. I was sitting a third of the way from the front, in an audience of around 400 people.

There are good reasons why that type of design is not great for an event-based or digital out-of-home application.

While it was well placed to attract attention, being on stage, the execution was poor in relation to it’s ability to sustain interest (which I’ll come back to) and it completely failed with regards to its ability to be read by most of the audience.

I tweeted that I couldn’t read the tweets.

As the tweets shuffled up, the new (attention grabbing) message only commanded around 15% of the screens’ real estate. Not only is that insufficient real estate to grab and keep an audience’s attention, but it’s also competing with 5 other older messages, commanding around 85% of the screen, with the same weight as the new message.

To the credit of the person managing the DPAA’s Twitter screen, they noticed my message and responded by decreasing the number of tweets to 3.

That was an improvement but it didn’t solve the problem.

From the screen shot below (again taken from Hootsuite, not from the DPAA screen, but in any case, similar in structure to the DPAA Twitter screen experience) you can see that the attention grabbing new message now has around 30% of the screen real estate. This is better but it’s still competing with 2 other messages, equally weighted, and commanding about 70% of the screen.

Sustaining an audience’s attention is not only related to content and graphics it’s also related to the predicability of the program or timeline. For example, a news ticker may grab initial interest, but after a few seconds, it’s crawl becomes predicable.

The human brain is designed to pay most attention to the newest movement and sound. Long ago, those changes in movement or sound might have been life threatening. Once we recognize the movements, we can process them and, if they are not life threatening, we tune them out. (That’s why we don’t notice the continuous hum of an air conditioning system until it’s turned off.)

That might be good for our safety but not for DOOH applications.

The screen shot below shows a LocaModa Twitter screen. The difference is hopefully obvious. It’s been designed (and patented) specifically for venue and event screens, is attention grabbing, attention sustaining, easy to assimilate by the entire audience and fun.

The newest message is displayed almost full screen for a few seconds (enough time to notice and assimilate the content) commanding at least 75% of the screen real estate, then it settles into a dominant screen position.

The new message default configuration is the inverse of older messages - new messages typically set to a dark font on a light background. Older messages are smaller, and typically set to a light font on a dark background. Whilst readable, older messages are designed to NOT compete with the new message - they are really used to convoy the flow of messages and activity rather than give them equal status and weight to the new message.

The messages deliberately do not have a predictable movement - they jostle to find their right screen position based on their size and that also provides a sustainably engaging experience for the entire audience, not just the front row.

Less is more.

Big is beautiful.

Content is king - if you can see it.

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On Wednesday I’m on a panel at DPAA talking about convergence.

The sexiness of cross pollinating mobile, social and DOOH is a hot topic. The coexistence of these technologies is often characterized as “Convergence.”

But convergence is a myth.

What is more important is interoperability.

If my device/network can’t interoperate with an audience’s device/network, it might as well be dead to the world. Media will be less measurable, less actionable, less engaging, less immersive, less… everything if it cannot interoperate. And when most people talk about convergence, they actually mean interoperability.

Convergence leads us down the wrong path - we do not need to build neighboring technologies into our devices/networks, we need to build connections and interfaces into them so that they can communicate with each other.

That’s why our DOOH screens, players, CMS, networks etc need to display tweets, checkins, Facebooks fans, text messages… because if they can’t they are like yesterday’s newspaper - old news.

Our DOOH screens need to co-operate with the outside world - and each other.

Interpretability is the word.

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I try to be a good Twitter citizen. Sure, I promote what LocaModa is doing from time to time and RT a few LocaModa tweets. But I balance marketing messages with a supply of tweets that link to posts that I find informative, amusing or inspiring.

Twitter is both a discovery platform and a marketing platform. I use it 75% for discovery and 25% for marketing. Of course it’s up to each person to use it as they fit, and to that end, I unfollow people who use Twitter only for self promotion - and add little or no value.

Of late, I’m getting really annoyed by people in the DOOH community who regularly tweet the same message and/or regularly RT from multiple accounts.

I think that occasionally it’s OK to tweet the same message a couple of times - but more than twice is spam in my books and if you tweet every message at least twice, it’s just annoying. Likewise, occasionally it’s OK to RT a company message on your private Twitter account but that shouldn’t be the majority of your content in my opinion.

So offenders of the above bad practices, consider yourselves unfollowed.

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So few Location-Based Marketing platforms have been built for real-world applications.

As location-based applications from Foursquare, Facebook, Google and others have gained attention, most locations have been somewhat frustrated by how much effort is needed to embrace these platforms.

Limited functionality and/or complexity has thus far led to results that have not lived up to the red hot hype. For example, it is really difficult to create messages and/or deals for multiple locations without having to go into each location’s account - which can be too time consuming for larger retail groups. And in a business where 15 minutes spent on a website is 15 minutes not spent stocking shelves or hiring a waiter, simplicity and RoI count for more than “cool.”

So it’s good news that this week saw both Foursquare and Facebook update their interfaces for merchants.

Foursquare has been on a roll - raising $50 million, partnering with AMEX for deals, and this week, opening up their API for locations to be able to create their own deals via any platform (LocaModa for example - shameless plug). So now venues can use one interface (LocaModa for example - another shameless plug) - to create/edit/monitor their offers. More info via Foursquare here.

Facebook updated Facebook Pages with a Location feature and introduced a Deals API. The new Facebook Locations tab displays the “parent/child” relationship of claimed Facebook Places locations in one place. This means that large groups of stores (Parents) can change all their pages in one interface while still enabling a single store (child) to control their own messaging. More info via Facebook here.

This is all welcome news BUT it’s still likely that for the foreseeable future, brands and location owners won’t quite know what to put on their location pages or Facebook walls. The experience greeting many users may therefore still be rather underwhelming at best. A blank wall at worst.

(Drum roll) THAT’S AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DOOH.

We know how much time and effort has been spent on creating local content and information for screens in the locations - menus in cafes, announcements in health-clubs, deals in stores etc. This content can now more easily flow back to Foursquare and Facebook - as well as enabling any content created on those platforms finding its way to the location signage.

From a DOOH perspective, I like to say that screens need to have a range of miles, not feet. With a screen connected to Facebook or Foursquare (or Twitter et al), a screen can reach many more people and be more contextually interesting to the local audience, an on-line audience and advertisers. And connected DOOH screens are ever more measurable via the interactions of these audiences.

Thinking about a “Build or Buy” decision for a DOOH-ready social-media platform? It should more obvious than ever that this is a full time business with API changes from social media companies happening almost in real time - and in order to monetize the technology, the solution not only needs to be robust, extensible and scalable, but also needs to be network agnostic to attract brands who need to be wherever their target audience is.

As locations join the social graph, their technologies - not least the screens hanging on their walls - simply have to become more socially connected.

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The photo above shows Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post UK. They’re at Charing Cross Station, London, tweeting to a LocaModa-enabled screen, running a real-time place-based social media campaign for the launch of Huffington Post UK.

I didn’t realize until last week that traditional street hoardings in UK are not familiar things to folks on this side of the pond. The memory of a guy with ink-stained fingers shouting something completely unintelligible to commuters is all part of British daily life. So I was really happy that LocaModa was asked to develop a place-based social media version of a newspaper street hoarding for Huffington’s Post’s UK launch this week.

The creative, like its traditional counterpart, features a live bold headline which grabs attention, and a moderated real-time tweet, hashtagged #HuffPostUK which helps emphasize the new media chops of the brand, as well as suggest to the viewer that this “poster” isn’t what it might first appear to be.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to mention all the players involved in this campaign - but I would like to thank them all for the excellent team work, especially as much of the back-room work was unfolding during the July 4th weekend over here.

The campaign is running prominently in major train stations all over the UK. Another trip down memory lane for me as I used to commute to Waterloo Station every day when I was at Symbian and Paddington Station (where the bear comes from) is over the road from St Mary’s Hospital where I was born. Keeping it real.

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