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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Last week Jason Kates wrote An Open Letter to the Digital Out-Of-Home Industry.

Jason has his detractors, but he’s been in the industry longer than most of us and has deep experience (and war wounds) of all the problems we still stubbornly have in our industry. He’s been a platform guy, a signage guy, a network guy and most recently, an ad platform guy. He’s smart, and understands the influence of the web on media. Something not enough people in DOOH do. He might not be completely right about Social TV, but I suspect he’s not completely wrong. So I prefer to look at what he might be right about.

Many people misunderstand what interactivity in DOOH means. Outside of touch screens, it is rarely about literally interacting in front of a screen. Of course a screen can trigger interaction, but that is by far the less common case for engagement. And if that literal version of interactivity is what people think about when they dismiss social engagement, they are barking up the wrong tree.

Most DOOH doesn’t have the dwell time or spot length for engagement. There are exceptions (bars and sports stadiums) but they are unlikely to be business cases for the next Google.

Interactivity to me at least (and to the growing number of people not focused on DOOH, but on screens that engage regardless of acronym) means that there’s some pulse somewhere on a network. When someone interacts, that interaction, be it a fan, a follow, a tweet, a text, a photo, a game play, a song play etc, can be reflected on multiple screens to help those screens be more interesting. A passive screen might then display What’s Playing Here, Who’s Here Now, What’s On Offer, What’s Happening…

A screen that doesn’t do this is dead. Dead to audiences, dead to advertisers and dead to investors.

That’s why TV is trying to redefine itself. At least it’s trying! And that’s why DOOH needs to do the same.

If DOOH practitioners don’t understand the scope and potential of 360 degree interactivity, they will have a blind spot for how social and mobile actually impact DOOH.

Ken Goldberg gets it right here in my opinion.

We have to find better ways to make DOOH relevant.

Let’s not get (conveniently) distracted by the definition of Social TV – it already means different things to different people. I am confident that companies like Bluefin Labs could disrupt Neilson. I am also confident that Twitter and Facebook will be mainstays of DOOH content (when done right and not infringing patents!)

So, assuming we all have a healthy respect for an argument, I do not agree with our favorite Brit (well he has more followers than me) Adrian Cotterill, when he tweeted his response to Jason’s open letter that “SocialTV is kinda orthogonal to the whole DS/DOOH issue I have never ever read such RUBBISH…”

Like Mr Kates, I suspect Adrian is not completely right. There’s more to Social TV than 140 characters can say.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Companies using social media to connect to people and places need to support the multiple tools and methods that their audiences use. However, if you were to ask 10 media savvy users how they send an update with a photo attachment, you’d probably get more than 10 answers.

LocaModa now supports even more interaction models via mobile or web using email, txt, Twitter and more….

For example, we support all the strange things that mobile phone email clients do, such as unusual MIME structures, or including the numeric mumbo-jumo that many carriers have implemented and include in their email subject lines. So friendly.

If a message includes a URL or short URL which looks like it might point to an image, we can display that image (assuming the message passes our filters and the image is moderated).

We also support a whole host of photo sharing apps on Twitter clients including yFrog (which also supports video), TwitPic, Lockerz, TweetPhoto, Instagram, img.ly, Lightbox and can display JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and GIF images.

We also get requests from customers that want their audiences to be able to email directly to local screens. Every LocaModa-enabled screen has a unique address such as JOESBAR. This address can also be used as an email address for example JOESBAR@Wiffiti.com. In this case, any text in the email’s subject line can be copied into the body of the Wiffiti message. That method can also be used to email a photo to a screen, with the photo’s caption being the email subject line.

Some of this might seem a little geeky, but we now enable networks with over 30,000 venues and our platform has also enabled 80,000 Wiffiti screens for events, as well schools and churches, so we’ve given up being surprised by what our customers want to do with our platform.

If there’s a feature that you want and we don’t support, we’d be happy to consider it for our roadmap (but if it’s too esoteric you might need to bring your checkbook!).

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I spent most of Monday at the DS Investors Conference and most of Wednesday at the DPAA 2011 Digital Media Summit.

What was notable at both events was that almost every speaker talked about leveraging the connection between DOOH screens and their mobile audience, multi-channel strategies and leveraging mobile and social media technologies.

What was different this week was that this buzz was not limited to the “interactive tent” – it was center stage. What used to be a lonely platform for way-too-early entrepreneurs and evangelists like me, is now well and truly an accepted part of our agenda.

I’m not convinced that every speaker at the conferences was “eating their own dog food” but I can’t gripe – obviously we still have some way to go, but at least the entire industry is talking about it.

There are various stages in the maturation of a digital market, and in my opinion, we’ve reached the end of the beginning.

Borrowed from an earlier Gartner paper, what I touched on in The DOOH Slope of Enlightenment suggests that digital markets move through various stages staring with a “Peak of Inflated Expectations” where the market experiences a fool’s gold rush and invariably early adopters pay the price for being early. The market then moves through a downward trend where it adjusts to a “Trough of Disillusionment” and finally it reaches a point where companies actually release products that exceed users’ expectations. At that point, the market can start to move up the “Slope of Enlightenment.”

As the web evolved from digital brochureware, so too are DOOH screens finally being forced to be more than slideware. Some are and many more will be more connected, more engaging and, as a result, more valuable.

Judging not only from the majority of speakers’ inclusion of all things mobile and social, but also the stream of Tweets from users at both events and even the inclusion of a Twitter screen at the DPAA event – I would say we are at the end of the beginning of DOOH. We are standing at the beginning of the Slope of Enlightenment.

Do you agree?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites