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Jan

18

Digital Signage Content Exchange

Filed Under Advertising, Digital Signage 

Now this little company I found really neat.

This company named Mochilla, out of “The City” (nyc):

Mochilla Logo
http://www.mochila.com

has some great potential. I don’t know a lot about them and maybe they’re already huge and I’ve been in a dark corner somewhere for too long, but they fit well into some thought processes I’ve been having for about 9 months.


These guys have a great little service that creates a marketplace for professional content for members to buy and sell their content without the hassle of syndication negotiations and monster, multi-item content licensing deals. While I haven’t actually peeked under the covers, the concept itself is sound and simplistic [read: people can actually use it, easily]. They’re basically aggregating content and selling on volume. This isn’t new, these guys seem to have packaged it differently.

Why does this interest me? They seem to only provide copy and image content, but let’s imagine they had video too and relate it to digital signage (in-store screen networks) for a second.

Based on what I’m seeing in the market, professional content is becoming way too expensive for anyone to actually effectively use and licensing processes are aged, cumbersome and unpleasant at the best of times. Just looking at the music and film association businesses (as a worst case) I think we can agree that unless we see more actions by the likes of the Steve Jobs of the world, not much is going to change. Like so many other things out there, the process of acquiring “content” just seems broken and shouldn’t be so difficult.

On the other side, you’ve got the little guy entertainment phenomenon going on. Millions of gigs of video being uploaded, some of which is really quite good. All of the sudden, the distribution and brand power that Martha Stewart or Mike Holmes have developed as a celeb may not hold as much weight. Why? Let’s use Joe Handyman and Home Depot as a really basic example:

  • Joe Handyman is a great contractor. He has lots of clients who love him. He has some quirk in his personality that makes him just a little bit unique
  • Joe Handyman finds himself doing the same thing over and over or finds himself telling clients the same thing over and over, which pulls him from his real competence and where his income come from: construction
  • To rectify this, Joe decides to video himself (no camera crew but a high quality camera and some basic technical knowledge) explaining or doing the things he would prefer his clients knew or did and offers those videos online to his clients, for free, as a value add. He may even offer them a discount or some other incentive if they prove they actually watch them

Nothing really interesting about this, right?

Now let’s look at a potential Home Depot scenario:

  • Home Depot creates a deal with Mike Holmes. They pay him large sums of money to be a face for them and hope that recall in the advertising world helps consumers create a positive recall of their brand and its association with their stores because he features them in his segments or shows. Mr. Holmes has worked very hard to get where he is and deserves the cash that comes with the HD marketing folks admiration of him.
  • Home Depot goes and installs a digital signage network inside their stores where they start advertising like crazy and bombarding consumers with advertisements and promotional messaging (like the sport lottery promos they’re doing now – quite smart actually)
  • One day, someone in the HD marketing department (Jim Marketing) wakes up and realizes that consumers are getting pissed at the constant ad bombardment and they should probably start using their in-store networks to add value to a consumers visit, instead of just saturating them with ads – It’s the content stupid! Content, Context, Relevance, Acceptance, etc – Advertising 101 – why this doesn’t register when people plan their in-store digital signage, I’ll never know. You’ll never get same year ROI on them
  • Our Hero, Jim Marketing, does what most big brand marketers do, looks about 3 feet to his left, sees a picture of Mike Holmes located somewhere in the gopher farm and – aha!- brilliant! let’s repurpose Mike’s content onto our screens in store!
  • Mike’s agent, immediately licks his lips, hears that each segment is going to be aired 200 times a day per screen per store, and promptly sends a $10 million dollar monthly bill to Home Depot for all the spots
  • Jim Marketing is promptly fired, and our new hero, Sally MarCom, comes to the rescue. She looks at the opportunity and the licensing costs, shakes her head and knows she can’t afford to participate in the licensing game – simply too expensive. That night, she goes home and is surfing YouTube, watching the latest indy release shorts, when she sees a spot by Joe Handyman.
  • After watching Joe for a while, she realizes that she could use Mike as the promotional draw and in-store poster/flyer “poster boy”, but ultimately, her customers get value from the content of the segments and education/edutainment it provides. Here’s some guy who is fun, fits their model customer, is one of the guys, and really knows his stuff and the “stuff” is relevant to other consumers.
  • Sally promptly calls Joe, pays him 10-20K for the ability to use his videos (money he never would have seen), HD has what it needs to deliver customer valueand customers get their entertainment and education (which sells more product by the way)