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Well, I’m checkin out so you won’t hear to much me (i.e. you get a breather) until the week of the 5th.

Have a great holiday and see you when I get back!

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Continuing on my rant on how creative needs to drive digital OOH and, as Shawn Riegsecker says in this piece on Ad Age AND contrary to what many tech folk in Internet AND Digital OOH say:

Unfortunately, algorithms can’t build great brands.

Shawn wrote a nice piece on how the early pioneers of web advertising created the problems the medium has today in that everyone thinks advertising is an algorithm.  It’s nice to see some folks pushing back, intelligently, on the problem:

Early internet companies and digital gurus have attempted to change the fundamentals of advertising by promising a world of measurability, interaction and precise targeting. The first 15 years of online advertising was littered with portals, ad networks and pay-for-performance “spray and pray” advertising. It was a direct marketer’s dream: buy billions of squares and rectangles on the web as cheap as you can, add some basic audience-targeting parameters and presto! You’re considered a successful internet marketer.

This method worked in the beginning when online-media consumption was under 10% and great brands were still built through offline channels (e.g., newspapers, TV, radio, magazines, etc.). However, with the average person now spending close to 35% of his or her media consumption time online, the facade and fallacy of online marketing “success” is quickly crumbling. Brands are being forced to use the internet for positive brand-building experiences

Advertising is much, much more than technology or the algorithms technology creates and we will do ourselves well to remember that as we collectively mature Digital OOH.

Great “truths” that he relates as well that fit into our world.  I especially like # 3 and #4:

Today, marketing executives I speak with, who have collectively spent billions in online advertising, recognize certain truths:

1. You can’t build a positive brand identity by simply buying billions of squares and rectangles on unknown websites; in fact, littering the web in this manner will, in almost all cases, hurt your brand more than it will help it.
2. Creativity is still everything.
3. The environment in which your ad is seen is more important than how many of your ads are seen.
4. The decline in offline-media consumption has left a void in helping advertisers build strong brands.

These executives are turning to the web but find the digital industry’s focus misguided and the fundamental brand-building tools lacking.

On #4, many advertisers I work with are running into the problem of finding “voids” in their plans in coverage because of faltering traditional media and fragmentation.

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USA Today has a nice piece on the Cannes advertising festival.  I was invited to this last year but had a hard time justifying the $5000 to investors for a week in Sunny South of France. For some reason they wouldn’t let me pass it off as work

Whereas advertising awards used to be really easy at Cannes, consisting of…um…just TV creative, today’s advertising doesn’t look quite the same as it did in days of yore. As the article states:

The blurring of lines for what’s an ad is obvious in the competition for Lion awards at the 56th International Advertising Festival this week. Entries in the 11 ad categories range from faux ads and products to marketing that combines a live event, social networking, film and outdoor.

Did you read that right?  Yes, that said OUTDOOR and SOCIAL NETWORKING.

Integrated programs that combine the effects of a multiplatform and multi-touchpoint campaign are what’s winning awards these days and what marketers feel is hot and worthy of conversation – NOT TV (well…it depends what agency you work for and how stuck on living in the past they are)

Where awards get won, creatives usually follow and I’ll be looking forward to seeing the Cannes results and entries over the coming years.  Maybe I’ll even be allowed to attend 

Worth the quickie read and exploring some of the submissions

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Andrew Hampp released his Art of Outdoor last week for those who didn’t see it.  Great pub on his part (well done Andrew)

Andrew’s/Ad Age’s Art of Outdoor can be found here.

While the focus is in no way really digital for the Art of Outdoor, Jonah Bloom did a follow up piece and made some great observations, many of which (ahem) have been covered in these pages over the last year or so (cmon…it’s good for the ego every once in a while ).

While it’s nice to see people start to take notice of things in our space, it always has a heck of a lot more impact when it shows up in a respected rag like Ad Age.

Some of the comments I like (although you should read the whole thing:

Yet, for all this change, outdoor’s biggest asset today may be that as audiences on every other channel are split into ever decreasing fragments, it can still operate on a mass, broadcast level.

so today’s out-of-home efforts are increasingly often integral parts of bigger digital campaigns. Indeed, it might seem somewhat odd to an industry outsider who was unfamiliar with the latest phenomena — such as brands emblazoning billboards with just their Twitter addresses — to note that outdoor is enjoying a renaissance right now, driven, at least in part, by digital shops. Creatives are clearly enjoying the ability to link the mass-market power of a poster to the personal power of the internet.

Even with this digitization and integration of the medium, simplicity remains the essence of great outdoor — which is why it is often cited as such a pure test of a creative’s skill. Can you distill the essence of the sales or brand message into a single, instantly understandable, affecting image? (The answer, in the case of so many of the campaigns within these pages, was “yes.” What could be simpler than TBWA’s “The world’s thinnest notebook,” for the Macbook Air, which was accompanied by a side-on shot of the product, or BBDO’s “Get a world view. Read The Economist,” accompanied by an ostrich’s head emerging from the sand?)

While it’s great to see folks take notice of social and mobile in Outdoor applications, it’s even nicer to see someone talk about the renaissance of outdoor as a medium, especially as they pull in Digital into the mix and credit creativity and challenge coming to the creatives who so often pooh-pooh Outdoor and especially Digital OOH in their efforts.

As I said a while ago, Digital OOH let’s creatives be creative again and I look forward to more folks in that arena taking a closer look at the space and what they can do with it.

Great article Jonah!  And thanks for noticing!

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My my.  I had heard they were having some MAJOR issues but I didn’t expect them to crash and burn this fast!

The “Canoe” venture between the 6 top cable cos. has not only had the air let out of it’s tires….it parked in the wrong hood and got jacked.

As the CEO of Canoe said:

Canoe CEO David Verklin recently told Multichannel News, “We were trying to use 20th-century technology to enable a 21st-century, advanced advertising product.”

Even as recently as last month there were comments about how they were driving forward and touting how successful and advanced this would be for the advertising market for cable operators.  I even saw some comments from Network TV operators that were going to try and emulate the system or at least try to.

I wrote about addressable advertising back almost 2 years ago and this project in particular. I was watching it closely as this level of targeted advertising coming to market for TV in the next 12 months could skew interest back away from Digital OOH and into the waiting broadcast groups once again.

Apparently I don’t have to be so concerned

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I’ll start this post with a comment: “The wrong measurement solution or tactic can kill mediums”.

I’ve had this conversation with many after recent announcements have come out on the mobile marketing front. I’m very cautious when talking about mobile and where it will go and how we need to be cautious in its introduction into the culture and execution of Digital OOH’s success.

Case in point? Look at the Internet.  While Internet advertising has grown by leaps and bounds and makes lots of people very rich, the fact of the matter is, because it went to a “success is a click-through” model (aka direct response) as fast as it did, it leaves 100s of millions of dollars on the table as click throughs rarely actually lead to the execution of a “sale” that is trackable.  As today’s Ad Age article from Hernan Lopez details on a statement from Randall Rothenberg:

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has called for a “creative renaissance” on the internet, which he said has been “an unthinking hostage to a direct-marketing culture and tradition that devalues creativity and its long-term effect on brands.”

Read more

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Yet another big name brand has jumped on the Pay-for-Performance or “value based” bandwagon.  Unilever has started to tell the folks at WPP that it wants them to start to take a different approach.

Nokia was the last company to do this to WPP I believe and they outright said no and the business was pulled.

Wonder how long they will stay their current course and push their clients off by refusing to go this route?

The last company I mentioned who did this to its agencies was Coke, which I reported on a little while ago. As I said in the other post, it’s a tricky system to implement.

To WPPs defense, they also want to extend payment beyond 30 days which WPP has been a defender of.  For Unilever to try and hurt their vendors (which would include folks like my company) in this type of economic climate is low.

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The lineup keeps shaping up well with new fun toys augmenting Digital OOH capabilities.  I don’t think we’ve even seen the begining of what can and will be done with our medium.

In the latest incarnation, CBS in the UK is dropping in WiFi based interactivity via iPhone to control and interact with elements on the screens.  This could be the start of some seriously cool apps and could get some of the facebook/iPhone dev crew thinking WAY beyond the small worlds they currently have to exist in.

More can be found here: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7015400336

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I was recently treated to a meeting with a guy who felt he was the “be all end all” of Digital OOH at one of the major media agencies.

While his understanding was “ok”, I was not very surprised at the fact his eyes glazed over when I started discussing social and mobile integration at retail with him.  On the media side of the business he:

1.) Didn’t actually know enough, in depth, about the environments we were talking about.

2.) Had never realized you could try and extend social media beyond a Facebook page or that all these screens are connected to the Internet

3.) Didn’t know that you could use mobile as an actuator for campaigns to further the brand conversation.

On one front, I’m a little glad I’m not one of his brands. His understanding of anything beyond his silo was very limited.  On the other, the stuff I’m talking about above, you can do NOW.  This doesn’t even touch what we’re up to next and where DOOH is going.

So I was keyed to a video that typifies media involvement 5 years from now that will be available for the more advanced DOOH networks in years to come and if media and creative agencies have issues with how advanced or different Digital OOH is today….what does this mean when the capabilities in the video below become ubiquitous?

this ain’t your mamas newspaper baby!

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