DailyDOOH

We just received some photos of San Diego-based Streamline Media’s first installation at Hotel Palacio Azteca in Tijuana. Mexico.

The young company (see our Jan. 15, 2010, article) is initially targeting Mexico, and was expecting to launch the week after we wrote about it. As with any young entrepreneurial company’s first project, it ran into the unexpected.

Here’s what Ezra Masri, partner and director with Avi Tal in launching the company, told us:
“We’ve had quite an adventure with installation! We expected that our first installation would be a learning experience, and it definitely was! We projected that it would take a couple of hours – maybe a day – to install our first location at Hotel Palacio Azteca. As it turned out, we had to reinforce every wall and our ‘simple install’ turned into a full scale project that took us a week to be finished to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Some of the main lessons we learned were:
1) to be ready to deal with the unexpected and find solutions;
2) aside from considering the cost of equipment when selecting locations, consider the additional costs and make sure the installation team is capable of doing all the work;
3) with the right attitude anything can get done!

“When the screens were turned on everyone was happy. The weather and financial content from Rise Vision looks great, and when the advertising and content from Amigo Digital comes on, everyone’s jaw drops. On the sales end, we have made excellent progress and a lot of business owners and heads of maketing are very excited about our network.”

Using lessons learned, Streamline has now installed its second location at Hotel Hacienda Del Rio, part of the Baja Inn chain of hotels, and is now working on its third.

Bob Baerg has just joined RNIN as inside sales director.

Many folks in the US would know Bob as the ‘face’ of Rollouts Inc. – he left them about a year ago (obviously to do the ‘Director, Business Development at Align 4 Profit’ gig.

Rollouts Inc. are a little pricey, but offer pretty good service.

I have been playing with a number of Twitter reporting tools in order to gather some statistics for a report the team is putting together for the people at ISE on what buzz, if any, we managed to create for them with social media around last week’s event.

No doubt Adrian will make some of the report public when completed early next week but I though I’d share a couple of what, we think, are interesting stats around the two main hashtags used before, during (and indeed) after the week’s events.

#DOOHBizConf

• No. of references made by ANYONE that mentions #DOOHBizConf: 276
• No. of references made by @DailyDOOH’s Twitter account that mentions #DOOHBizConf: 79
• No. of times that DailyDOOH was RTweeted when it, itself had mentioned #DOOHBizConf: 9

#ISE2010

• No. of references made by ANYONE that mentions #ISE2010: 368
• No. of references made by @DailyDOOH’s Twitter account that mentions #ISE2010: 60
• No. of times that DailyDOOH was RT’ed when it, itself had mentioned #ISE2010: 14

The stats were compiled during a two week period ending yesterday (Sun 7th). When comparing the two, we can see how differently Twitter was being used in Amsterdam for the two events.

• ISE is an event spread over the three days with large numbers of exhibitors and visitors
• The DOOH Business Conference was a focused smaller event over one and a half days in a private conference room in the Elysium building at RAI

The number of #DOOHBizConf tweets is pretty much up to three quarters of the total #ISE2010, despite seeming to be a much smaller event – this is due to the fact that #DOOHBizConf was very much a live event with a number of people tweeting  from the audience throughout the day (and ourselves of course during day 1). The other big contributors during the conference were Ronnie (@minicom_digital) and Oliver (@oschwede at invidis consulting).

InfoComm 2010 will be held 9th – 11th June, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada

It’s always sad to see screens off…

Spotted in the Metro Assent Management Mall (Mecator Center, Duisburg) – a network we believe managed by Deutsche Telekom Out of Home.

The Digital Signage Group, the advocacy and standards arm of Point of Purchase Advertising International (POPAI) focusing on the digital signage industry published on Monday the industry’s first code of conduct for the utilization and deployment of consumer tracking research and technology.

More than 18 months in development, the code of conduct provides recommendations to marketers on maintaining ethical boundaries with consumer data and suggestions on how consumer observations and marketing insights should be collected and used.

Richard Winter, POPAI President told us “While the code of conduct is voluntary, it is an important first step in creating an industry-wide consensus about how to address the concerns that come along with the exploratory use of observed tracking data,”

He added “Countless hours were spent meeting with and interviewing digital marketers, consumer privacy groups, members of Congress, and the Federal Trade Commission to develop guidelines that are ethically sound but do not diminish the technological advances being made in the industry.”

Whilst the digital signage industry’s present level of privacy infringement is not especially high because only a small percentage of digital signage units have audience measurement, identification or interactive capabilities, the privacy issue is of course very real.

Bill Gerba, POPAI Digital Group advocacy chair and CEO of WireSpring Technologies did a fantastic job in driving this initiative and told us “As digital out-of-home (DOOH) media continues to trend towards greater identification and surveillance capability, it is important that our industry regulate itself,”

He continued “It is very likely that DOOH media will one day regularly identify individual consumers, putting our industry on a direct collision course with consumer privacy. These guidelines serve everybody’s best interests, including the consumer’s, by establishing credible and transparent standards before the problem hits center-stage.”

The code of conduct can be downloaded by clicking here

About POPAI

Since 1936, POPAI has served as the leading international advocate and voice of the marketing at retail industry. Comprised of 20 chapters worldwide and serving more than 1,700 members internationally, POPAI promotes, protects and advances the broader interests of the marketing at retail community through original research, certified education, showcasing industry excellence, trade forums and protecting intellectual and legislative rights.

CBS Outdoor, on behalf of client Visa, is running what is believed to be the first out-of-home high definition 3D projection advertising campaign.

It’s part of Visa’s full ‘Go World’ campaign tied to the 2010 Olympic Games whereby Visa has also taken over New York City’s Grand Central Station with wall displays, wrapped columns and other traditional OOH displays. Visa is a Worldwide Olympic Partner of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Read the rest of this entry »

You would have thought that after almost a full week in Amsterdam last week we could and would have spent the weekend relaxing but unfortunately not as we were part of a content and strategy workshop for one of our clients on the Saturday (with obligatory dinner on the Saturday evening) and then indulged ourselves in some corporate entertaining (Chelski vs Arsenal no less) on the Sunday.

Anyway, intrepid as ever we still managed to find the time to document our final observations on #ISE2010 whilst they (the observations) were still fresh in our mind…

• It’s big. The show that is. Final total attendance for ISE was 28,489 (up from 24,912 in 2009)
• It’s relevant to digital signage. Many may say “it’s finally relevant” but we’d say that the Digital Signage Hall / Zone is clearly in its second successful year.
• Our open Letter to Mike Blackman congratulating him on the success of the DIgital Signage Zone in 2009 is here where we said “You have set the bar high for others to follow and managed to pull off a DS Zone that actually works”. He and his team have done it twice now!
• Those digital signage vendors we criticised for not exhibiting should take it on the chin and not claim that (a) employees walking the floor, (b) sharing a booth, or perhaps worse still (c) having one of your media players unattended on someone else’s booth does not constitute being an exhibitor.
• The #DOOHBizConf brought networks and media owners (err, end users) to the show. On the Tuesday after the conference closed and on the Wednesday a dozen or so of these folks came to see us. If you weren’t exhibiting you wouldn’t have met them walking the floor and if you were exhibiting and didn’t see them then maybe you want to focus on solutions that help them rather than technology that (sometimes) baffles them (more of that later).
• OVAB Europe Members Neo Media Group, ECE Flatmedia, CAN Media all stopped by to talk with us. We also met JCDecaux, Digicom, Digiboard, Imagesound, PlayNetwork and many others. We also met key influencers from all over Europe like Bernhard Baer, Thomas Doktor, Chris Heap, Blair Parkin and Don Sperring and of course the invidis guys – all of whom for those with something to sell will / should have wanted to spend time with. ‘End-Users’ however you wish to define them were at #ISE2010 if you knew where to look and how to attract them.
• Great coffee (that it was free helped), free Wi-Fi, a talented beautiful friendly Barista, comfortable chairs and sofas, a big OVAB Europe logo on our stand, some interestingly shaped technology, fantastic WayFinding (thanks Amigo Digital) and being close to the DS Showcase and the DS Experts Tour kick off area all helped us, relative newcomers to this exhibition lark, have one of the most traffic’ed and useful stands in Hall 10 AND importantly for us (as in the point above) meet the right people at the show.
• Digital Signage Hall (12) was very successful and I am sure that all the exhibitors would be happy with footfall and the types of leads and contacts they made BUT the industry needs MORE dedicated space. It may take a bit of persuasion to move DISE, Scala and C-nario from the best positions they dominate in Hall 12 elsewhere but we think that the whole of Hall 10 (where we were) should be given over to digital signage in 2011.
• Everyone now has a digital signage player. Whether it’s Mitsubishi of Geffen launching a digital signage solution everyone, big or small now has one. It’s actually going to be even harder for the Top 10 and others to differentiate themselves unless they really work on their brands and their marketing.
• Big vendors are now firmly in the game. Whether it be Mitsubishi as above or Harris Broadcasting or Christie Digital we have seriously big companies, with marketing muscle and big turnovers to boot playing in the digital signage and digital out of home space. The little guys need to be wary ‘cos they seem to have learnt lessons from previous (attempted) big guns 3M and Cisco on how easy it is go to wrong (now who are 3M and Cisco in our space exactly and where were they? – their total absence says more than any criticism that we can level at them).
• Much of the content on display is still bad. The better some people do content (sorry to harp on about this but seriously look at the great work that Arsenal Media have been doing with Christie Digital’s MicroTiles) the worst the average stuff looks.
• A lot of content on display in Amsterdam was still average and quite a bit actually appalling. Whilst not wanting to pick particularly on Daktronics the ludicrousness of trying to show sports stadium LED close up – ie. within metres of the show attendees and then not even bothering to offer any bespoke content spoke volumes of a typical engineering / techie business not figuring out that good content goes a long well in selling the message you trying to get across
• Like with Dave Haynes / pressDOOH’s special program intended to help firms ‘tune up’ their communications in advance of a trade show there is undoubtedly a similar opportunity for a content company to do similar with content
• Getting together and having fun is surely an integral part of any trade show and there were several really enjoyable events we attended. The Barco Belgian Beer event for press only on the Tuesday night was probably our favourite highlight
• We also enjoyed the new style InAVation awards (complete with singing compere). InAVate did a great job with the award ceremony, providing plenty of refreshment and snacks, great company, good sponsors and keeping the awards flowing smoothly so that no one was bored. Hats off Dan Jago and team and let’s keep that same style in 2011

It’s Saturday morning, back at home after most of the week away in Amsterdam (Sunday to late Thursday for most of our team) and time to dwell on the conference and exhibition.

I will start off first on the conference which started the day before #ISE2010 proper…

• #DOOHBizConf on the Monday and part of the Tuesday was good and well worth attending. I’d maybe disagree slightly with our Paris correspondent Russ Curry who summed it up earlier in the week and say (personally) that I didn”t think it was as good as last year though.
• #DOOHBizConf attendance was probably lower this year (maybe 100) whereas last year was more like 120 (and that was in the ”recession”) although more people may have paid for their seats this year (controls on entry were somewhat lax last year I seem to remember).
• On the first day of #DOOHBizConf there was only one truly awful presentation (that’s enough mind when you have paid EUR 800 to attend) but a lot of the speakers repeated the same stuff over and over and I thought there was too much technology – seriously DOOH folks do not want to hear from new entry upstarts Intel and Microsoft – no matter how big their brands may be (neither of them know a single thing yet worthwhile knowing about our media business).
• #DOOHBizConf gave networks and media owners a good reason to be at #ISE2010. This is great for exhibitors (see separate post).
• The #DOOHBizConf drinks mixer at the end of play on Monday was a nice initiative and had all the (digital signage) exhibitors in Hall 12 finished building their stands it would have been even better but it was a great idea and drinks and socialising are always welcome at events.
• With a bit of thought and a bit more work by OVAB Europe, #DOOHBizConf at #ISE2010 in Amsterdam in February combined with the other OVAB Europe Conference in Munich in October (#DOOHBizKonf perhaps?) could easily be ALL that the DOOH industry needs in terms of a European conference programme.
• The organisers listened to our gripes about doing a conference properly and pretty much everything we asked for on behalf of the press, bloggers and indeed audience was there. Free wi-fi, CAT5 internet access for press power users, good sound, good projection system, nice room and a TwitterFall screen in the room as well, However, it’s unacceptable in this day and age that the presentations are not online as the speaker takes the podium but even having said that we were served up the best technology at a conference in the last few years.
• The pre-agreed hashtag #DOOHBizConf worked well and many outside Amsterdam followed the conference proceedings and indeed interacted with some of those in the audience in this manner. This is exactly how it should be and thanks also to Ronni Guggenheim for doing such a great job with twitter during the two days of the event.
• The hashtag #DOOHBizConf needs to be part of the event marketing and branding for the conference.
• It was surreal to see folks on the way to Amsterdam (Jason Cremins from signagelive and Alex Hughes from Amigo Digital in particular) twitter using the hashtag on things that were being said in the conference room appear on the TwitterFall screen also in the room. Surreal but perfect!
• By the way we are serious about the organisers using #DOOHBizKonf for the next OVAB Europe konferenz in Munich later in the year

As the economy seems to be picking up, BroadSign is expanding its sales force in North America. News reaches us that Richard Massella, formerly a worldwide sales manager at Netkey Inc. joined BroadSign in late January.

Richard has a 10-year track record of success in sales of SaaS products and will focus on direct sales of BroadSign’s software.

He will be based in Connecticut. The new hire in direct sales comes after the company had spent most of 2009 establishing an infrastructure for channel distribution sales.

Rumours are that BroadSign has also added new support and development personnel to handle growing client base and product evolution.