DailyDOOH

Our good friends at City Gateway Media already operate and market large format digital out of home screens in Manchester and London’s Canary Wharf and here we see them adding another.

Anyone driving into London along the M4 cannot have failed to notice this recently refurbished digital wall located at the busy intersection of the A4 Cromwell Road and North End Road (in West Kensington).

James Porter, Director of City Gateway Media told us “The
impact of 3 large format LED screens in a roadside location and
with full moving video is an exciting addition to our sales portfolio.
I expect this site will further the cause for moving imagery at our
other planned roadside locations”.

The screens will operate on a 2-minute loop and can facilitate fully moving or static imagery.

Clear Channel Outdoor, 3D Exposure, Posterscope and Twentieth Century Fox have combined to launch what are believed to be the first digital transit shelters with 3D that can be seen without the need of glasses.

Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief, Twentieth Century Fox’s latest release that will be in cinemas beginning Feb. 12, 2010, is being brought to life on the streets of London this week through the world’s first outdoor ‘Real 3D’ ad campaign.

Developed by Twentieth Century Fox in association with Clear Channel Outdoor’s Create division, 3D Exposure, and Hyperspace (the innovations division of out-of-home agency Posterscope), the cutting-edge campaign enables consumers to engage with a 3D trailer on 42” HD screens.

Just as the gods and monsters from Percy Jackson’s Greek mythology texts walk out of the pages in the film, so do the characters appear to reach out of bus shelters in high profile London locations on Oxford Street, Buckingham Palace Road, Kensington High Street and Kingsway.

The original Percy Jackson trailer was converted from 2D to 3D with additional elements re-created to take the film promotion into the next dimension. The ‘Real 3D’ total surrounding effect is achieved without the use of glasses through a specialist filter affixed to the high quality HD display. The LCD image is then subdivided into complex repeating segments that result in the human vision interpreting the image as a ‘Real 3D’ scene.

“Our strongest asset for marketing movies has always been the product itself,” says Cameron Saunders, UK theatrical marketing director at Twentieth Century Fox. “In the past 18 months, digital outdoor has moved on leaps and bounds, enabling us to showcase movies in brand new environments out-of-home.

“This visually spectacular new technology means we can present Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief to mass audiences in ways never seen before. In a world where consumers are being bombarded with competing messages, this is something that no one could fail to be absorbed by.”

Richard Simkins at Hyperspace says, “In recent years we have seen the quality of 3D displays increase significantly. This, coupled with falling technology costs, means that it is now a viable and exciting medium to use in out-of-home advertising campaigns.

“3D displays such as the Real 3D format offer advertisers a new way to (literally) reach out and engage their audience, and we are certain that 3D imagery will offer new depth to the out-of-home experience for years to come.”

Research by Millward Brown has shown that 3D Exposure’s 3D solutions to have four times the stopping power of standard 2D advertisements, up to 10 times the average dwell time with increased brand recall rate, interaction and word-of-mouth from the onlooker.

There’s an interesting pilot taking place in the UK at the moment. At first glance Colchester in the South East of England might not seem like the most likely location for a pilot of cutting edge mobile phone technology but being a pretty average UK town makes it a good place to test just how interested ordinary citizens might be in using their smart-phone cameras to interact with poster sites.

Remember our story of a few weeks back ‘All Billboards Should Have QR Codes‘? Well, for that to happen and be of any use, all mobile phones would need a QR code compatible app (an easy enough process if the plethora of Android, Blackberry and iPhone apps is anything to go by).

Nokia’s approach here is still app based – in order to take part in the pilot, Nokia’s Point & Find app must be downloaded by sending an SMS to a shortcode (note that the Point & Find app does include other features not mentioned here including acting as a barcode scanner).

Once downloaded, viewing any of the poster sites in Colchester through the camera of a compatible Nokia device will automatically offer the user on-screen hyperlinks to content specifically related to the poster in question, ranging from video clips to competitions (achieved through a combination of image-recognition and GPS technology).

At that point of course you are getting into the realms of Layar type augmented reality browsers as well.

We sort of liked the idea up until this point but we also noticed a series of icons that have been developed which when viewed through the camera, trigger links tolocal online information – the icons can be found on ‘street furniture’ such a bus shelters and telephone kiosks as shown in the picture here.

Nokia claim that their approach is unique – they should have perhaps replaced the word ‘unique’ with ‘closed’ or ‘proprietary’ as they have much the same meaning in this instance.

The project is a collaboration between Nokia, media owner JC Decaux and out-of-home agency Posterscope and has been approached very much as a learning exercise and all three stress that no decisions have been made as to future availability to other advertisers.

I am sure this is a useful exercise. It’s a shame that those advising Nokia have chosen a somewhat proprietary path as this sort of thing done correctly could really go viral. For that to happen though Nokia need to recognise that their are other handsets out there!

Those involved were at pains to point out that “to some extent QR codes do have similar functionality however the main reason that they have not become mainstream outside of Japan is that there has been insufficient media activity that explains the proposition and encourages consumers to download the software” – well errrr, there is little difference with what Nokia are doing here, the instructions and the download app.

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 »