Comments on: Oops, Lamar’s Tweet Wreaks Havoc

By: iDOOH

iDOOH — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:29:44 +0000

purely coincidence, this digital was bought by the news station who’s twitter account was feed into the digital (no one else was able to Tweet to the board other than the station) No filter would have caught this and it was an actual story that broke in the market…get over it!

By: Ranga Raj

Ranga Raj — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:59:51 +0000

Good point Manolo.. It is a balance between automation (which is necessary when you have scale) as opposed to handcrafted playlists as in Times Square. Reminds me of a conversation with the CTO of a major retail signage operator who explained the phrase “foot in the pizza” – they have humans look at each clip and will not allow kids with bare feet on a beach followed by a Pizza ad – now that takes a lot of people when you have scale. The easy way to solve that is either synchronize the zones (where there is some control at campaign level) or as Ken suggested make it full screen..Tough to have both..

By: Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:46:45 +0000

Jeremy:

The idea of the Celebrity Twitter Channel is an interesting one. The challenge your editors will have is understanding the context, as demonstrated by the Lamar billboard. Assuming that the feed will be presented in a sidebar or ticker zone (i.e. not full screen), they will have no way of knowing what else is on any given customer screen when the feed (or any single tweet) is presented. That opens up potential for issues. However, it wouldn’t be different for any well-filtered RSS news feed, either. Perhaps it is another argument for full screen presentations… then you create your own context!

By: Neil Farr

Neil Farr — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:40:09 +0000

THe problem lies when a feed is ‘bought in’ and portrayed against other content you cannot know about. i.e. in this case it was know, but imagine if the billboard operator ran multiple billboards and multiple ads on those billboards, even with passive AND active filters on, the likelyhood of an innapropriate match (like this one) will always be there as you can only see the match when you look at every possible combination. The only way to do that is employ lots of people to look at every screen for every combination every time it changes …. or just take a hit and do the best with passive filtering combined with as much control over the content rather than bought in feeds as possible (and take the hit for the Jay Leno jokes )

On another (related) note, here in the UK I understand that all details of advertising on broadcast media legally has to be recorded and stored for a period of time (like we do with Acquire) as the Advertisign Standards Authority require this in case of complaints – the above story would have been more serious if one of the presenters took legal action . Although Digital Signage seems to be in a ‘grey area’ at the moment regarding this (i.e. it is self-regulating), we feel it is better to be safe than sorry. It would be interesting to see the details of how many countries actually require this of Digital Signage platforms (as it is NOT truly a broadcast medium).

By: Jeremy Gavin

Jeremy Gavin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:43:05 +0000

I agree UGC is valuable content, but really needs control. My company (Screenfeed) is getting ready to launch a Celebrity Twitter channel within the next few weeks that will be actively moderated and available to any subscriber. Our channel editors will select only those tweets that are relevant, interesting and appropriate. We feel that is the only way to ensure quality. Of course ‘relevance’ can change between networks so we’ll start with a general feed and look to move quickly to add different ‘flavors’ of tweet mixes. Should be fun to see how its received and used.

By: June Hagman

June Hagman — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:59:05 +0000

But this is what keeps comedian Jay Leno in business!

By: Dave Haynes

Dave Haynes — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:40:12 +0000

Good points on the peril of UGC, however I agree with Ken this could just have easily been an RSS news feed or a direct Web form popping this up without any editor connecting the dots. Newspapers were inadvertently running stories about train crashes next to ads for railways decades ago.

The problem with passive moderation is that to be really safe you need a LOT of keywords. The problem with active moderation is that it is not cheap, or foolproof.

By: Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:15:54 +0000

Manolo:

All good points as usual. However, is it really considered UGC when a TV station pumps headlines to a billboard from its own Twitter account? If they fed the billboard with the same data via an RSS feed, it would have had the same result without the trendiness of being a tweet. Either way, the lesson about context is still valid.