The Nielsen survey shows that Captivate delivers an audience of several million employed, high-income consumers who pay attention to the company’s elevator screens and use the content on them to help make buying decisions.

More than 1,000 Captivate Network visitors found that the company delivers more than 31 million impressions to over 4.7 million visitors in an average month – a reach that is larger than popular shows such as Mad Money, Larry King Live and Hardball w/Chris Matthewsv, combined.

The survey – Captivate’s first since year 2000 – also confirms that Captivate reaches a highly desirable demographic group composed of professionals ages 25 to 54 with an average income of $108,000.

“We had some surprises,” says Mike DiFranza, Captivate’s founder and president. “Up until now we had projected our numbers, but this new survey shows that we were understating our traffic numbers,

“Another surprise for us is that, rather than a 50-50 split between men and women, our audience is approximately 57% female, 43% male. Working mothers are hard to reach. This information can help us go after advertisers wanting to target working women with children.”

The survey involved employees and visitors in 46 buildings in 15 U.S. and Canadian markets.

“We didn’t see any difference between Canada and the U.S.,“ says DiFranza. “Our audience is not that volatile. And the income as shown in the survey is about what we expected.”

Unlike many other out-of-home research reports, Captivate’s Nielsen report provides brand-name advertisers with detailed metrics about how viewers interact with Captivate screens. Captivate asked Nielsen researchers to manually count people leaving the building and confirm if they went in the elevator; if they noticed the screen; how long they were in the elevator (the ‘dwell rate’); and demographic information. The methodology is consistent with OVAB guidelines that ensure uniformity and accuracy in audience reporting metrics.

“Advertisers want proof that their digital out-of-home campaigns are reaching the right people,” says Paul Lindstrom, senior vice-president at The Nielsen Company. “Captivate Network is providing advertisers with highly credible, best-in-class viewership and demographic metrics. Advertisers can rely on Captivate’s audience metrics with the same confidence they’ve grown to expect from print and broadcast
media.”

Captivate Network consists of more than 7,500 digital screens of varying sizes – usually 15” – in the U.S. and 1,500 in Canada. Primarily in office buildings, there is usually one screen per elevator but some elevators, such as those in Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) have two screens.

Through its screen network and interactive Web site, Captivate has shown a consistent ability to engage viewers with compelling content. The Nielsen survey confirms that Captivate consistently reaches an audience of ‘spend-ready’ consumers in office towers throughout North America.

Captivate’s DiFranza is also chairman of the OVAB board and has regularly advocated for industry standards.

“No matter how sincere you are or how much documentation you can produce to show your audience data is accurate, advertisers will always want an industry standard to verify your claims,” DiFranza says. “Between Nielsen’s research methodologies and the OVAB guidelines, we’re providing thorough, accurate data that shows advertisers we can deliver an audience comparable to a network television show at a fraction of the cost.”

Captivate is growing, both in the U.S. and Canada. In the latter, is has recently moved into Montreal and Edmonton office towers. Among its recent advertisers in the U.S. are American Airlines, BMW and Sprint. In Canada, recent advertisers include WestJet and Expedia. DiFranza says that Captivate has no plans to expand beyond Canada and the U.S. in the foreseeable future.

Pretty simple premise – mobile participants send in SMS or email of map grid coordinates to the “sign” and then the crane operator (once the coordinates are plotted) will spin the sign around and point it in the general direction where the mobile user data has determined it should go.

The video’s a lot more interesting than the actual explanation. However – I would chalk this particular example of the type of experience that I would never recommend any of my clients spend their hard earned money on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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