My tenure at Publicis [1] provided me with enough sense to know that media planning and strategy is one of the “dark-arts [2]“, it is down-right dangerous in the wrong hands and should only be handled by professionals. Any one on the agency side will tell you, “creating a plan is -one part research, one part finesse, and one part black magic”
So I as a follow up to our recent post [3] – I reached out to Jeff Atley [4], founder of Adcentricity [5], who was kind enough to show me his team’s creation, and I have to say that I was surprisingly impressed with what I saw.
Ladies and Gentlemen – This Advenue [6] is the REAL DEAL – and not just marketing hype. The application gets high marks from me for its usability but its real power is in the database that holds ALL (130,000 screens in over 200 DMA’s) the details of Adcentricity’s partner networks. ADVenue’s planning workflow relies on the metaphor of building a typical campaign brief and it integrates the process with some extremely clever conditional logic that automatically filters the out only the most relevant DOOH network partners.
In plain english ADVenue provides you with a tool to model many versions of DOOH campaign plans by simply changing some variables in the brief. For each plan ADVenue provides some very sexy data visualization tools such as; a “slider” control that changes the Audience Profile ratios; slide to the right and you incrementally increase the importance of ‘reach’, move it to the left and you increase the value of “relevancy” to your audience.
The other nice add-on is a third party geographic mapping program that plots all locations on a clickable map, that provides a drill down click through for each region- all the way down to being able to click on one specific location.
In my discussion with Jeff, he mentioned “this tool was not developed to replace the expertise of buying and planning DOOH campaigns as it also requires some a little finesse as well”, – he added “but it allows us to quickly model the effects of any variations in the campaign planning process”
I’ve added some screen shots of the application below, but they honesty don’t do justice to the overall experience of getting a demo of this application. I recommend you contact Adcentricity and take a spin in their ADVenue tool for a better sense of the power of this platform.
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Could this new tool be a game changer for Adcentricity? -I’d say- a definite “maybe” as ADVenue goes a long way to helping agencies & brands better understand the impact of changes in an everchanging landscape of digital signage networks. I can tell you that this platform doesn’t hurt their chances for getting an edge on their competitors since they claim that the inclusion of Canada partners plus their US networks, they cover all of N. America vs. SeeSaw’s US Centric model.