Brand Central Station

Kudos to the Boston Lobser Feast for this great stunt.  No missing this mobile billboard!

I call “slug bug”!

Thanks to the guys at CoolzOr for this one.

This article of the MarketingVOX blog caught my attention last week. Specifically this bit:

“Some 3-5 percent of phone users click on banner ads on their screens – higher than the 1 percent click rate of computer users, according to Jeff Janer, chief operating officer of Third Screen Media.”

If Sprint Nextel and Verizon are getting into bed with Yahoo! and other search companies, then what does that mean for the independent phone directory people? More importantly, how are small and medium-sized businesses going to be able to take advantage of this technology on a local scale?

The benefits of this technology are pretty obvious: more precise targeting and a rich database on customers broken down by phone number. It’s a database marketers dream come true, isn’t it? The real question is how will consumers react.

Our prediction: If the mobile phone companies stumble by streaming tons of unwanted, irrelevant crap over their customers’ phones, we’re looking at the next generation of spam. On the other hand, if revenues generated by advertising are used to reduce (or eliminate) the cost of the phone service and the content is accurately delivered (relevant), consumers may consider ad content to be a product benefit.

This Wall Street Journal article has more info.

Outdoor and out-of-home media has always been a quirky discipline. Creatives love it because, in general, the format is very visual, the canvas is large and from a cost-efficiency standpoint, one-off concepts are not out of the question.

Media planners and buyers aren’t necessarily crazy about the medium – demographics, traffic counts and other metrics are only somewhat reliable, there are still a lot of independent players in the business with odd terms and conditions and everyone has a different idea as to an effective strategy that has as much to do with geography as it does with “reach and frequency.”

Clients, on the other hand, seem to love out-of-home media – when they see it. If a client doesn’t see his or her campaign, then it probably isn’t working. (As a point of reference, when I ran an agency, we made sure to include at least one billboard location on the route between our client’s home and office so he’d see it every day when he drove to work.)

But while the concept of “convergence” is making a lot of noise in the electronic media (i.e. television, radio and Internet), it’s also driving some significant change in the out-of-home market. This piece in MediaPost, announces a strategic partnership between Yahoo! and Clear Channel that underscores how the Internet is changing the face of outdoor. The new, digital billboards will eventually appear in 200 malls across the country. These boards will be more than just flat panel displays suspended from the ceiling … these things are big:

While this new technology and Clear Channel’s involvement is interesting on its face, I suspect it is just the beginning. The technology exists to take this same ad serving scheme and deploy it across kiosk-type displays as well. The combination of the large displays with kiosks carrying the same or complimentary messages gives an advertiser a significant one-two punch when trying to engage a consumer.

“The screens, which measure 4 by 16 feet, will be divided into three parts: the far left section will display Yahoo! content, while the middle and right-hand sections will show ads, including 30-second video ads. The Yahoo! portion of the screens will show just a headline, sports scores, entertainment blurbs, or information from the Yahoo! Buzz Index. Content will be refreshed every 15 minutes.”

The plan appears to be to give advertisers the flexibility to advertise in different dayparts, to change creative every fifteen minutes and to target ads based on the location of the display and corresponding demographics of the audience. The beauty of this plan is that everything can be served off a central server, so message/brand management is relatively easy.

More importantly, by adding a Point-of-Sale device to the mix, out-of-home media steps to the head of the pack when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of traditional, main-stream media.

Superior customer demographics, high-level engagement, targeted creative, big, bold and interesting … who ever would have thought that out-of-home media would be leading the way in the ongoing integration of traditional and new media?