Your client has come to you with a request. She wants a more effective way to reach people for the upcoming video game launch. Her target is a national audience of notoriously hard to reach 18-34 males. She knows television is not effective with this group and wants to try something different to promote her brand, perhaps a medium that will reach her target audience where they are.
She has heard about the explosion of out-of-home digital media in places like grocery stores, retail environments, bars and restaurants and on college campuses. She wants to run her online creative out-of-home to synchronize with her online campaign. She wants you to present her with a few campaign options. She wants it tomorrow.
You have done your research, but with hundreds out-of-home digital media networks of all different shapes and sizes and new ones popping up everyday, you are not sure how you are going to identify the best locations to connect with the target audience, especially in only 24 hours. You also have 4 other clients who are looking for similar things from you.
How are you going to pull this one off?
Option 1: Trying to do it the ‘traditional way’
Before you dive in, you consider how you have done this in the past. Given a few weeks of time, you would have picked up the phone and started calling digital signage networks to identify those that provide the best match for the specific needs of your client. The trouble is, for each of these vendors you need to understand the demographics for each of their locations. Then, you would need to understand the traffic patterns for each network and collect any third party research that validates audience awareness of the screens. In some cases, you know you would be lucky to even get this information. You assume that you could tease out this information, but it would probably take several days just to get the basics. To assure that you are getting the best fit for your client, you may be interrogating 10 to 15 networks!
Your client is looking for a national audience. You need to think big. Even if you were trying to reach a regional audience, you could easily spend a week slicing and dicing spreadsheets that compare one network to another in order to get a cohesive plan. Big means lots of data to manage. You hear the clock ticking in the background.
You drill a little deeper into how your traditional approach to planning an out-of-home digital media campaign way might play out. Each of the networks has a different way to price their media. More headaches. One network only has time for a few weeks, another network has a week here or there. One network is offering you locations and a market that does not match the demographics of the audience you are trying to reach. More phone calls, more email, more time wasted.
Given a week or so, you think that you could narrow this down to some reasonable choices. But then you start to worry. What the about quality of the network? You don’t have time to review references. How would you really know what the quality is for each the networks? What about the screen locations? You could get in your car and drive to a few venues, you could fly to Los Angeles to check out some of the locations, but now you have added even more time to the schedule.
Another concern kicks in. Media formats. Each of these networks has their own video format. The creative team usually handles this but there is no time to get the creative team involved. Then you consider the work that is going to be involved with trafficking the media to each of the networks. First, there is setting expectations with your client. Then there is working with the creative team. Then there are multiple files flying back and forth between the creative team and each of the networks. More time and expense even prior to the campaign launch, and more chances for errors.
Given a few weeks, you could do adequate research to put together a plan that would meet your client’s media objectives. But what would happen if you placed a buy across five or six networks? How would you know if the media ran in each of the locations that you picked? You quickly realize that you will be in the same position that you were in during the planning process. You see more spreadsheets, more trafficking of information and the nearly impossible challenge of communicating a uniform set of media metrics and the proof of play reports from disparate networks to your client.
It seems that the ‘tradtional way’ of planning and buying simply will not allow you to create an ’apples to apples’ comparison among networks let alone present a uniform set of results. You take a great deal of pride in your work and are always thinking about new ways to provide your clients with the best service possible. You think to yourself, “No more churning and burning. There has to be a better way.”
Option 2: Embracing new ways to be the market expert
You recently signed up for SeeSawAds.com which claims to make planning, buying and measuring out-of-home digital media easy. There has been a lot of buzz about this service so you give it a shot. You point your Web browser at www.seesawads.com and sign in.
The first thing you do is explore the different types of venues that are available. You peruse photos of the different venues and quickly see the different screen sizes. Online maps make it easy to see where the venues are. You are able to access standardized demographic, traffic and awareness data backed by third party research across each of the different types of venues. You read detailed descriptions of the audience that each type of venue reaches. In a few minutes, you have determined that retail-entertainment, sports bars, bookstores and universities reach your client’s target audience. Already, you have learned more about possible networks for your client in a few minutes than weeks of research would have yielded.
That seemed too easy. The real test will be in the planning process. You create a campaign and pick the dates when the ad will run. You can target nationally, by Designated Market Area (DMA), city or state or you can even micro-target by zip codes or addresses within a trade area. To achieve the reach objectives of your client, a Top 50 DMA buy is necessary so you select all 50 DMAs.
You already identified the types of venues for your campaign: retail-entertainment, sports bars, bookstores and universities; and with a few clicks of a button you select these categories. Then you target a specific demographic of 18-34 year old males. You select a 15 second spot and enter a target budget and request a plan. Within a few seconds you are returned a detailed plan for your campaign.
As you dig into the plan, you can clearly see how it has met your media objectives. You are presented with demographic performance indices against the national average for males in the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups for the campaign as a whole and across each DMA and venue. SeeSawAds.com also presented you with a schedule of venues that were available for the dates that you specified along with detailed maps that show where each of the venues in your plan are located. You can view pictures for the location of screens in each of the venues and view demographics, traffic and awareness by each venue.
It is clear that the plan meets your client’s objectives. It has only been 20 minutes since you signed in. Out-of-home digital media planning has never been this easy. Your creative juices are now flowing. You decide to build another plan for your client who always appreciates innovative ideas. With what you have learned, the second plan is even easier to build.
During the planning process, you see that you can add your colleagues and creative partners to your campaign team and they will be able to collaborate with you in the process as well as receive email notifications around critical deadlines. More time and expense will be saved here.
You also see that there is a single media format and that the service provides automatic trafficking of media to each of the networks that are in your campaign. You start to think about other clients who would benefit from out-of-home digital media.
Along the way, you also learn that with SeeSawAds.com, you will receive a single proof of play report that spans 5 different digital sign networks. This proof-of-play report will be delivered on a monthly basis throughout the course of your campaign. You save your second campaign and then create a third.
After a quick comparison of the plans, you choose the first plan you created and reserve if for 48 hours. Using the reserved plan, you export the summary of the plan to a PDF document and generate another custom PDF document that provides a detailed description of each of the types of venues for your client. Then you email these documents off to your client ahead of schedule.
Your choice for how to provide your client with state of the art media expertise has never been clearer. SeeSawAds.com has taken a nearly impossible task that might have taken a team of media planners and buyers a few weeks to complete and compressed it to minutes.
You sign off and pack up early to spend an evening out with your colleagues, confident that you will delight your client tomorrow.
