DM News: Going Digital in the Great Outdoors
This article originally was posted on May 5, 2008 at Digital Signage News.
By Monte Zweben
Digital out-of-home advertising has emerged in places across the country such as gas stations, coffee shops, office elevators, grocery stores, health clubs, bars and restaurant, to name a few. This medium has now reached the scale necessary to compete with television and the Web for national advertising dollars.
According to the Digital Out-of-Home Media Awareness and Attitude Study (OTX, October 2007), people report that digital out-of-home advertising is the number one way to capture their attention in today’s fragmented media landscape. People are engaged by compelling and relevant content, such as news, entertainment, community information and weather while they are tuned in, not tuned out.
How do marketers take advantage of this exciting new medium to connect with their customers and prospects? Oneway is to use a behavioral marketing methodology such as life pattern marketing, which maps the work, play and social routines of a target audience to digital out-of-home media opportunities. This methodology includes a discussion of the type of creative that would be most effective in communicating a brand message or a call to action. In many cases, creative repurposed from existing Web, print or television assets can be repackaged with text and animation to deliver an effective message.
This media can also be made interactive by integrating a call to action through text messaging within the advertising creative and tracking responses in real time. Some digital out-of-home media networks also enable marketers to connect people in places to the Web through social networks using SMS text messaging, thereby creating the opportunity for a campaign to be viral through social networking.
