RMG’s Addiction campaign raises marketing game in Digital OOH

October 21, 2011 by Dave Haynes

Travels kept me from writing about this earlier in the week, but the Fedex pkg that showed up Thursday with a print version of the RMG Network‘s Addiction campaign reinforced the need to write this up.

The Digital OOH/OOH TV/Digital Place-based company has pretty significantly raised the game on marketing this medium with a new multi-pronged effort. The premise is that consumers are addicted to digital news and entertainment, and that digital screens provide a short “fix” in a venues outside the home.

The target audience for this campaign is media decision makers, with the aim of hammering home that the medium currently reaches 181 million US adults each month, and the number gets steadily bigger.

The integrated campaign includes print, online, direct mail, social and email marketing.

You can see the eBook at www.digitaladdiction.tv. The print plan broke this week in AdWeek and in online banners. There is also creative running on RMG’s screens, and mobile and social partners are pitching in as well.

What is very cool about this is the time, effort, expense and thought that went into it. RMG CEO Garry McGuire told me about plans for this months and months ago, but he clearly took the time to get it right.

Many, if not most, network operators in this space use creative that doesn’t do much more than show little gaggles of people excitedly staring at screens – looking about as natural as infected people in body-snatchers flicks. Quite often, the visual is not much more than the screen and the venue, and the backs of heads. My favorites are the ones where people look about ready to wet themselves because of the presence of a screen … RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM!!!

In this case, RMG partnered with a fashion photographer, Kate Owen, to shoot edgy, slightly loopy but always compelling visuals of people “who are completely enthralled” with digital place-based screens. They’re excited, but they don’t look insane.

It is the sort of effort that completely moves the discussion away from the technology being the product, and making it instead about the audience and context. Lots of network operators talk effectively about their audience, but their marketing rarely backs it up and shows it like this.

Not many networks have the budget to do what’s been done here by RMG, but it’s not so much about money some times as it is about mindset. If you can get a world-class photographer, great. But lots of people execute great ideas on shoestring budgets.

My guess is this will have a lot of folks in charge of marketing for networks thinking about what they do now and might start doing instead.

Photo credits: Kate Owen Photography

  1. Bruce Owen says:

    fantastic ad campaign. great photos that say so much and I can’t wait to hire these guys to do something like this for me.

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