On advertising – Networks and the role of digital signage

There are lots of people who think digital signage exists only because of advertising, though most of those people also spend a lot of time thinking about how they’ll make payroll every couple of weeks.

Digital Out Of Home advertising is a tough game, as is advertising in general, really. But DOOH, the acronym for this medium, attracts a steady stream of newcomers who think putting screens in well-defined locations will get the people who control advertising dollars for brands – directly or at agencies – positively giddy at the opportunity to book campaign time.

Doesn’t work that way, really.

There are some success stories in DOOH, but there is way more roadkill. The DOOH highway is scattered with the carcasses of companies that had either stupid ideas, decent ideas but not enough capital, or great ideas but not enough experience and insight on how to sell media.

Even media veterans who have sold advertising time in print and broadcast since forever still struggle to find the right formula. I know people who have been doing this for more than a decade – who are in the right verticals and get meetings with senior, senior people with a 15-second phone call – who still sit at office desks staring at spreadsheets and wondering where they are at each month with receivables.

So what’s the secret sauce? Oh, were it only that easy. The best probably anyone can conjure is some basic advice.

You have to have a media environment and audience that advertisers want, first of all. You can “own” a vertical – with screens in hundreds or thousands of similar sites. But if the brands don’t want to be there, that ownership doesn’t matter.

Then assuming you have a vertical that’s in demand, you need to have enough of those places to warrant the effort of planning a campaign. It’s easy to book TV and print and reach massive audiences. It’s much more work to book DOOH and hit a much smaller audience.

And you then need to have some metrics that confirm people are looking, and for how long. All the dead screens we all see in malls, stores, airports and radio stations – whether dead networks or ones that aren’t well managed – make media planners skeptical about whether they will actually get what they buy.

To run a DOOH company, you need to bring on people who know what they are doing. You need to figure out what amounts to critical mass in locations, screens and eyeballs, and then a budget that will get you there. And then you need to bake in at least 18 months of groundwork educating and courting the people who control media budgets. Assume almost no sales through that period, and then a gentle build-up of ad sales from there.

And get your programming sorted early. Just because there’s a screen on the wall in the store or airport lounge or waiting room, does not mean people are going to look at it. There has to be programming on it that people want to see. Ideally, they see that programming as valuable and worth their attention – not just a foil to utter boredom.

Denys Lavigne of Arsenal Media uses the phrase “earn your audience” and I think that encapsulates nice the approach content programming and creative needs to take on advertising networks.

In developing that programming, network operators need to understand and tailor the content to the context of the venue and the audience. What happens too often is that programming is an after-thought … the stuff that runs between the ads. It needs to be much more. That likely means health-related messages in medical waiting rooms. Travel in airport lounges. And so on.

But that programming also needs to consider the attitude and the emotions of the audience. The right subject matter is a start, but is the tone and message duration right?

Then there is the actual advertising on the screens. The first thing to understand and fully buy into is that this is not TV. Even though some networks stick “TV” into their title, it’s not… and never was. This is its own medium and needs its own creative. A spot produced for television safely assumes that if people are watching live or forgot what their DVR can do, they are sitting and watching intently for minutes and possibly even hours. That’s their activity.

Television spots often involve story-telling and building up to a message or brand impression at the end. They have a pace to them and they assume people are watching all the way along. They also have audio.

In DOOH, people are often on the move, just glancing at screens for a matter of seconds. Video analytics that look at audience behavior suggest people lock on a screen for perhaps three or four seconds at most, before looking elsewhere. Their eyes will come back to the screen again, but not for long. That means your creative needs to be short, and immediately on message. The brand needs to stay on for the duration, and that duration should probably be far less than even the 15-second TV standard. Even in the rare cases that audio is allowed in DOOH, the spots should still – likely – be designed to work without that audio.

In designing spots, your reference media is more outdoor than broadcast or online. Really good billboards and backlit posters tend to have minimalist designs that allow viewers to immediately grasp the content and context, and contain very few words. What words are there are in the font types and sizes that allow them to be seen from a distance? DOOH ads that will be seen from 10, 20 or even 30 or more feet away must be designed to respect those circumstances, or that effort is wasted.

Movement is not necessarily a good thing. The notion of eye-catching visuals that5 might make sense for an audience that is static might be completely wrong for certain DOOH audiences, and work well for others.

The bottom line, to repeat, is that DOOH is its own ad medium. Just as it is tough to make money from advertising, and requires a lot of experience and hard work, producing good programming and creative takes experience and a lot of experimentation and testing to see what has an impact.