DOOH planning network Adcentricity adds mobile Impact

April 13, 2009 by Dave Haynes

There’s been piles of coverage about this today in various spots, but I will jump in nonetheless and note a press release today by my friends at Adcentricity, who have struck up a deal to get themselves mobile marketing-ready.

According to the news release, Adcentricity and Toronto-based Impact Mobile (whose head office is maybe three blocks away from Adcentricity world headquarters) have worked an arrangement to offer a “full-service, cross-carrier mobile marketing solution” for networks and advertisers.

By combining two of the fastest growing categories in advertising – digital out-of-home and mobile – advertisers can now take advantage of the unique opportunities within digital out-of-home executions and activate consumer dialogues where they live, work and play. By providing marketers with a holistic approach to their planning needs, ADCENTRICITY makes campaigns more powerful and dynamic with this added mobile component.

“The convergence between digital out-of-home media and mobile is happening now and smart marketers are figuring out how to use these forms of media together to create the ultimate engagement tool,” said Rob Gorrie, CEO of ADCENTRICITY. “Adding a mobile component to a digital out-of-home plan is a great way to enable consumers to interact with your brand messages with relevance and introduces additional means to evaluate ROI.”

Today’s mobile subscribers send more text messages than phone calls, according to Nielsen. The proliferation of iPhones, Blackberrys, increased bandwidth and unlimited texting packages have made mobile marketing a high growth category. With the addition of this service, ADCENTRICITY can plan and execute digital out-of-home campaigns among 140,000 screens across North America and is the only digital out-of-home provider that can bring scale and mobile applications to life at this level. ADCENTRICITY’s unique capabilities for digital out-of-home planning can be extended seamlessly into the mobile strategy, driving efficiency and impact.

There have been stabs here and there for years now to integrate digital signage networks with the mobile world, particularly given the monstrous market penetration of handheld devices and the crack-like addiction many people have to them.

Locamoda has done and is doing some very cool stuff, some bar-focused networks are doing things on platforms like Aerva, but it is still seeming to be very much a onesey-twosey kinda business in which network operators and their vendors have to start from near-scratch each time a new idea or request bubbles up.

Having something baked in and ready to roll beats the hell out of the old “Let me get right back to you” dodge if and when the mobile question gets popped during an ad sales pitch meeting.

I don’t know how seamlessly anything can be integrated into dozens or scores of networks on a variety of platforms, but I think Rob and the boys are being smart in being able to actually walk the talk when this sort of thing comes up.