OVAB

April 20, 2009 by Dave Haynes

It’s hard to measure success in digital out-of-home. That’s because the entire industry is broken and I’m not sure a bureau can fix it with a set of policies or guidelines everyone can abide by. We have to start exploring the root of the problem first.

There is an immediate need to invigorate the digital signage and digital out-of-home industries—so much so that we should even change the name of the industry itself. The term “DOOH” should only remain to be a remark coined by Homer Simpson and not an acronym that identifies the sophisticated animal that it is: fast-growing, rapidly-evolving, cutting-edge, and technologically advanced—these elements are its core strengths, but there remains to be a need to utilize the full-scope of these vast media platforms, as they grow and evolve with astonishing velocity. The power and versatility of these networks have great potential that is far from being reached. Herein belies the need to reinvigorate it. The need comes from two major sides of the business: the networks and the advertisers.

This need is underscored by a significant lack of advertising dollars allocated to digital out-of-home platforms. No allocated media budget means no business for networks equates to no growth. But the barrier is quite legitimate from the advertiser’s perspective. They don’t allocate budgets because networks are so fragmented and vast, that advertisers and media planners don’t have the time to navigate through cluttered networks inefficiently.
Therefore the pattern is detrimentally reciprocal. On the network side, major digital networks simply need to fill their remnant space. On the other side, advertisers like large footprints, but need to target their audience intelligently. Not to mention the challenge of having to reformat a single piece of creative content to distribute on multiple digital platforms.

The industry needs a completely fresh perspective on how to maximize efficiency with creative technology, and a way to harmonize creative content across all digital platforms.