Is DP supplanting DOOH in running battle of what to call this ad stuff?

July 9, 2010 by Dave Haynes

This goofy sector continues to wring its collective hands over what to call itself, particularly as it relates to the ad side.

As you know, what was started as the Out of home Video Advertising Bureau (OVAB) became the Digital Place-Based Advertising Association (DPAA) a few months ago. That prompted much head scratching, and a fair amount of ridicule.

When I talk to people who sell this stuff, they tend to say the ad sector has settled in on digital out of home as the handle they use to describe digital display networks that support advertising. Forget about trying to give it a new and different handle, they say. That train has left the station.

But here we have the Digital Screenmedia Association – with its own new and ostensibly improved handle – holding a webinar next week about: “The State of Digital Place-Based Advertising.” The event has Arbitron presenting the findings in its 2010 Arbitron Digital Place-Based Video Study.

Last year, the report was called: Arbitron Out-of-Home Digital Video Display Study 2009. Same study. same author. Totally different handle on the cover and throughout the doc.

Hmmm.

SeeSaw Networks CEO Peter Bowen is also on the webinar. The Wayback Machine tells me SeeSaw used to call the game digital out of home on its main web page, but poking around more recently suggests SeeSaw has been using place-based for a while now.

Jeremy Lockhorn from Razorfish is also part of the webinar, and his firm clearly calls the sector DOOH, right down to a section in its annual outlook report.

Meanwhile, probably the noisiest guys in the space – Adcentricity – are clearly on the DOOH bandwagon. But Nielsen, Arbitron’s biggest competitor, uses digital place-based or location-based.

And just so you have an excuse to drink at 10 in the morning, you should know Reach Media Group – probably the guys with the deepest pockets playing in the ad part of this sector – call what they do “away from home.”

Jeez Louise. So as we head into the second half of 2010, the sector as a whole seems no closer than before in agreeing on the most elemental part of the presentation to agencies and brands.

The whole argument about what to call the overall industry is one thing, and maybe not all that important. But just as we started hearing the agencies and brands, right or wrong, were settling in on DOOH, place-based seems to be rising up.

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