DS Today: DPAA developing creative guidelines, planning tool

October 18, 2010 by Dave Haynes

The Digital Place-based Advertising Association has been pretty quiet since its name change (from OVAB) and the departure to RMG of president Suzanne La Forgia. But the DPAA’s new head Susan Danaher has surfaced in an interview  with Digital Signage Today, which is now up on the portal site.

It’s a lengthy, particularly for DS Today, piece and you need to stick with it, as the first half or so goes over well, well worn ground about the need to make the medium easier to buy, standards and the DPAA’s one number research release of a couple weeks ago – if you missed, DPAA says media placements grew by 25% in Q1-2 2010.

It gets more interesting though, as she mentions the amount of research being done in the sector, and some upcoming work.

“So when you look at that, that’s all happened in the last six months, so we’ve arrived on the research front,” she said. “And what that means is that the people who make decisions about how to spend their advertising dollars, the media folks at the ad agencies, are now going to have the tools to help them understand the impact that digital place-based media has within the consumer experience — and with that data they’ll be able to plan, evaluate and buy the sector, so that’s a huge accomplishment on the part of the industry.”

Going forward, Danaher says the DPAA has several big announcements it plans to make at its upcoming Digital Media Summit, scheduled for Oct. 27. (Me, holy crap that’s next week … has this ever been promoted quietly)

The DPAA will be coming to the marketplace with creative guidelines, to complement its earlier foray into audience research guidelines, she says.

“We will now be establishing some common nomenclature, as well as some creative standards or guidelines that will make it much easier to buy the medium,” she said. (Me: Have they talked to POPAI, which has also been working on standards?)

In addition to the new creative guidelines, the DPAA also will be announcing a still-unnamed search and discovery tool that will be available to agencies and their clients at no charge to enable them to search for media players in the digital place-based space, she says.

Danaher stressed in the interview the planning tool is not a real planning tool to compete with SeeSaw, Adcentricity, rVue and others. ” … the DPAA has no business in the business of transactions, so it truly is a search and discovery tool and not a pricing tool by any stretch.”

The interview does not go into what is probably the most contentious aspect of the body, which is is name. Though Arbitron uses that handle, the media business does not seem to be shifting to digital place-based. The sector used digital out of home, and a lot of people would argue that ship long since sailed.

Worth the time to read.