Media Giant Bloomberg Repurposing Social News Videos For DOOH Screens

November 13, 2018 by Dave Haynes

Via Digital Signage Pulse

The financial news giant Bloomberg now sees digital out of home as a market for the social media-angled news briefs it started about a year ago, under the handle TicToc.

In a guest post on Digital Signage Pulse, the NYC-based media company’s Head of Strategy and Business Development for Bloomberg Digital talks about how the social news videos – all captioned to allow consumption without audio, when necessary – can have a home on Digital OOH screens.

While the great majority of TicToc’s output is seen online, the content is also on some NYC taxi screens.

“We plan,” the company says, “in the near future to expand into screens where people consume content throughout their day — at work, during a commute, or at play. This includes taxis, elevators, airports, as well as screens in shopping areas. We also aim to be in city streets, similar to LinkNYC — any screens where people can watch news video.

The content is reminiscent to what I see from Cheddar, all over Linkedin. Video clips and stills sequenced through a set of summary statements. The pieces are well done, and could be quite good in an environment that has viewers behaving in media consumption mode (as in: they’re poking around on phones or other screens).

I’m not at all sure longer-format pieces work in the always on-the-go dynamics of out of home media. In that medium, content-producers typically think in terms of messaging in seconds, not minutes, on digital posters.

The short-form subscription material that companies like Screenfeed, Datacall, Digichief and others put together – with this medium in mind – would seem to make more sense FOR this medium. It’s important to note all of those companies are 16:9 sponsors in some way, but that’s not why I’m pointing this out. It’s just logic.

That said, Bloomberg is a media powerhouse and has the time and resources to study, tweak and adjust to the Digital OOH market, if there is enough there to make it worth the added attention. Media sales is about eyeballs, and digital OOH could, in theory, accumulate a lot of eyeballs.

The business model is not early clear to me – as in whether networks pay for this, or get it free.

“TicToc is currently ad-supported,” the company says. “We help our brand partners achieve their larger business goals through the expanding TicToc ecosystem. Brands can take advantage of a variety of turnkey and custom integrations targeted at the audiences they most need to engage.”

I can’t see networks paying, as the feed is set up in such a way that “sponsored content” is integrated into the news experience, “and brand messages appear natively within the news content.” So you’d be subscribing to display an ad-supported news service.

Guess we’ll see.

TicToc, by the way, is a direct reference to this cloying term some journalists have been using more often recently to describe events timelines, as in here’s the tick-tock. Ugh. Timeline works just fine, thanks.

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