Key ingredients for a successful DOOH campaign

by Matthew | 13 May 2012 11:16 am

By David Little
In mid-February 2012, the TV ratings service provider Arbitron released data counting all viewers who had watched the Super Bowl football championship earlier that month outside of their homes—e.g. at bars and restaurants. Across 44 media markets that were tracked with the company’s Portable People Meter (PPM) system, some 12 million people watched the game in these places. That equalled nearly 10 per cent of the 123 million adults who live in those markets, enough to lift the ‘in-home’ Super Bowl audience of 57.5 million people in those markets by 20.7 per cent.

When announcing those figures, Arbitron’s senior vice-president (SVP) of cross-platform sales and marketing, Carol Edwards, pointed out that while TV ratings have traditionally counted viewers at home, watching sports programming is often a group activity that specifically takes place outside of the home.

Similarly, digital out-of-home (DOOH) networks are drawing a huge, verifiable number of viewers everywhere from fitness clubs to gas stations, from airports to arenas. Nielsen, also well-known for measuring TV audiences, reported adults visiting 12 of these types of venues in the fourth quarter of 2010 were exposed to more than 500 million gross minutes per month of OOH media.

For advertisers, marketers and digital signage network operators with the vision to develop this emerging media market, the opportunity to create successful DOOH campaigns has never been greater. Doing so, however, depends upon five key ingredients:

• Setting goals.
• Choosing the right hardware and software.
• Successful deployment.
• Designing effective content.
• Collecting, analyzing and responding to audience metrics.

Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, these elements of digital signage must be assembled properly to achieve a complete success in DOOH advertising.

Setting goals
Dorn Beattie, the founder, president and CEO of Solara Adworks in Coquitlam, B.C., is one example of a ‘puzzle master’ assembling these elements. He is currently building a digital signage network—known as ‘Solara360’—across North America as a franchisor.

This involves signing up franchisees to provide proprietary liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and related software to sports bar owners as a turnkey system. The system is provided to the bars for free.

The key to this business model is Solara’s proprietary display technology, which enables the playback of local, regional and national ads in an L-shaped space along two sides of each screen, without interfering with the sports programming’s visibility. The franchisees secure locations, manage deployment, sell ads and collect content for the loops that are scheduled and played back on the signs. The bar owners share in the ad revenue, with no responsibility at all for the signage.

Beattie’s approach exemplifies the goal-setting necessary for successful DOOH campaigns. Simply put, his goal is to provide a digital signage system so compelling that the bar owners can’t say no.

“We have a 100 per cent closing ratio of signing up sports bars,” he says.

Also, as that success rate would be difficult to sustain financially on his own, Beattie transitioned Solara to the franchise model, giving entrepreneurial go-getters the opportunity to invest in the necessary technology and then reap profits from ad sales.

Choosing the right hardware and software
Hardware and software technologies are closely related when deploying a DOOH campaign, as they lay the foundation upon which the campaign’s content will be presented to the public.

DOOH hardware includes the displays themselves, the media players that deliver content, the cabling and other components supporting the distribution of content to individual digital signs. The displays need to offer not only sufficient resolution and durability, but also the capability for external control via general-purpose interface (GPI) triggers or scripts, depending on the campaign’s application requirement.

The media players are, essentially, personal computers (PCs) with a small enough form factor for inconspicuous deployment within or behind the displays’ structure. Their computing and graphics processing capabilities support the simultaneous playback of multiple media files, including video, audio and animation, and the generation of other screen elements, such as text crawls. In many cases, they offer both wired and wireless Ethernet connectivity, Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports and connectors to relay control commands, e.g. to turn a display on or off.

Digital signage software generally falls into two distinct areas. The first involves editing applications for assembling and arranging various types of media and scheduling their playback, along with media player software to retrieve, store and manage files in line with the playback schedule. The second area involves server software, which operates via Internet Protocol (IP) connections to control DOOH content distribution across dozens, hundreds or even thousands of displays, along with monitoring those displays and performing diagnostics.

Successful deployment
Deployment begins with important decisions about where and how to position the displays, but also involves ongoing network management.

Understanding the target audience’s traffic patterns, habits and demographics will help make it easier to decide where to deploy various types of displays. In a hotel and conference centre, for example, data about how visitors and guests use the space can be used to determine how to position digital signs for wayfinding, digital meeting room schedule screens and self-serve interactive kiosks.

The goal of deployment is to deliver the right information at the most appropriate location. Understanding local demographics may also affect the size and orientation of screens within a space.

Successful deployment also depends on deciding, early in the process, who will be responsible for managing the media players, the displays and the network in general. Some digital signage network plans have been stopped dead in their tracks by conflicts between information technology (IT) and communications departments.

This is particularly true when using a Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN). Well-intentioned IT professionals, motivated by the need to protect the security and integrity of these networks, often claim responsibility for digital signage deployment without first considering the sheer amount of work that will entail. Some even decide to build a proprietary system from scratch, adding further burdens of time and complexity, to the point where the digital signage network may never be deployed.

Conversely, many media and communications professionals, who may be well-equipped for content creation and messaging, lack the technical expertise to oversee a successful network deployment.

Given these factors, it is becoming more common for organizations to turn to an outside specialist to deploy, manage and monitor their digital signage network, separately and distinctly from their IT network. This trend has helped them rise from digital signage failure and achieve new success.

Designing effective content
Several strategies have also been identified in recent years for the development of successful content for DOOH campaigns.

[5]“All content considerations should first be led from the brand,” says Brian Bibler, director of creative services for software developer Keywest Technology. “From there, make decisions about goals, initiatives and objectives. To do otherwise will doom a content strategy to being ineffective at best and off-message and harmful to the brand at worst.”

While Bibler recommends observing and evaluating currently deployed content to identify popular trends in the DOOH business, he emphasizes the value of thinking outside the box by beginning each individual campaign with a blank canvas. The vision for the campaign will then be limited only by what can be conceived for the brand, given its own context.

He also advises learning as much as possible about the audience. The failure to do so can derail otherwise well-executed campaigns, simply because the message is lost in translation.

“A good campaign delivers a targeted message that is innovative, clean and easy to read,” he says. “Guiding the audience through the campaign guarantees the brand message will be received and remembered.”

As Bibler points out, ‘less is more.’

“Be sure the text is concise, the images compelling and the dwell times sufficient to allow the audience to absorb the message without losing interest,” he says.

Audience metrics
The final piece in the DOOH campaign puzzle is metrics, i.e. collecting and analyzing verifiable data about content playback and how the campaign is actually viewed by an audience. Paying advertisers, for instance, will demand to see a log of which messages have run in which locations and at which times.

It becomes easier to sell DOOH ads when specific information about viewership and audience size is provided by a third-party source like the aforementioned Arbitron or Nielsen, both of which have recently used a combination of measurement technologies and audience sampling techniques to develop metrics for this medium. This information is also helpful in allowing those responsible for DOOH campaigns to evaluate their approach, tweak their messaging and redeploy their assets.

The big picture
When a DOOH campaign successfully integrates all five of these ingredients, it will support the needs of marketers, advertisers and network operators alike. They can impart information, influence consumer decisions and reap the rewards.

David Little is director of marketing for Keywest Technology, which helps businesses implement digital signage hardware and content, and a charter member of the Digital Screenmedia Association (DSA). For more information, visit www.keywesttechnology.com[6].

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/key-ingredients-for-a-successful-dooh-campaign/

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