What’s to come in 2014

January 17, 2014 by

Companies are now targeting customers more effectively, as demonstrated by the Mini DOOH campaign

Companies are now targeting customers more effectively, as demonstrated by the Mini DOOH campaign

Digital out-of-home continued to grow in 2013 – and it doesn’t look like slowing down in 2014. With lower prices and greater ease of use, the market is expanding into areas that perhaps wouldn’t have considered digital signage as an option before.

Compared with traditional advertising mediums, such as TV, radio or the internet, DOOH has been able to offer brands more control over their content and a better idea of the exposure they have. The interactive capacity of DOOH, as well as its ability to gather information through facial recognition and mobile technologies, puts it firmly on media planners’ maps. Talon’s chief executive Eric Newham calls it ‘face time’, in that it allows advertisers to choose who they talk to directly.

Richard Blackburn, commercial director at MediaCo, agrees with this suggestion: “The hottest trends in digital signage are currently facial detection and touch. Facial detection is not, in itself, changing the role of digital signage, but it does add another dimension for advertisers seeking to better understand how people react to creative engagement. This ensures that brand content not only evolves over the duration of the campaign, but also delivers relevant content to people.

“By combining touch capacity with this, we can deliver activation as well as branding,” he adds. “It is a potent mix.”

Liam Boyle, managing director of Monster Media, believes that this development shows the potency of DOOH: “I’m enjoying the continued use of data and analytics that help to prove the effectiveness of the medium. Measureable results support creative and demonstrate the power of integrated and interactive campaigns.”

The digitisation of OOH cannot be stopped and management tools for this fast and flexible medium are essential. Mike Dillon, director of Key Systems, opines: “Having seen the growth of digital assets amongst our traditional OOH clients, we know that the industry needs flexible and robust asset management tools.

“Our digital director is helping media owners and agencies to put the right content onto the right screens at the right time. It also provides proof of posting, which can be accessed through any Windows-enabled mobile device. Big data means big business for DOOH, but you need software that can process the whole life cycle of the campaign.”

Tim Harvey, director of digital strategy at JCDecaux, adds: “Facilitating the buying process by removing layers of administration and complexity between the brand and media owner is key. We need to prove the ROI of the medium through display metrics, through hardware and software performance, mixed in with audience data from EPOS and mobile search channels.”

When it comes to screens and players, simple is best. Companies that have put their bets on easy, transparent and straightforward operations are reaping the benefits. Signagelive is a good example of this, having seen a 40 percent growth in the past twelve months. Jason Cremins, Signagelive’s chief executive, comments: “The biggest trend has been the shift from exclusively AV-Systems Integrators installing digital signage networks to a mix of both AV and IT-Enterprise resellers that are now moving into the sector.”

Cremins attributes this trend to the simplification of end-user devices deployed for digital signage purposes, including Samsung Smart Signage and Android devices. Installation and maintenance of these digital display systems are so easy that AV resellers might need to rethink their strategies.

“We’ve seen a major retailer purchase its Samsung Signagelive Smart Signage displays from a major IT reseller, and then decide to install and maintain its digital signage by itself,” continues Cremins. “Previously, this type of deal would have been sold and installed by a specialist AV reseller.”

In terms of content, the move to HTML5 for media playback has encouraged other sectors, such as web designers, to create dynamic passive and interactive content and applications for digital signage, while the uptake of Android has helped hasten the spread of DOOH.

Content also poses a challenge in ultra HD, or 4K. The industry seems positive about its emergence but, due to the lack of components, content and the current cost, we will wait a while before we see it fully implemented across the DOOH spectrum.

For Matrox’s sales account manager Rob Moodey, though, the unmentioned barrier is actually in bringing the content to the screen. “The normal DOOH distribution architecture uses cat5 extenders, while ultra HD requires fibre optics, such as Avio’s KVM extender,” he explains. “For DOOH, more than just 4K, I foresee up-scaled, dynamic, full-HD content.”

For 2014, we can expect to see more fully integrated digital signage, in terms of hardware and software. Incorporating NFC, touch-less interactions and brand message personalisation will be a must. DOOH will also cease to be a separate category for advertisers, as it begins to lead the way on media planning.

First published 17 January 2014 – Output

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Screens in the Wild

December 12, 2013 by

The research provided insight into how location and audience can affect interaction with DOOH

The research provided insight into how location and audience can affect interaction with DOOH

For the past two years the University College London (UCL) and the University of Nottingham (UoN) have been working together on a project called Screens in the Wild. Researchers from the UCL’s Space Group and the UoN’s Mixed Reality Lab investigated how media screens located in urban space can be designed to benefit public life.

The research team includes architects, human computer interaction designers, computer scientists, anthropologists, developers, artists and curators. Notably, it doesn’t include anyone currently working in DOOH. The reason for this is simple; they wanted to have total independence in order to be able to invite companies to try their test platforms in the second phase of the project, which began recently.

Ava Fatah gen Schieck, lecturer at UCL and head of the project, explains: “We built a series of architectural interfaces in Leytonstone, east London and Nottingham which use broadcast media and interactive technologies to foster community participation and ownership of the urban space.”

A total of four screens have been installed: two are in Nottingham, at the New Art Exchange and the independent Broadway Cinema, while the other two are in East London, one at Leytonstone library and another at volunteer-run community centre The Mill. The displays run as a network and, from the moment the first screen went up, the project has been running 24 hours a day. Each of the four nodes contains a touchscreen, a CCTV camera and a webcam, a microphone and a speaker.

Dr Holger Schnadelbach, the principal investigator and senior research fellow at UoN, was in charge of creating the technical platform for the project. The displays, which are NEC MultiSync screens, run on a Windows 7 platform using a Union Server and a touch foil overlay from Visual Planet.

“We tried various technologies, such as an Xbox for gesture interaction, but they didn’t work,” says Schieck. “We wanted to bring interactivity into the public realm and a simple touchscreen was the best.”

The research results show that slight distinctions in a screen’s surrounding area can provide remarkably varied results. Nottingham’s Broadway cinema is situated a few metres back from the street; here, people tend to stay and interact with the screens for extended periods, or just sit around and passively watch others play. In east London, where the screen is on the high street itself, the dwell time is briefer.

The project’s aim is to invite people to get more involved with their local community. With this in mind, researchers invited local digital artists and residents to workshops and events in which participants generated their own relevant content.

“A key element for engaging the public, besides creating simple interaction mechanisms, is to focus on locally generated content and to collaborate with communities to generate and develop the content,” believes Schieck.

One of the most popular interactions is a photo booth application, where pictures can be shared between the four locations, while another – a game – saw a high level of participation from children.

“Depending on the time of day you can get a very different picture of the interaction taking place,” explains Schieck. “For instance, inhibitions seem to disappear in the evening.

“There is an interesting case with the community centre screen where, for the past two years, a man has visited the screen every other day and had his photo taken. The picture only shows a snapshot of the interaction, but through our CCTV camera observation we can see that what he does is a whole performance: he dances in front of the screen!”

The research and development phase has ended; however, the screen network with its scheduled experiences continues to run and is available for any interested party to run tests on. Local venue owners and the residents involved in the project have expressed their continued interest in supporting the project.

“We have developed knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work, knowledge of the urban setting and the types of community around the screen locations, ” concludes Schieck. “We would like to test the possibility of offering the screen locations as a research test bed for developing novel ideas and supporting new ways of engagement with the public, which might be of interest to media owners and advertising agencies.”

The DOOH industry has a gap to bridge between academic research and the practical application of screens in the urban landscape. The Screens in the Wild network could be an ideal platform for identifying useful information about specific locations and engagement levels. This controlled environment can provide an outline of the social and technical challenges and opportunities for further developing out-of-home advertising and permit the transfer of this knowledge to other networks.

First published 12 December 2013 – Output

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Hyper definition: 4K screens in DOOH

December 2, 2013 by

Display products such as PsCo’s hyperwall have put digital signage companies at the fore of 4K development

4K is undoubtedly expanding. Video production houses welcome the format and, even if they often have to use down-converters from 4K to HD, the image quality is still better than what can be captured via HD. Most video camera manufacturers have already launched 4K cameras and creative advertising agencies are adopting it in an attempt to future-proof their work.

Sony’s latest professional monitors, the PVM-A250, 25″ (60cm) and PVM-A170, 17″ (43cm), have been designed to be 4K ready. Using organic LED (OLED), these lightweight, slim screens have high colour accuracy, contrast and picture quality.

“Higher resolution content creation – 4K and beyond – requires monitors with larger screen sizes for accurate colour evaluation on site,” says Daniel Dubreuil, senior product marketing manager for professional monitors at Sony Europe. “Yet bigger monitors are harder to carry and take up more space. These new models have the screen size needed for critical evaluation, with a thinner and lighter design that’s perfect for live broadcast and outdoor shooting. They even have a handle for easy carrying.”

Danish broadcast production start-up Nimb TV has recently unveiled Denmark’s smallest Ultra HD Outside Broadcast van. The unit is built around a number of Blackmagic Design’s raft of Ultra HD products, which includes the ATEM Production Studio 4K and Blackmagic Audio Monitor. Housed in a three-wheeler moped van, it can be positioned at the heart of any live production, not simply feature films. But it is not necessarily the broadcast market that is paving the way forward in 4K.

“The AV and digital signage markets are leading on Ultra HD, 4K adoption,” believes Patrick Hussey, senior communications manager for EMEA at Blackmagic. “Meanwhile, the broadcast industry is, for once, playing catch up.”

Stuart Holmes, chief executive at AV distributor PsCo, corroborates this: “In the professional AV world, 4K or Ultra HD is nothing new; it made huge waves at CES and is now one of the latest buzzwords in the consumer market. Consumer expectations of image quality are through the roof as they compare the fine detail they get on their tablets, smartphones and home TV sets to displays they come across daily in the out-of-home world.

“As experts in videowalls, targeting vertical markets such as broadcast, public sector, retail, rental and corporate, we understand 4K and, from a multi-display angle, we have been delivering videowalls with higher than 4K resolutions for a long time. Our focus has always been more on delivering according to the required display size, shape and pixel by pixel performance required for a specific environment.”

In the AV manufacturing sector, the projector industry leads the way on 4K, particularly for 3D applications. Some manufacturers are already claiming they use 8K, although most of the time that means two 4K projectors, which gives better definition, but not at 8K standard. 

In the residential market there are 55″ (140cm) 4K screens available for under £4,000, but in the professional market this quality of screen is not so widespread. Many LED manufacturers say that their HD screens are 4K ready, they just need the content to match. That said, there are plenty of HD DOOH screens already on the streets and, if the image is already fit for purpose, then why change them?

French creative company MovingDesign, which designed the amazing 4Temps mall in Paris, says that its clients are not worried about definition as long as it looks good, while Monster Media has made similar noises concerning 4K. However, BrightSign’s XD line software and firmware upgrade to support and upscale into 4K would indicate that the format is coming to DOOH. The company’s BrightAuthor 3.7 software and its companion 4.7 firmware XD can upscale 1080p video content to 4K and offers enhanced IP streaming and some very useful HTML5 support features. 4K-display manufacturer Seiki Digital recently demonstrated the impact of BrightSign’s XD video engine, paired with the new software features, at the IFA trade show in Berlin.

4K is a technology that is relevant to large videowall displays, rather than close-up screens. For screens that are used for interaction or large displays, such as roadside billboards, 4K is irrelevant. In cases where flat-panel displays are used to create large videowalls, the better the definition, the more eye-catching and effective the signage will be, so expect to see more 4K making its way into the DOOH market.

First published 2 December 2013 – Output

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Out-of-home: the new mass media?

October 11, 2013 by

This year's edition of Outdoor Works was hosted at the British Museum in London

This year’s edition of Outdoor Works was hosted at the British Museum in London

“We are here to give you confidence that outdoor works as a medium,” Mike Baker, Outdoor Media Centre’s chief executive officer, announces at the start of the Outdoor Works conference. Gathering media owners, agencies and end clients together, the event attracted a full house of almost 300 participants to analyse trends and opportunities within out-of-home.

With a focus on five key benefits that out-of-home brings to the table for brands – connection, influence, activation, amplification and inspiration – the speakers demonstrated how and why outdoor media provides a unique opportunity to communicate with audiences and how emerging technology is making OOH sleeker, more targeted and accountable, and bringing brands closer to the client.

“The planning of outdoor thus far has been like picking our noses with rubber gloves,” argues Justin Gibbons, creative director at Arena Media, in his talk. He believes that the current market approach to outdoor advertising can be greatly improved upon by using tools such as NFC, geo-location, crowd evaluation and audience measurement. “Today, information can be granular. Using research bodies such as Route, agencies can have detailed audience information to create more effective campaigns. Dayparting finally means something.”

Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent Drinks, shared the story as to how his business grew from a humble market store run by three friends into a successful enterprise that ended up being bought by Coca-Cola. Outdoor advertising played a part in its growth and – in their case – location was particularly crucial to the promotion of their brand.

“When we just started with Innocent, we were desperate to get into supermarkets,” Reed confesses. “We were a bit cheeky and sent out a press release announcing that we were doing a national poster campaign. The reality was that we had a five-billboard campaign. The advertisements were located just outside the head offices of the main supermarkets. After that, we had our first order from Waitrose.

“OOH is the only medium that allows any organisation to address the whole nation at once. TV is no longer the mass medium as it’s too fragmented. Posters are like the fridge door of the nation.”

Verica Djurdjevic, a strategic media planner and managing director of PHD Media, talked about the power and influence of context in out-of-home: “By understanding environmental and location contexts and aligning message, moment and mind-set, the power and influence of OOH campaigns can clearly be demonstrated.”

She suggests that more should be demanded from media and OOH agencies: “Any format has a context. Make sure context is taken into account. OOH needs to embrace audience and contextual diversity. Set the right KPIs from the start in order to measure success – and don’t be afraid of the production implications. The world of digital makes it easier.”

Focusing on direct interaction with customers, David Rowan, editor of Wired UK, walked us through well-known mobile phone capacities such as NFC, QR codes and instant internet connection. He also mentioned the lesser-known Apple technology iBeacon, which takes advantage of the very low-power, low-data rate spec that is part of Bluetooth v4: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). It works in a similar manner to NFC but is based on Apple’s iOS 7. Tesco is one of the first companies currently trialling the technology.

“The debate on privacy is hot at the moment, though there is a huge business opportunity to advertisers who understand the value of predictive analytics, behavioural tracking, emotional response measurement and the frictionless path to direct payment via mobile devices,” he asserts.

The refrain that the consumer process should be ‘frictionless’ was one that was often repeated throughout the Outdoor Works conference, the thinking behind this being that there should exist a seamless customer cycle of ‘like, want and purchase’.

Tim Spence, senior partner at Truth Consulting, believes that out-of-home works in the context of an evolving cultural landscape: “OOH isn’t just static and peripheral. It guides us in layers. It is mobile and multi-faceted, providing us with dynamic visual stimulation from which we can cherry pick that which moves us and appeals to our senses.”

Creative agencies and advertisers need to start thinking of out-of-home as an ever-present, blank canvas that can host effective, dynamic messages. Measurement technology is there so that advertisers can maximise the effectiveness of campaigns. The focus now surely has to be on maximising contextual creativity and ensuring frictionless transactions for the customer.

First published 11 October 2013 – Output

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NEC Showcase 2012 at the O2

April 30, 2012 by

NEC Display Solutions Europe organized its third Showcase at the O2. Its doors opened at 10am and there was a queue to get in. Last year, the showcase was held at Battersea Power Station. The exhibition space was smaller, brighter, and very hot; but it was also well attended.

NEC has been a partner of the O2 since it re-opened in 2008 and it managed to get a prime position for its showcase. The hall, which was at least 50% bigger than last year’s, was divided in nine zones: DOOH; Education; Professional Office; 3D & Leisure; Innovation; Colour; Healthcare; Transport and Retail – these last two were new zones. The zones were consistent with current vertical markets and all but two, featured digital out of home solutions, demonstrating how widely used this is.

Visitors were able to meet face-to-face with a total of 47 partners. Some of these companies included Intel, U-Touch, Smart, Scala and Onelan; and internal NEC units such the IT solutions division.

Seeing the different technologies integrated in real life situations was ideal to provide NEC partners the chance to show existing and potential clients their latest solutions. Half of the total attendees were end users.

At the show was also VUKUNET, NEC’s automated ad delivery platform and marketplace for DOOH media. VUKUNET was formally launched in Europe this year at ISE 2012 in Amsterdam, and at the NEC showcase it made its UK debut.

Dirk Hülsermann, manager of DOOH Solutions for NEC Display Solutions Europe, did a presentation at The Screen Briefings* conference, which was held also at the O2 at the same time as the NEC showcase. He said: “Until now, there was no way for an advertising agency to communicate with all the different networks – because they speak different electronic languages and also because the market is too fragmented. For the first time, VUKUNET brings together advertising agencies and digital-out-of-home media owners in one single cloud-based solution. Media owners can aggregate their networks into a nationwide buy with VUKUNET. VUKUNET turns any internet connected screen into an advertising face, which can generate incremental revenue for the screen owner.”

VUKUNET’s first UK partnership is with Wonderworks Walkway Media Ltd. The contract will see Walkway Media supply a DOOH, signage, information and advertising network across a target of 30 mall locations in 2012 commencing with the recent installation at several independent sites, including the Criterion shopping malls at Slough, Dalston and Sutton.

New to the show was Wonderworks 3D, also part of the Wonderworks group but separate from Walkway Media, was welcoming visitors by the entrance of the showcase with a ‘Pepper Ghost’ holographic display. Using Mussion’s Eyeliner film screen, and an HD NEC projector, the company has packaged the holographic solution to be used in luxury shop windows and other applications where companies want to wow their clients.

Matrox Graphics, a manufacturer of graphics cards, had its finger in the pie in several zones at the showcase. Its high-performance Mura MPX Series video wall controller boards and M-Series multidisplay graphics cards were featured in a variety of environments as go-to multidisplay solutions.

At PSCo’s corner the Matrox’s Mura was integrated on a four-by-four video wall made up of 16 of NEC Display Solutions’ new X463UN 46-inch, ultra-narrow-bezel displays. The setup stood at 4.5 meters high in portrait mode at the show’s DOOH zone. The Professional Office of the Future zone, featured a two-by-two, Mura-powered video wall leveraging an Exterity codec as well as a player from VisioSign. Matrox was integrated in video conferencing solutions, working with HD VC LifeSize; in transport information displays and others.

Matrox is just a good example of how NEC partners work together across the board to enable great solutions.

Over 850 people, from clients to AV professionals – and some of NEC competitor companies, walked the floor and networked at this year’s NEC Showcase.

*As mentioned before, the Screen Briefings took place simultaneously at the O2’s Cineworld Cinema. There was a morning session presenting: ‘A Digital Journey’ and ‘Digital Engagements’; and in the afternoon there was the VUKUNET presentation and some applied technologies talks touching upon: ‘Augmented Reality’, presented by Grand Visual, ‘The Wolrd According to 3D’ from White Space and Burner Mobile gave an insight on ‘Mobile Interaction.’

 

First published on Output magazine

 

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