Departure Media’s David Menk gives this advice on how to run a dynamic content billboard campaign as feedback to our readers poll which showed that dynamic billboard campaigns are underused.
I’ve been working with digital OOH since the initial inception in 2007. When it was first launched I was working with one of the large public OOH companies. They invested significantly in training and development—to the point where we attended multi-day seminars on how to educate potential clients on the flexibility of the medium, including the use of all of the dynamic content capabilities. This was around 2009ish. We drilled on it repeatedly and there was a certain buzz in the marketplace about this exciting new toy we had in the OOH space.
We set up “lunch and learns” with agencies—educating, helping them visualize, brainstorming on ideas. Many of the successful dynamic content programs I have been a part of in my career were born during that time—from live leaderboard updates to the Wendy’s time/temperature related copy that won a regional ADDY award, to traffic/news headline updates. All of these were highly successful for the advertiser.
In the never-ending chase to secure new revenue and get it into billing as quickly as possible, I believe we have lost our way here. These types of programs require training, teaching of A/E’s , creative departments, production teams, etc… There is significant brainstorming and education on the front end. I suspect we don’t invest in this the way that we used to.
Most OOH organizations and/or agencies/marketing departments run lean and mean these days. I can’t remember the last time I did lunch and learn. Nobody seems to have the time, nor have I made that much of an effort to re-develop this as part of my gameplan. That’s on me.
Maybe it is something for me to re-consider? Would require taking a time out and putting some thought into it—instead of operating on autopilot and just grabbing the low-hanging fruit that is selling digital as a static because it’s a quick turn time.
Just my two cents.
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An excellent 2-cents! Watchfire’s “Digital Sales 101” training class emphasizes explaining dynamic content to potential advertisers, especially countdowns, day-parting, and conditional ads. Most advertisers have no idea that the digital billboard can pull up an ad based on the current temperature, the speed of passing traffic, the pollen count, a 100-point swing in the stock market, the rain forecast in 10 minutes, etc. Conditional ads are probably the least used “billboard magic” and the easiest to explain to a customer. Every operator should offer to do them for a modest fee or free of charge.
Great article!! I’m gonna start to get some re-training on this. I started to do it when I put up the 3rd digital in Detroit but haven’t done in a while. I was all about it initially bc you could never do anything like that before. Unfortunately, the novelty of it has fell off a bit. But, it is a great tool for the client and helps increase efficiency, bolsters ROI and retention of the info.