A major national beer brand recognized that last year, and booked a product launch campaign into the vast network of place-based video screens now running in bars and fast casual restaurants across the United States. The result: 72 percent incremental sales lift on that beer, in venues where the campaign ran.

There are now more than 100,000 networked digital screens being run by Digital Out Of Home (or DOOH) media companies in the hospitality and entertainment sector.. These networks run programming tuned to the audience, aiming to capture and hold the attention of crowds that aren’t very easily locked in. The beer promotion suggests these are good places and moments to have an influence on active consumers.

Nielsen’s 2010 Fourth Screen Network Audience Report took a snapshot last summer of the biggest DOOH networks reaching US adults, and found four of the Top 10 were operating in restaurants and bars. Nielsen estimated the Gross Monthly Digital Video Ad Exposures, P18+, was roughly 210 million between such media companies as TouchTunes, AMI, TargetCast and IndoorDIRECT. Millions more roll up through other networks that are represented by DOOH ad networks such as Adcentricity that provides a massive national footprint as well as advanced targeting capabilities.

The screens are fixed behind the actual bars, at wait areas, transaction points – anywhere that normally has the ideal balance of sight line,  traffic and dwell times. Mixed with audience demographics and venue dynamics, these screens make up a wicked cocktail for brands. Their planners get access to often elusive target segments at a time when the audience is relaxed, receptive to media, and planning to stick around for many minutes, not just seconds.

This kind of place-based, highly-targeted advertising can directly impact purchase decisions in beer, wine, spirits and soft drink categories. The audience characteristics are also prime targets for big categories like consumer electronics, telecommunications and automotive.

General research on this still-developing media environment has found high levels of ad recall (47%) and very high levels (60%) of willingness to try products from booked advertisers. Field research being shared by DOOH network operators is also steadily indicating big upticks in purchase intent for promoted products.

Here’s some of what we know, from Arbitron and other research, about digital media in these venues:

• 50% of Americans visited a bar/restaurant-bar as a customer in the past month, and 31% in the past week;
• 9% of all Americans 21+ saw a DOOH screen in a bar in the past month;
• People visit these places about four times a month;
• The bar crowd indexes high for young adults, 21-24, male, with college degrees.
• The numbers are strong on older age brackets;
• Fast casual restaurants deliver high concentrations of teens and young adults, and affluent consumers.

The planning, distribution and management systems typical with most DOOH networks are powerful tools for brands and media planners who can easily tune campaigns by attributes. Most networks profile their venues by a variety of characteristics that can get the right messages in appropriate places. Creative produced for the Hispanic market can be efficiently targeted just to those zip codes and venues that sync up by profile.

Digital provides the ability to do national promotions that also have localized relevance. With a little planning, a campaign for a wireless carrier can point viewers to the store nearest to that venue. Available inventory – the easily said but not always so easily done job of aligning advertising with what’s actually sold on-premise – is truly easy. Test campaigns are also readily executed and measured when digital manages both the distribution and reporting.

Digital Out Of Home is the first medium that’s taking emerging social and location-based technologies, bringing them off PC desktops and smartphones and making them part of the venue experience. Companies such as Locamoda and ScreenReach are stitching steadily-updated, crowd-based social streams into the programming of screens, and encouraging direct engagement through interactive polling and check-ins.

Networks and brands are working with vendors with brands on opt-in, proximity-based programs (such as Bluetooth) that are pushing out coupons and invitations to phones and email accounts.

Mainstream media has also started partnering with DOOH networks to extend content into out of home environments to develop audiences. NBC, for example, ran a special episode of its comedy series Community in some 1,000 fast casual restaurants last April, layering in special video segments with Facebook and Twitter tie-ins. 

Longer dwell times – as much as 2.5 hours in some venues – combined with low CPMS of $1-$6 has made the hospitality sector a consistent top five performer in DOOH bookings, and just as strong in RFP activity quarter on quarter.

As the sector and the story of its effectiveness grows, people will be under the influence of more than what was just in their glass.

Author: Jeff Atley, Cofounder of Adcentricity

What started as an absolute niche product a decade ago is fast becoming part of the mainstream media landscape – as digital screens fixed in varied public places deliver highly targeted campaigns and solid, sophisticated metrics. As a medium, it’s still finding its way just as online did, and starting to settle in as an offshoot of the Out Of Home category. If you are planning media for digital screens in retail and other targeted places, you are buying Digital Out Of Home, or DOOH.

Most of these networks are driven by entrepreneurs, retailers or media companies extending their business. They secure media agreements with retailers, public areas such as mass transit terminals and platforms, and well-defined environments like clinic waiting areas and restaurants. Screens in place, the networks deliver content programming that provides some information and entertainment value for viewers, which in turn provides value to the consumer, venue operator and to advertisers who want to reach that defined audience.

These networks intrigue brand advertisers for one particularly compelling reason: it can take the rich visuals video based content and the dynamic capabilities of online and mash that together on screens facing consumers in the most contextually powerful moments – when people are actually in stores shopping, or in places, like frequented throughout their daily activity, when targeted messages can be particularly meaningful.

These networks of screens, when well organized vertically and geographically, let planners be highly efficient in their targeting – getting the message in front of the audience that really matters, and tuning that message by things like demographic profile, dominant language, time of day or even reacting and adjusting based on things like POS transactions.

This is part of a brand new, on-demand experience that reaches consumers across multiple touch-points. Activities that might start on one medium get broadened by other mediums and then reach, using public screens, right into where people are gathering. Consider a beer product promotion targeting sports fan that starts with in-store POP and broadcast, drives people online, encourages people to enter and interact through mobile and social, and then pulls all that promotion together on targeted screens in sports bars, where the engagement can be driven even further.

In pure marketing terms, it has always made infinitely more sense to advertise goods in the immediate vicinity of where goods are sold. This is especially true considering today’s consumer behavior and media consumption patterns. Marketers get more excited by the notion of advertising when people are shopping, than they do pitching people when they’re comfortably lodged on a sofa. There is now plenty of evidence, from retailers as large as Walmart, showing screens in retail have a fully validated double-digit lift impact on promoted items.

Forecasts are just that, but industry analysts like PQ Media and BIA/Kelsey both predict high growth rates for digital OOH media spending. PQ Media expects a compound annual growth rate of 9.4% through 2014 in the U.S., while BIA/Kelsey says the medium will be a $3.7 billion business by 2013.

Author: Jeff Atley