My Guy - Gene DeWitt

Dear friends,

I am posting this message to all of you who knew my husband, Gene DeWitt. As I did not get the opportunity to see some of you at the funeral, I wanted to thank you for sharing in my family’s celebration of Gene’s life. I especially hope that you enjoyed the music because music was so important to Gene, and he requested that it be a special part of his service.

While you all are probably very familiar with Gene’s accomplished career, you may not be aware of his love for his family and New York City, which I believe is worth sharing and I hope somewhat inspirational to you.

Gene and I are joined in our family by five daughters, three husbands and one to be, and a darling 11-month-old grandson, Cooper, who Gene adored. Gene was active in keeping our family together as a group and called for each of us to be extraordinary individuals. Gene loved us all unselfishly and was a great role model for any father or grandfather. Gene always pushed us to learn more, too. One summer, he had us all read Shakespeare, another Faulkner. He was also keen on getting conversations and debates started on topics ranging from politics, to art, to music.

My story with Gene is of a real old-fashioned romance; it’s about love at first site and the magic of New York City. When I met Gene, I had the sensation of meeting a great man with powerful ideas. We took advantage of everything the city has to offer, both as a couple and with our children. It was not a rare occasion to have the ballet, opera, a class at NYU and a dinner with friends all in one week. Gene was fond of saying that we had spent 35 years together in our true 7 ½ years. Based on all this experience, I was lucky enough to have Gene dub me as a quintessential New Yorker this New Years Eve.

Gene was incredibly courageous during his battle with lymphoma and later pancreatic cancer. He was always willing to try new treatments and never gave up the fight, even in his last days. He also made it important to understand his disease and to not become a victim of it. Lastly, as I’m sure many of you experienced through the years, he never let his life become about cancer. He still enjoyed all the city had to offer and time with our family. Gene was still Gene, he was not a cancer patient.

Gene loved life and lived it in a big way. I hope you all will help me carry on this legacy by following his example.

With warm regards and appreciation,

Dianne DeWitt

Dianne_DeWitt@yahoo.com

646-717-3430

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NBC Adopts "Endless Season" We Predicted Last Week

Bill Carter and Stuart Elliott writing in the NY Times wrote on Wednesday that "It soon may be time to retire the phrase "fall television season" in reporting that NBC had announced the day before "that it would move to a year-round schedule of staggered program introductions."

Take a look at our post from the week before headed "The Endless Season".

I don't know if Jeff Zucker or Mike Pilot read our blog but they and their competitors at the other networks should.

Do them all a favor and forward us to them.

Writers Strike addendum

In today's New York Times, Stuart Elliott discusses the implications of the Writers' Strike settlement on television programming and possible longer term effects on network ad sales practices. This is an interesting supplement to yesterday's post.

The Endless Season: How the Writers’ Strike May Forever Change the Face of the TV Business

Introducing new shows one at a time throughout the year will be seen to be a much better strategy for programming, promotional and profit success.

1. The Pilot ‘Season’ Will Become an Ongoing Year-Round Development Process

A compressed pilot season has jacked up the competition and prices for writers during a few months. Commissioning dozens of pilots simultaneously simply drives up the prices writers can charge. In addition, programming decisions are made quickly and sometimes badly.

Nevertheless, the networks will now undoubtedly engage in a panic of last minute development to try to salvage the season and set a proper stage for an upfront.

However, looking beyond this year, I think it is highly likely that the strike has convinced network managers that year-round pilot development would result in lower costs, better programs and improved ratings and profit.

2. Introduce New Programs throughout the Year

In rethinking ‘pilot season’, the networks will also want to reconsider the whole idea of a ‘broadcast year’.

The mid-September to mid-September ‘Broadcast Year’ originated with the desire of automobile companies to have primetime showcases for their new model introductions in the Fall.

This was never in the networks’ interests (and probably not that great for the auto companies) because all of the simultaneous and competing introductions of dozens of TV shows could only confuse viewers, reduce sampling of new shows and result in a high mortality rate for the new programs.

From an advertiser’s point of view, the broadcast calendar coincides with no one’s marketing plan or fiscal budget.

From a network perspective, it cannot make sense to stage an annual face-off in which their most expensive and fragile products are burned off in one big electronic bonfire.

3. The Endless Season

So let’s look forward to an ‘endless season’ in which new TV programs are developed, introduced and promoted one at a time throughout the year. Will it work? Ask HBO.

Hello Macy's! All Sales are Local

In today’s WSJ, Vanessa O'Connel writes about Macy’s CEO’s admission that its national strategy was flawed.

With January same store sales down over 7% that would seem to be an understatement.

Management’s response: fire 2,500 people and consolidate back office operations. No mention of reductions in management compensation…

It is axiomatic in retail marketing that “all sales are local”. Ignoring that fundamental precept of retailing, Macy’s CEO Terry Lundren cut back on local ads and poured tens of millions of dollars into “splashy national TV ads.”

Brick and mortar retailing requires

· Weekly sales circulars to bring the regular customer in more frequently,

· Regular sales promotions in newspapers and on local radio.

· TV can work on top of this base but given TV production costs is often not cost effective for local features.

If affordable after funding priority local efforts such as these, a relatively small continuity base in cheap daytime cable television could support a branding effort. I’d prefer local outdoor around each store location: billboards, mall posters, etc.

Note: Please credit clairegeordio for the photo above.

Anecdotes/David Ogilvy on Getting New Business

At Ogilvy & Mather, David Ogilvy himself would sometimes come into the agency cafeteria and sit down with anyone he chose and open a spirited conversation with the surprised employee.

One day I was privileged to have this charming fellow join me over my tuna sandwich.

It was I think in 1971 when I had been with the agency for five years, having risen from media planner to assistant media director and tripled my salary in the process.

The agency had grown during that period from about $60 million in billings in I think only one office in 1966 to nearly $500 million in 1971 with an expanding global base of business.
It was a great career ‘ride’ so I was delighted to have a chance to meet the great man one on one.

He asked me about myself, what I did, etc. Then he asked me whether I had any questions about the agency itself?

I told him that I was amazed and delighted by the rapidity of the agency’s new business growth and asked him what his ‘secret’ formula was?

He told me something that has always proven useful to me. He said that when he did everything he could think of to market the agency--- public relations, white papers, advertising*, building relations with top media owners and managers, original research**--- to name just a few things that I recall, he got ‘lucky’ with new business but he couldn’t pinpoint one tactic that drove the process. On the other hand, he said that when he didn’t do everything more or less constantly and consistently, the new business flow seemed to dry up.

And that’s how it worked out for me when I sought to create and build DeWitt Media, Inc., in the 1980’s and 1990’s. I kept a post-it list of everything I could possibly do to attract positive attention to the agency stuck to my pc monitor and tried to at least work on every item every day. What was on the list? Newsletters, PR, mailings, even cold calls worked. During that latter period when agency search consultants entered the business, it became critical to build awareness and relationships with these folks. What are the elements of an effective new business program today?

Everything you can think of. And try to move each peanut along every day. That’s how to get lucky with new business!

*D.O. wrote a series of amazing ads for the agency that ran in Ad Age and that listed his famous ‘rules’ for advertising, targeted to specific business categories in which he wanted clients; e.g., ten rules for food advertising, six rules for travel marketers, etc.

**Ogilvy had been a researcher for the Gallup organization early in his career and he believed that bringing prospective clients new information about their businesses was a critical way to get meetings and assignments.

"MOG": On Managing DeWitt Media, Inc.

On Management

MOG = Management Operations Group

The Management Operations Group at DeWitt Media met every Monday morning at 830AM.

All department and client account group heads attended along with our CFO and me, about 12 people out of our total staff of about 95.

Each MOG member presented a single page recap of the status of all work in progress in their area of responsibility---e.g., media planning, media buying, client service---followed by questions and feedback from all other attendees.

In this way, no project could go very far off base since every assignment was flagged weekly.

MOG meetings were a great way for me and my management team to be kept apprised of every job in the house.

They also alerted client account managers to possible problems with direction, due dates and other issues that could be corrected before they got too far off track.

By scheduling meetings first thing Mondays (our normal hours were 9-5) we made certain that our senior managers

• Started the week with a bit of momentum;
• Ended each week reviewing past progress and planning for the week ahead; and
• Were engaged with and could contribute their ideas and input to every thing that was being done in the company.

There was also a social aspect to MOG as everyone came to feel responsible for and proud of the work of everyone else.

The Wikipedia definition of collegiality is I think a concise way to summarize why and how this all worked so well for us:

“Colleagues are those explicitly united in a common purpose and respecting each other's abilities to work toward that purpose.”

Mass Marketing Still Alive & Important

An article in the current issue of Fast Company is cited in today's Wall Street Journal's The Informed Reader blog. It seems to me that creating mass marketing platforms in today's fragmenting media world is perhaps more important for certain business categories that need to influence millions of customers daily (e.g., beer, fast food, soft drinks, politicians) than trying to assemble slivers of audience in the even more fragmented web world. After all, there are not many Super Bowl, Academy Award or Olympic level broadly based media vehicles left. And there still is no more powerful marketing communications medium than television.

Ten Things Reality TV Won't Tell You

Writing at SmartMoney.com, Kedon Willis provides a number of interesting observations about the fundamental unreality of what is called reality television. Of particular interest to advertisers is the finding that program producers often do not do thorough background checks on program participants, which has resulted in a number of violent acts and resulting financial settlements. Although the studios use iron-clad releases to avoid legal liability for such missteps, the negative public relations potential for a sponsor is immense. My suggestion: advertisers need to pay special attention to program participant background checks and insist that producers do the same. Other highlights of this very well done piece include the facts that:

• Reality TV today accounts for 20% of primetime programming on network television
• Actors are often hired to play the role of real people
• Celebrities are increasingly replacing 'real people' in these shows
• One hour of Reality TV costs as little as $1 million per hour vs. $3 million for each episode of a dramatic series
• Because these programs can draw audiences as higher or higher than dramas, they are very profitable for the networks and have thereby earned an enduring place in future programming schedules
  

They Call It Blogging

They call it ‘blogging’ a word that is redolent of kindergarten or adolescence or of geeky twentysomethings engaged in some sort of mutual electronic ego massage. What if it were called electronic publishing or even better since today everyone likes acronyms and initials EP? Would we---my peers, ‘adults’, tightlipped agers---think better of the practice? We could see EP as harmless diary-keeping, a new form of diary that opens the authors’ words, and thoughts and experiences literally to the world. Some aimless mindless jottings of a child in Dubuque available to read by an septuagenarian in Kirkiztan.

It is clear from what little I’ve seen ‘on the web’, that a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards are not likely, in spite of the old saw, to generate the King James Bible or the works of Shakespeare. On the other hand, isn’t it possible that over time this thing, this blogging, will result, is resulting, in a new form of self expression? Certainly it is liberating to think that one, I, can write something that does not rise to the level of literature but that can be shared with others without the intervening scrutiny of an editor and publishing house, without the expense (or waste) of paper, printing, distribution, remaindering and recycling. As best as I can tell there are no rejection slips in blogging other than the occasionally sharp comments of fellow EP’ers, candid comeuppances intended sometimes to hurt but more often to encourage even the lamest expression of experience, thought, feeling.

What’s the point? I’m not sure yet. But I think that this blogging thing represents something new in human experience, the chance to throw one’s thoughts to the wind and to see in whose branches they are caught even for a moment, to be shared by others briefly until they drift to the end, turn brittle and disappear like the leaves they are.

In Memory of Steve Florio

Since attending the funeral service this morning at St. Ignatius Loyola church here in NYC, I cannot stop thinking of Steve.

Not that I knew him that well. A few business meetings, a weekend in Key Largo, maybe a few meals at the Four Seasons---but anyone who knew him at all will recall that it didn’t take long for Steve to make a big and lasting impression.

People are saying that he was “bigger than life” in many ways: his outgoing personality, his aggressive points of view, his competitiveness. But I think rather that he was as large as life, that he lived life as it should be lived, to the fullest. And I think this scared and scares a lot of people because many of us live our lives smaller than they could be, afraid perhaps to make those around us anxious or uncomfortable.

In business I think that Steve thought it was a major part of his role as a leader to make people around him uncomfortable with the status quo, to shake things up, to make us unwilling to settle for less than could be achieved.

Steve loved stories so here are a couple from my memory of Steve.

I remember a memorable night on Andy Berlin’s yacht, sitting on the top deck with Steve and his gang of usual suspects (Tom, Richard, Chuck, Ron) puffing on fine cigars and sipping fine cognacs under a cover of bright stars and listening to an endless series of tall tales and risque jokes for hours and hours. Steve’s energy kept us all at a high pitch whenever we were around him; what a blessing!

I also remember working with Ron and Tom on the launch of the BMW Z3 automobile, their first roadster in America. Our task was to pre-sell 9000 cars with a small budget. The solution: an ‘outsert’ to accompany certain Vogue subscriptions consisting of a tune-in ‘program’ for the VH1 Fashion Awards and a sponsorship of the awards. Steve and his folks introduced the BMW people to key contacts at stores such as Nieman Marcus and Nordstrom’s to get showcases for the car.

Not only did we sell out the entire year’s production run before a single car was available but we did it in a classy, high quality way and we had fun doing it. That was Steve’s genius: surrounding himself with great people, always being open to ideas and willing to mow down any obstacles that got in the way.

Rest in peace, Steve. Vaya con dios.

Network TV “CashBacks”Pull the Rug Out From Under Advertisers & Doom the Upfront

A new age of media discontinuity may be dawning as the television networks, in giving cash to advertisers in lieu of promised audience or ratings, have pulled the rug out from under the foundation of trust that underlies the selling and buying of TV ad time. In giving cash instead of advertising to buyers of ad time, the networks are taking back time sold at one price in the past and reselling it to higher paying advertisers today. It’s “bait and switch” without the switch; the marketer who needs the ad time to sell goods is left with a bag or cash and no ad support.

Pre-emptions of previously purchased ad positions have long been a bane and ethical conundrum for local spot television ad sellers. Neither the media buyer nor the advertiser has ever been able to count on local stations to honor their media sales contracts. The ‘custom of the country’ for local TV stations in the U.S. has simply been to sell each spot to the last highest priced offer, reselling the same spot over and over until the last, highest paying offer is executed in the form of a telecast.

In this process, each of the early buyers of the same ad unit for ever increasing amounts, is “pre-empted” by the seller and offered a replacement spot or makegood, often in an inferior time period. As a result, one of the most expensive components of spot buying is the scheduling and rescheduling of makegoods. However, even in this swamp of reneged promises and towers of paperwork, one has usually been able to count on some sort of ad schedule airing approximately during the desired time periods.

However, the new network cash-back formula makes it impossible to count on the seller to ever deliver the promised goods. Any time ad rates increase over time, a network can now pre-empt an early ad buyer for a higher-paying latecomer. This situation makes much of the discussion about the Writers’ strike’s possible effects on the Upfront moot. In the “Cash Back Age” there really is no basis for an upfront, which is after all supposed to be at core a guarantee of audience at some future date. Let the buyer beware. A new, more risky media age is dawning.

I predict that the next few months will represent the most tumultuous period ever in the history of television. It is time for our industry---media sellers, ad buyers and advertisers---to sit down and to address the need for a new and reliable basis for doing business in the future, nothing less than a new foundation for television advertising commerce.

Media Agency Profitability May Drive Media Selection

Media Buying Today

What Leads Media Agencies to Recommend the Various Major Media?

Although we are primarily a consulting company, we undertook to place about $50 million for an advertiser over the past 18 months or so (mid-2006 through 2007). We planned, negotiated and scheduled time and space in virtually all media: national and local television and radio, magazines, newspapers, out-of-home and the internet. We bought every imaginable unit and just about every time schedule possible, from broadcasts upfront, calendar upfront, scatter, opportunistic and “the night before” and “day of”.

Since I had not been directly involved in media buying for quite a few years, having functioned as an executive, manager and company salesperson, I thought it would be interesting to comment on my experiences and perception of the various media from a front row seat. My perspective is that of the manager of a media buying operation, particularly viewing media from the point of view of whether we can make media buys that are effective and efficient for our clients and profitable for us.

Ease of Buying characterizes national media

There’s nothing like broadcast network television for spending a lot of advertising money fast. The networks are set up to accommodate media buyers in every possible way; in fact, my experience was that they do virtually all of the work involving in buying network time. For example, they’ll provide historical ratings tracks, project ratings forward to telecast dates and then guarantee their projections. What’s left for the buyers to do? Very little as far as I could tell. Plus the network sales people are friendly, responsive and exude positive energy. It’s a pleasure to meet with them and work with them. I found we could manage effective and efficient network buying very profitably.

National magazines come in a close second in efficiency for the ad buyer. The extra challenge represented by magazines arises in planning print schedules, selecting specific publications from the huge array of print vehicles available. Added the to complexity of the selection process and dealing with a large number of sales people, with quite a bit of duplication from the big publishers, is the importance of securing the best ad position in each magazine. Unlike television, which still offers something akin to an “involuntary” ad exposure at least to non-DVR users (the preponderance of all viewers today and in the near future), individual magazine ads are often ‘seen’ by a minority of the readers of a magazine. This is because magazine audience is measured by someone’s ‘exposure’ to the magazine issue, not to specific ads or even an average readership score for all ads in a book. The bottom line: when buying ‘expensive’ magazines such as People and Parade, it is still pretty easy to handle print buying profitably for the media agency.

Local media may be unprofitable for media agencies

Local television and radio, OOH and newspapers are a disaster in terms of media agency profitability and operational efficiency. The spot sales system is fundamentally dishonest because the same ad time is sold over and over in a series of serial ‘pre-emptions’ that drop earlier buyers for buyers offering to pay more as the telecast date nears. Out-of-Home is site-specific and requires a great deal of time to find locations and verify postings. Achieving significant reach with newspapers requires the use of large numbers of individual publications, each with its own approach to pricing, positioning, contracting and scheduling of ads.

The Internet offers media agencies a special income opportunity because advertisers seem to be willing to pay internet-focused agencies on a completely different basis from media agencies. Moving advertisers into more and more internet-based advertising is therefore a highly profitable strategy for ad media holding companies.

Media agency profitability may drive media selection

The bottom line of my 18 months back in the media buying saddle: the networks and magazines should do just fine over the next few years because they make it very easy for media buyers to recommend them. The Internet should continue to outpace other media’s growth. And expensive to place local media need to find another way to get on media buyers’ screens; until then, their revenue will continue to be rerouted to easier to place media.

My first virus. Yechh!

So I was running through my email the other day and up popped what looked exactly like a Microsoft update screen including a EULA checkbox which I automatically checked and moved on.

A few seconds later I realized that Microsoft does not generally update in this manner and in any case no follow up screens resulted from my checking the box.

Uh oh. At that moment I began received a series of message: “Sonic Activation Module”, software I’ve never used. These messages refused to go away no matter how many times I tried to close them.

Then I noticed the PC slowing down and checked CPU usage; it was nearly 100% with no apparent programs running. I shut it down and looked in my Windows XP for dummies book which recommended a procedure to rectify this mess, as follows:

· Erase all restore points

1. Restart

2. Click Start, right-click on My Computer, and choose properties;

3. Click the System Restore tab and select the Turn Off System Restore check box;

4. Click Apply and the click OK

5. Restart

6. Update antivirus program with the latest definitions, scan and disinfect your entire computer

7. When the computer is disinfected, repeat Steps 1 through 4, except that in Step 2, uncheck Turn Off System Restore.

· Then create a new restore point for future use.

It worked! Wow, I may have a whole new career in IT. Not.

Web Sites Cast a Net Over Striking Writers - WSJ.com

Sara McBride, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Web Sites Cast a Net Over Striking Writers” quotes Mydamnchannel.com CEO Rob Barnett: “When there is nothing but repeats (on television), people will go searching for alternatives.”

With broadcast ratings down 10-12% in the first few weeks of the new TV season, with all new programs, the networks need to rethink their situation concerning the writers or risk serious long term damage to the medium.

Cable networks and Fox built audience in the summers when the old broadcast networks were in reruns.

It's clear that today's younger viewers are fickle, fast and agile in their media habits. If the writers' strike causes more people to sample alternative fare such as online "webisodes", this can only serve to weaken an already increasingly ignored medium.

Will there be new TV networks via the web? You betcha. And I think there will be plenty of advertisers ready to support them, also encouraged by the obduracy of the networks.

The TV Writer's Strike

We're nearing a perfect media storm for advertisers as viewers melt away from television, an ongoing process accelerated by the strike of television writers. What this means for companies that need TV ad time to market their products: higher ad prices, fewer ad positions available and greater difficulty in reaching a broad spectrum of customers with TV sales messages.

For holiday marketers who have not yet completed their ad buys, this media maelstrom could be particularly crippling during a season that some companies count on for a majority of their annual sales.

What are these advertisers to do? Move quickly and decisively into other proven media such as radio and newspapers that offer low production costs and short lead times for ad scheduling. The radio and newspaper media are in an advertising recession right now and can offer advertisers attractive ad rates and a platform from which to move seasonal merchandise quickly.

Is the internet also an option for these TV-deficient advertisers? Of course, but high reach on the internet is very expensive now and often hard to come by. Radio and newspapers, on the other hand, offer an opportunity to reach half or more of America in a morning.

TV Ad Time “Selling Out” at High Scatter Pricing: What to do?

The costs of TV media buys is soaring. How can advertisers adjust their media strategies to maintain effectiveness and ROI?

In these occasional moments of high network ad demand and media pricing, we often see trade articles quoting advertisers and media buyers threatening to move some of their media dollars to other media.

In my experience, however, these words are rarely followed by action to make major shifts in media strategies.

This time may be different, however, because I don’t think this situation is likely to change in the near future and I doubt whether some advertisers will be able, even if willing, to maintain satisfactory ad schedules in TV.

So what is an advertiser who needs to buy TV ad time in the near future to do? I suggest

1. Analyze the geographic distribution of your sales patterns.
1. Local Spot TV in key markets, while more expensive on a CPM basis, may afford you heavier media levels than you can buy in network.
2. Local Spot Radio can offer similar leverage with very low production costs if you use ‘live read’ announcer copy. This can often be a good deal more credible than slickly produced ads. And radio has just as large an audience in the early morning hours as TV has in the evening.
2. If your product or service is of relatively high interest to your customers and prospects---I’m thinking of such business categories as automobiles, entertainment, travel, etc.---then you can use print media effectively because your readers will want to see what you have to offer.
3. Want the quick high reach that TV used to offer but can only deliver today with multizillion dollar budgets? Consider
1. Outdoor especially the new digital OOH venues that deliver a TV-like message to a specific location and audience
2. Sunday supplements like Parade, what they used to call ‘prime time print’ because they can reach a third of the country in a day.
4. Multiplatforming newspaper and/or magazines with their respective internet sites and brand-specific microsites along with sponsorship of relevant streaming video.

Digital Out-of-Home Media: Where to go to find availabilities?

This is the second guest post from Tom Eley of Eley Media Management, our favorite expert on out-of-home and place-based media. This post points the way to find out what's available in outdoor advertising today.

There are several organizations that can help you keep abreast of new players and developments:

• SRDS, www.srds.com, has a subscription-only buyer’s guide to Out of Home, and has many new companies listed;
• The Outdoor Advertising Association of America, www.oaaa.org, also lists many new companies on their membership roster and has other information on outdoor digital networks as well;
• Traffic Audit Bureau, www.tabonline.com. TAB is the audience measurement arm of the outdoor industry; and
• The Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau, www.ovab.org, was recently launched by ten of the major players in the digital OOH network business

You can reach Tom directly at teley@mindspring.com.

TV ON THE FLY: DIGITAL OOH TAKES OFF

This is the first of three guest postings from Tom Eley of Eley Media Management and describes the types of Digital OOH

Minority Report here we come! Digital signage now encompasses:

• Posters
• Bulletins
• Malls
• Airports

And pretty much any other high traffic location that OOH companies can plug in with:

• LED’s for the larger formats
• Plasmas or LCD’s for the smaller and closer formats

There are also some exciting new technologies like digital ink on the horizon from companies such as Magink: www.magink.com.

Many of these new screens are hooked up to wired or wireless networks that facilitate copy changes in seconds not weeks.

Indoor Networks

On one end of the spectrum are indoor tightly-targeted networks offering video formats and featuring non-advertising as well as advertising content. Examples of this include:

• The Hotel Network
• In Stadium network
• In airport Networks
• A variety of networks in hospitals and doctors offices
• All Over Media in gyms
• Ad Space in movie theatres and shopping malls
• Wal-mart’s In-store Network operated by PRN
• Captivate in elevators owned by Gannett
• Video at gas pumps backed by NBC
• etc. etc....

Two OOH Associations Have Different Roles

‘Having non-ad content is the differentiator for why a company joins our Trade Association versus the OAAA’, says Kim Norris, former cable executive and since April President of the new Out of Home Video Advertising Bureau, ‘Although that point of difference between us and larger format outdoor digital networks won’t last long. They will want to try content too at some point,’ she says.

Mass Digital OOH: Subway Entrances, Bus Shelters

In the middle of the spectrum is CBS Outdoor’s high resolution LED network of Urban Panels above subway entrances in New York City. These screens show full motion video with no sound and only show advertising content. CEMUSA is experimenting with LCD screens implanted in bus shelters as is Decaux with airport dioramas.

Digital Bulletins

On the other end of the spectrum are small networks of large outdoor bulletins converted to an LED format that are only allowed to show static images, due to traffic safety concerns.

At this time, they only show advertising content, but many of the outdoor companies have agreed to make them available to broadcast emergency information such as Amber Alerts.

In Minneapolis this summer when the bridge collapsed, within 10 minutes ClearChannel’s digital network alerted drivers to avoid the area.

Demand for advertising on these new super-bulletins is high and locations seem to sell out as soon as they are built.

TV on the fly? Digital OOH is taking off.

Next post: Where to go for availabilities and other information.

The post is the work of Tom Eley, President of Eley Media Management and is edited by Gene DeWitt. For more information contact Tom at teley@mindspring.com.

Tags: Digital Outdoor, OOH, Advertising, Media