WHITE PAPERS
Read our white papers on digital signage techniques and standards
Twitter on Place Based Screens: Why It's Not So Simple, March 2010
Displaying place-based social media brings with it a plethora of challenges, from technological hurdles of aggregation and delivery of arbitrary, on-demand social media data streams to compliance with public decency laws, the CAN-SPAM Act and public liability considerations – all while having to facilitate a holistic and engaging user experience to mostly transient, lean-back audiences.
The technical challenges range from the well-understood battles against internet spammers and pranksters to technological hurdles of delivering information in a timely, coherent and relevant fashion. The biggest challenge of all, however, is the unenviable task of having to moderate large amounts of information in real time; moreover, that information often must be filtered through ad hoc communities, topics of interest or venue and contextual guidelines in order to make it suitable and desirable for public display.
Download this White Paper as a .PDFIncreasing the Value of a Digital Out of Home Network Via Metcalfe's Law, February 2010
Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is the square of its connected users (n2). DOOH networks, being typically single hub and spoke designs, fail to leverage the potential network effect of Metcalfe’s law and are consequently failing to maximize their value to locations, advertisers or end users.
Download this White Paper as a .PDFThe Digital Out of Home Tipping Point, January 2010
Lessons can be learned from the web and the mobile industry to help Digital Out of Home reach its “tipping point.” Those lessons reinforce that media needs to be more measurable and more engaging, and networks need to offer less friction to brands and agencies wishing to reach their audiences across multiple channels.
Download this White Paper as a .PDFDealing with F**k & Other User Generated Content Challenges for Digital Out of Home Networks, August 2009
Unlike content designed only for websites, UGC is uniquely challenging for public display. There are plenty of user experience challenges and legal concerns that lawyers can and do worry about. Businesses need to balance cost and potential or hypothetical risks of displaying UGC. For many, the safest thing to do is give up! For others, the focus is on best practices combined with the best user experience.
Clearly, large companies still need to adjust to the fact that social networks enable a culture of openness. Being too restrictive about content, especially content that might be critical of the brand, endangers the authenticity of UGC applications. But brands need to understand the balance between controlling the conversation and directing it.
Download this White Paper as a .PDFBuilding an Interactive Digital Out of Home Experience - Basic Considerations for Mobile & Social Interactivity on Digital Out of Home Networks, August 2009
Simple text-to-screen and photo-to-screen applications are commonplace at pop concerts. Twitter feeds are springing up in conferences. It can't be too hard to add an engaging mobile and social interactive applications to digital out of home ("DOOH") networks, right? Wrong. A capable interactive DOOH network supports real-time user engagement. Engagement might come from a user at the location or via the web (e.g. via a social network connected to the location through the affinity of a brand). Engagement might be sporadic or frequent, but whenever it happens, it creates an enhanced user experience as well as a measurable "mobile click." The resulting "pulse" for the location can then be used to help the location or advertiser improve services and/or messaging.
Download this White Paper as a .PDFOvercoming Ghost Town - Leveraging the Network Effect to Enhance the Interactive Experience on Digital Out of Home Networks, August 2009
The success of engaging users via interactive social media on Digital Out of Home ("DOOH") displays is highly dependant on location, audience and the context and user interface features. Many text-to-screen applications do not have the luxury of running in locations that are crowded every day, and the worst user experience for user generated content ("UGC") is to metaphorically crash an empty party. A screen with no messages or old messages is a poor advocate for participation. This "Ghost Town" problem can be cured by leveraging other messages from locations that are contextually connected to each other.
Download this White Paper as a .PDFThe Different Capabilities of Interactive Mobile & Social Media on Digital Out Of Home Systems -- Not All Systems Are Created Equal, August 2009
Mobile and social interactive media is starting to appear on the screens of digital out of home ("DOOH") networks. Before the gold rush of anything with the words mobile, social or interactive gets into full swing, brands, advertisers, DOOH network operators and event planners need to understand the many differences between systems that claim to support these new media buzz words.
This is part 1 in a series of 4 white papers focused on helping brands, advertisers, digital out of home ("DOOH") network operators and event planners understand the strategic impact of mobile and social interactive media beyond the web and to navigate some of tactical issues of bringing it to screens in public spaces.
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Making the Most of Mobile Marketing: Leveraging Mobile and Social Networks to Amplify Response Rates from the Connected Class, June 2008
It is not uncommon for mobile marketing companies to use the terms conversion, response, and opt-in loosely (and often interchangeably); to compound the issue, there are no standardized definitions for such terms. If we are to understand the potential of text messaging as a marketing tool, we must sort through the widely varying claims of mobile marketing companies.
This paper establishes a series of best practices for mobile marketing, paying particular attention to the advantages of an interactive, user-controlled model over a traditional broadcast model. Looking forward, this paper examines how the integration of mobile technology into a connected, social, and localized platform shifts the advertising model from impression-based to expression-based, thereby leveraging the social graphs of users to create a rich and responsive media experience beneficial to brands and consumers alike.
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The Disruptive Effect of the Internet and Mobile Phones on Out-of-Home Digital Media, October 2006
Fostered by their experiences via the web and on-demand TV, consumers in many countries have developed a seemingly insatiable desire for connectedness and ease-of-access to information and entertainment, anytime, anywhere. Web-savvy businesses are feeding on that desire and, as a result, are attracting billions of dollars away from traditional advertising budgets. However, out-of-home "push models" of impression-based advertising (as opposed to the web's "pull model" of intent-based search), depend on the frequency of a message and are therefore not much better than commercials on traditional TV. This fact is not helped by the growing indifference to push advertising and the fragmentation of media channels.
This paper concludes that out-of-home signage applications will leverage a combination of the web together with mobile phone technology to achieve best-in-class interactivity. It also concludes that future digital out-of-home signage networks will be built on scalable, interactive web-based architectures rather than today's more typical passive narrowcast designs. As a result, the appropriate combination of narrowcast, web and mobile phone technology will enable businesses to benefit from their proximity to mobile consumers and enable them to deploy more effective out-of-home marketing.