• by Jonathan Blum , September 5, 2008

Coming soon to a screen near you.

Less may be more, but more is always more. And when it comes to out of home marketing more could very well mean too much. Starting this year and proceeding well into the next decade, there will be an exponential increase in the number of ways and places we access the Web untethered. Brandable, rich media opportunities will flourish literally on every bus, banner or surface, really, a person faces every day.

"To hear the WiMax guys talk - particularly Clearwire's Barry West - they see WiMax embedded in everything short of underwear - seriously," says Tim Kridel, an independent analyst who tracks the industry. The biggest notion in the industry is to create a new family of displays married to wireless connectivity that can transmit lucrative marketing messages. This crop of cellular and WiMax service providers will, in turn, face competition from a group of hybrid products creeping in from - get ready for it - old-school linear content providers. Starting in 2009, local television stations will roll out a new mobile riff of broadcast TV, developed by a consortium of companies - Harris, Samsung and others - that will enable local TV to be rendered in properly provisioned moving portable devices and out-of-home marketing environments. And cash-starved over-the-air radio operators are announcing new business-to-business offerings. Entercom Communications is working with Consolidated Edison of New York, for example, to transmit using new digital technologies as part of their HDRadio standard to communicate with power management devices in the field. "This is absolutely just the beginning for us," says David Field, president of Entercom.

All these players will face competition from a round of ever-more-exotic wireless connectivity standards surfacing now on the gadget-o-sphere. Everything from standards like ZigBee and MeshBox to companies like Meraki Networks, will allow marketers to inject their message onto displays pretty much everywhere in North America.

And already, innovation is developing in unlikely spurts: Take for-rent storefronts. A New York City-based company called Inwindow Outdoor specializes in placing marketing messages in empty retail office space across the country. Clients include BMW, CBS, Discovery and many others. And though the company now uses traditional stationary images and text in its storefronts, company executives see great potential in new wirelessly connected digital displays.

"We're currently investing in approaches that engage people rather than simply being a passive ad," says Steve Birnhak, CEO at Inwindow. "Over the next five years, as bandwidth becomes abundant, I imagine we'll be doing real-time, two-way video streaming so a person can, for example, be face-to-face with a marketing representative from the brand. I definitely see more interactivity."