• Making Recipes Kool With Kraft
    Who says the shelf life of an app is less than a quart of milk? Kicking things off with today's keynote at OMMA Mobile, Ed Kaczmarek, director of innovation, consumer experiences, Kraft Foods, and father, if you will, of the company's popular ifood assistant app for the iPhone and other devices, points out that 85% of those who downloaded the 2.0 version of the app in November are still using it. What's more, the ifood assistant has been a customer acquisition tool for Kraft, with 90% of users not previously Kraft customers. It also appears to be getting men into …
  • economies of feel
    An interesting point from the very end of the DO forum: video content in public spaces (esp. interactive content) has to work at an emotional level both for a single person and for groups of people -- from two to ten to a thousand. I'm not sure I can elucidate this except to say that the master communicators in history have all been able to do both: that is, address a crowd so that each person feels he or she is being addressed personally, but with an effect that is communal -- that diffuse but powerful group feeling that transforms …
  • DO gives you icecream if you smile
    This is pretty awesome, from the DO exhibition at the end of the Forum: vending machine kiosks use facial recognition technology to determine if someone is smiling, then gives them an ice cream if they are smiling very enthusiastically. On the other hand, I have to ask: if someone isn't smiling, don't they need an ice cream even more? Why punish someone who's depressed by depriving them of ice cream? Just sayin'.
  • How Boucher Bill Could Affect Digital Out Of Home Industry
    Rep. Rick Boucher's draft of privacy legislation might have been aimed at Web companies but could also have a significant impact on other types of ad companies, including those involved in digital out of home media. So said Harley Geiger, counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, this afternoon. Among other provisions, the Boucher bill would require that companies who collect and store "unique biometric data" notify consumers in advance. Geiger says that this clause, if enacted, could pose some realistic problems for companies who amass photos of consumers. How, Geiger asks, would anyone deliver a detailed privacy …
  • What Does Madison Ave. Think About Digital OOH Ad Formats?
    Want more on the industry research Adcentricity conducted about which digital out-of-home media advertising formats are working best? Well, you can see a bunch of industry leader interviews here: http://player.delvenetworks.com/preview/?m=6fed2c18740d4151b19f4d82151f6bb6 .
  • The Committee To Reelect Jack Sullivan
    Sound a little creepy? Well, sort of. Sullivan, who was elected to serve twice on today's Digital Out-of-Home Forum agenda - on the opening Big Buyer's panel, and on the just introduced "Are We Getting A Little Creepy" panel - quipped that he thought the second one was, "going to talk about the creeps in the out-of-home business," not about the creepy new technologies and analytics that can tell marketers increasingly personal things about digital out-of-home consumers. Commander-in-Creep Sullivan
  • to standardize, or not so much standardize?
    Differing views on the need to standardize formats and other creative parameters for digital out-of-home advertising. Razorfish's Lockhorn said it's crucial to establishing economy of scale, and lack of standardiation will limit the medium. Phil Lenger of Show + Tell said it's less critical -- more important is to establish a process that can accommodate a number of creative products (which, frankly, sounds like standardization). My prediction: some happy medium will be established based on balancing creativity and convenience at the optimal cost-point. Not exactly controversial.
  • DO needs thousands of pieces of content
    Simply re-purposing TV ads isn't the savvy way to approach digital out-of-home, with its myriad formats and contexts, according to Philip Lenger of Show + Tell. Instead, agencies need to figure out how to create literally thousands (he threw out the figure 3,000) of different pieces of content, crafted for individual formats and contexts. This isn't quite as daunting as it might sound at first, however, because "we're not talking about Superbowl production" for each ad -- "You can make a beautiful ad with just some moving text on a static background."
  • Which Came First, The Chicken Or The Reach?
    Okay, so that was a stretch, but it was the mixed metaphor that Everywell's Rick North used to set up his message during the "showcase" section of the Digital Out-of-Home Media Forum. North, or course, was talking about the paradox surrounding sales of digital OOH media. When a new network is starting off, he says, marketers complain that they don't have enough reach. When they get enough reach, marketers complain that they're too expensive to buy. "It's the chicken and the egg," North said, adding that he has finally answered the long-standing question of which one came first: …
  • public games on a vast scale
    Neat-o: Megaphone is scaling up its mobile-mediated, digital out-of-home games from relatively small screens to the big ones -- much, much bigger ones: the jumbotron screens at sporting events. Of course that's a great environment for playing sports-themed Megaphone games (we saw a tennis game, but there are others).
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