Earned media is hugely unpredictable. But it's become an increasingly large part of the media mix. Usually it's, 'I put this in and get and get this out,'" James Davies, Chief Strategy Officer, Posterscope USA  pointed out during the strategic planning panel. "There's a huge opportunity for digital out of home in this context." He sees instances where people might be prompted by signs to take actions on their mobile devices, spreading a paid message into earned realms, such as a Facebook wallpost or the like.

If the most effective thing to buy is a Super Bowl spot, you buy that, John Leeman, SVP Group Director Communications Planning, Carat pointed out during the startegic planning panel. "But there's a lot of waste," he says. "Addressability is still a problem," says Nadine McHugh, Managing Director, MindShare. "And what's more addressable than digital out of home?" Everyone is pushed to do more with less, these days, she says, calling it "the whole procurement challenge right now." And planners can look to new channels to get the performance that is demanded. "You have a really good opportunity …

That's what I just learned from the folks at Clear Channel Outdoor, which donated its Los Angeles area digital billboard network for a six-week campaign to raise awareness and funds to help preserve the city's – and entertainment industry's – iconic HOLLYWOOD sign. Clear Channel's "Save the Peak" campaign helped raise the remaining $3.05 million of the $12.5 million total needed to buy and protect 138 acres surrounding the HOLLYWOOD sign. Specifically, the Clear Channel campaign and aired almost 2 million spots on 84 digital billboards throughout the Los Angeles metro area. All to save one analogue billboard …

That's the way Starcom  out-of-home chief Jack Sullivan describes the digital out-of-home media sector. He calls it an entirely "new space" in the industry, and a great opportunity to tell marketers a "new story" about how to reach consumers. And a new way to tell consumers some new stories. The problem, he said, is that the industry has so far been talking a little too narrowly and a little too traditionally to get that story across. "I'm not sure we have a compelling story yet," Sullivan said during the Big Buyer's panel at the digital ooh forum. …

Like any great Madison Avenue ad executive, Starcom's Jack Sullivan is an expert on the subject of positioning. But normally, he's discussing the positioning of one of his client's brands, or the position they occupy on some out-of-home media placement. To kick the discussion off during the big buyer's panel at this morning's Digital Out-of-Home Forum, Sullivan pointed out the position of a column buttressing the room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in New York, the venue for the forum's meeting. The column was set dead center in the room, and Sullivan quipped that it was likely "well positioned between …

Yep, PQ Media chief and Digital OOH Forum opener Patrick Quinn got things off on a depressing note, citing, well, the Great Depression. Which of course, wasn’t so great. And neither was 2009 for the advertising industry. It was the first year since the Great Depression that the ad industry saw two consecutive years of declines. The good news for digital out-of-home media, is that it actually managed to grow, albeit at a tiny 0.7% rate of growth. Still, that was pretty good, compared to PQ’s estimate for a 14% decrease in overall ad spending last year.

Talk about your mobile app envy, BBDO's Chad Stoller thinks things have gone a little amuck, citing a scenario in which "somebody gets a phone that can butter toast, and another person exclaims, 'Holy shit, why can't my phone do that now?'" "I feel like I'm living in Japan right now," Stoller quipped.

That's the surprising evolution of the smart phone user, according to Chad Stoller, EVP Digital Strategy at BBDO. Speaking on the Buyers' Roundtable panel at OMMA Mobile, Stoller said the ubiquity and ease of smart phone access is breeding new casual browsing habits among consumers that could well challenge the conventional notion of TV's couch potatoes. Stoller said smart phone users are starting to use their phones to browse while sitting on their couches watching TV. More people are leisurely consuming mobile data," he said, asking attendees if they happen to know how much mobile data people are …

"Don't believe if you build a branded app people are going to give a crap," Sloan Broderick, Managing Partner, Managing Director at MediaCom Interaction, told the audience, sounding a bracing note on the media buyer panel this afternoon. He was picking up on a point made by Rachel Pasqua, director, Mobile Strategy at iCrossing, that marketers can't just throw things against the wall to see if they stick in mobile the way they might on the desktop Web because its a more fragmented, highly targeted medium. "You can get in front of a much smaller audience but get a much …

In the afternoon keynote, Charles Johnson, general manager, mobile advertising at Microsoft previewed the company's new MSN home page optimized for smartphones and which goes live Thursday. The new home page sports a cleaner, more streamlined look on a white background and is tightly integrated via dynamic tabs with other Microsoft properties including its Bing search engine. By maintaining a single mobile banner ad placement, Microsoft also aims to insure that ads are positioned to drive user engagement and awareness and avoid clutter. The higher response rates on mobile have been attributed in part to mobile pages running fewer …