That was how Saatchi & Saatchi’s global CEO Kevin Roberts started his Institute of Direct Marketing lecture last month. His argument – which I blogged about in my Editor’s View at nma.co.uk – was that price, value and even information are now “table stakes”, and that what advertisers and agencies need to do is create emotional connections with their customers: “loyalty beyond reason”. The tools are engagement, interactivity and the willingness to give up control of your brand.

So far, this is all exactly what you’d expect from a new media evangelist. Except that’s not really what Roberts is. There was only one website among the examples he showed, the rest were TV spots. And although he was enthusiastic about blogging and product comparison sites, when I spoke to him afterwards he was critical of the performance of online advertising, describing it as “too information-driven” and “not reaching people”. What Roberts was doing was taking the thinking that has dominated the world of new media and applying it to old media.

He’s not the only one. At its recent Future of TV event, Thinkbox, the organisation set up to promote TV advertising, was pushing the idea of the third age of TV, in which traditional TV, mobile devices and PCs will allow people access to the same video content. And in a recent issue of NMA, when we looked at the development of digital outdoor advertising, we discovered a fierce battle going on over what type of agency should own the space. Should it be the digital agencies, because they understand interaction, or should it be those that specialise in video, as that’s what’s really on offer? (NMA 15.02.07)

What all this brings home to me is that the world of marketing and advertising has finally accepted the change in peoples’ attitudes that we in the new media sector have been talking about for so long. The fact that Thinkbox sees new technology – from red-button interactivity to IPTV – as part of the future of TV, and therefore as part of its armoury in winning back advertisers, is powerful evidence that TV companies realise the game has changed. They see engagement, interactivity and acknowledgement of consumer control as key selling points.

Likewise in print, publishers find themselves experimenting in all sorts of new areas as they try to accommodate the new reality that digital media have unleashed.

But this change is having an effect that’s confusing at best. Take Thinkbox’s attitude to mobile. The people really embracing mobile TV are those in the mobile industry, which sees an easily saleable proposition that will boost take-up of mobile data services. People within TV shake their heads and talk about how content will have to be specifically made for tiny screens. Can we really assume these new platforms will simply be delivery mechanisms for traditional TV content?

Or consider TV advertising. Even if Roberts is right that people want emotional engagement with brands, can that be achieved through interruptive advertising? After all, in the words of Modem Media founder GM O’Connell, you can’t annoy someone into liking you.

What we seem to have is a situation where big companies of all stripes are telling us how they understand the massive changes taking place, while in the next breath claiming it’s business as usual. But maybe that’s just what big companies always do.

The TV ad for the car will be distributed across outdoor media owner Boomerang’s network of 80 London bars and cinemas via postcard racks.

Rachel Harker, co-founder of technology company Hypertag, which provides the service, said campaigns typically send tens of thousands of push messages to mobile users who have Bluetooth switched on.

General Motors ran a similar campaign for Vauxhall at the MPH motor show last year. It made over 23,500 connections with the 32,000 attendees at the show and saw 865 downloads.

“Bluetooth is powerful because it gets to hard-to-reach customers. But you need to provide a reason for people to engage,” said Paul Fitzpatrick, digital marketing manager at GM, adding that great content is vital.

See www.nissan-qashqai.co.uk

Source – NMA

It’s a question for clients as well. Advertisers who visited CBS Outdoor’s (formerly Viacom Outdoor) demonstration suite for its digital displays on the London Underground (see Strategic Play, NMA 14.12.06) brought their above-the-line or outdoor shops as well as digital specialists along with them. And when the media owner announced the results of its digital advertising competition last week, the winner was not a digital shop but Hooper Galton, which holds the above-the-line account for homelessness charity Shelter.

Let’s go outside

What’s at stake is one of the fastest-growing mediums in the UK. The Outdoor Advertising Association (OAA) predicts investment in digital out-of-home formats will balloon in 2007. Last year, investment in new outdoor advertising technologies accounted for 4% of growth in outdoor. The OAA believes that figure could reach 16% in 2007 and that by the end of the year outdoor could generate £100m from digital alone.

What’s more, the amount of money spent purely on digital outdoor advertising is predicted to more than double in 2007; it will rise by a massive 84% to £53.1m, according to the OAA.

All the outdoor media owners are getting involved. As well as CBS Outdoor’s digital media for the Tube, JCDecaux has won the outdoor contract for BAA, which includes the outdoor media for the new Terminal 5 contract at Heathrow. Titan Outdoor already runs its Transvision network of digital screens across the major UK railway stations, and Clear Channel owns ten 48-sheet-sized digital screens across London.

Alan James, chief executive of the OAA, says, “We have one enormous thing that will transform the use of digital screens this year, which is the London Underground. Everything needs a catalyst and that’s going to be it. It’s going to be visible because it’s in London and most people use the Tube at one point or another.”

So if the OAA is to be believed, outdoor digital advertising will soon be big business. While the traditional sector wakes up to this fact, new media agencies are ahead of the game. “At the moment we’re finding that specialist digital agencies or smaller digital production houses are putting out the work,” says John Lewen, account director of Alive, CBS Outdoor’s digital arm.

AKQA’s work for search brand Yell.com, for example, featured interactive bus shelters, panels and digital six-sheets, and put the concept of local knowledge at the centre of the campaign by letting passers-by to do location-based searches. Glue London’s design arm Anorak has also produced work for the Alive network, and Agency.com ran a successful digital outdoor campaign for BA last year using Titan’s Transvision network.

Some digital agencies, such as R/GA, are also developing their own technology. “Any agency that’s serious about outdoor digital advertising should be developing its own applications,” says R/GA chief technology officer John Mayo-Smith. “We’ve been developing interactive applications for more than ten years, enabling us to drive innovation and build awareness for our clients.”

The new media specialists argue that outdoor digital creativity is right up their street because of the interactivity involved. Nick Corston, head of new business development at Agency.com, says, “The discriminating factor is the level of interactivity. It’s often that which is the defining factor because you have to understand the power of the activity and its potential. You also have to be able to deliver on it, and getting those skills to understand and deliver will be the forte of the interactive and digital agencies.”

Nigel Gwilliam, head of outdoor and digital at the IPA, advises digital agencies to build their understanding of the medium: how is it consumed, who are the main players (contractor and outdoor media agency), and what technical opportunities and limitations exist. “Then leverage your in-house production facilities in order to get your hands dirty.”

Digital agency de-construct does a lot of outdoor work for P&G and Nokia. Business development director Dan Douglas says that “Outdoor 2.0″ has arrived, but that seeing the emerging technologies just in terms of digital poster sites misses the point. He believes it’s the convergence of mobile, web, retail, installation art, ambient media, event and experiential marketing, and digital poster sites that will define the future.

“Digital technology has not only made it a lot easier to interact outdoors through multiple channels and devices, but our experience from participating online in a variety of ways makes it a simpler cultural leap to participating outdoors, where we can and do form communities around shared experiences,” says Douglas.

Matt Dyke, planning director at Tribal DDB, also puts a strong case. “Above-the-line agencies may feel they’re best placed to create beautiful moving film images, but movement is only scratching the surface of what digital outdoor really means,” he says. “In the long term, it’s the digital agencies that will be best placed to get the most out of the new medium. Not only are they already experts at creating interactive formats – which requires creative and media to work together as one and is something above-the-line agencies seem unable to do – but they’re used to dealing with live content.”

The confidence of the digital specialists isn’t putting off above-the-line agencies, which have been working in this area both independently and with outdoor specialists.

Peter Beeney, head of digital at Titan, says, “Planner/buyers are becoming more informed and hence more comfortable with including digital outdoor on their schedules. As the formats become demystified, traditionally risk-averse advertisers use digital screens more and more.”

Some of the most talked-about campaigns include Walsh Trott Chick Smith and Grand Visual’s push for newspaper The Independent on London Underground escalator panels, and Abbott Mead Vicker’s use of Transvision for the BBC’s Planet Earth series. This area of activity promises to rise once investment increases.

Graham Fink, creative director at M&C Saatchi, says that his recently rejigged creative department includes specialists across all media. He sees the divide between above- and below-the-line as ultimately a false one. “Ideas are the most important thing and we have one of the best creative departments in London, so we can put digital into any channel,” he says.

Drawing battle lines

Experts predict that competition in this sector during the coming year will be fierce, and expect a turf war over the new area of business and expertise. But it won’t be as polarised as digital agencies versus above-the-line shops.

“There will definitely be some fights and squabbles over this,” says the OAA’s James. “We’ve seen this before with smaller companies coming into the market. They feed off a territory that existing agencies think of as their own. There will be a big turf war, but don’t write off existing agencies when there’s big money to be made.”

There’s an overlap between the skillsets housed in established ad agencies and new media specialists. Traditional agencies have been making posters and TV ads for years, but the strength of the new media shops in designing interactive rich-media experiences is enormous.

The relevant skillsets also vary depending on the job at hand. Alive’s cross-track network, for instance, will carry moving-image advertising along Tube platforms. Arguably, there’s more synergy between that and the skills of an agency used to producing TV and cinema ads than with those of a new media company.

Conversely, when it comes to plasma screens like those on escalators or interactive bus shelters, a web agency – used to grabbing the attention of people without the use of sound and encouraging them to get involved – might be more competent.

Crucially, it’s important to remember that many of the advertising networks already own digital networks, in some cases very successful ones. Agency.com and TBWA frequently work together, for example, and Omnicom’s Zulu network of specialist shops feeds into its above-the-line agencies, meaning the line between ATL and digital agencies no longer exists in some cases.

There’s also scope for joint ventures or relationships such as the one which exists between Tonic and CBS Outdoor.

“I think you’ll see strategic alliances, and there’ll be some areas where digital agencies take a greater role because of client relationships, creative ability or production facilities,” says the IPA’s Gwilliam. “It’s a bit dangerous to just talk about a turf war – in reality, the lines are far more blurred in that some creative agencies have pretty successful internal digital thinking and continue to explore that.”

CBS Outdoor’s Lewen adds, “This is a new space. At the moment no one really owns it, so for agencies really prepared to get involved and learn fast and first, there’s great potential to develop a level of expertise in this area.”

There’s everything to play for. Although the methods of working will be varied, competition promises to be fierce due to the huge amount of revenue that’s up for grabs.

Quick Take

• Digital outdoor technologies are becoming a big area of investment for brands, and media owners are expecting a boom in 2007
• The completion of CBS Outdoor’s London Underground network is being seen as the boost that tips digital outdoor into the mainstream
• The skillsets needed to excel in digital outdoor straddle new media specialists and above-the-line agencies
• New media agencies are currently producing most of the work, but the traditional advertising companies are becoming increasingly active in the area

Nokia N-series Bluecasting

Nokia wanted to raise awareness of its N-series line of devices among key technology leaders and position them as multimedia computers, not just phones with cameras or MP3 players.

To target Nokia’s audience, R/GA created 15 interactive posters fitted with Bluetooth technology and placed them throughout the London Underground last year. The posters invited users to download images of neighbourhood maps from Superfuture, London’s online city guide, directly to their handsets. Each of the 15 maps, which were tailored to highlight the area around the relevant station, were then downloaded to their mobile devices immediately. The content was available to all handsets, not only Nokia models.

The campaign created interaction between consumers and their local areas, and during the 27 days of the promotion more than 13,000 maps were downloaded.

Viacom Outdoor is installing thousands of LCD panels as part of a £72m upgrade to its ad network on the London Underground. The digital upgrade comes on the heels of Viacom’s regaining the rights to the Tube (and DLR) network in March with an eight-and-a-half-year extension that will go beyond the London Olympics.

“At £72m, it’s by far the biggest upgrade that outdoor advertising has ever seen,” says Jon Lewen, account director for digital at Viacom Outdoor. “It’s more than most companies have put into new sites for the last couple of decades put together, and it will give us a world-leading digital network that will allow advertisers to reach a mass audience in the heart of London in a new and exciting way.”

The first noticeable step is the 2,000 LCD screens that will run along 20 zone 1 and 2 escalators – Tottenham Court Road is already up and running. Then there are the 225 LCD panels the size of a six-sheet poster that will mainly be found in ticket halls and exit routes from February or March of next year. By end of 2007, 24 key stations will also have 150 platform screens with HD projectors beaming ads across rail lines.

Digital deluge

Viacom Outdoor’s investment comes at a time when the outdoor ad sector is embarking on its own digital switchover. Titan Outdoor (formerly Maiden) has its Transvision screens at major railway stations, Clear Channel is trialling Magink ‘reflective-light’ billboards (NMA 17.08.06) and JC Decaux has digital displays at Heathrow.

With its digital rollout under way, Viacom’s full-size demonstration suite – named the Beck Centre after the designer of London’s famous Underground map – will soon be demolished. And Viacom Outdoor itself is changing its name to CBS Outdoor from 1 January, while the digital division will get its own brand, Alive.

Viacom promised Transport for London a world-leading digital ad network in time for the London Olympics. But what does it believe will be the impact of its £72m upgrade?

For sales director Nicky Cheshire, the answer is simple. “We’re establishing a brand new communication channel for advertisers to reach a mass, captive audience in the heart of London,” she says. “Our audience truly is captive. It’s not like a hairdresser’s or a bar you may go into every now and then, it’s not like an airport you only occasionally have to wait in – we have a contained, captive audience in the heart of London and we’re providing a new, digital channel to reach them.”

Viacom Outdoor will allow five advertisers at a time to share an LCD screen on a rotation that, in the case of escalators, will make sure each has a chance to present its message during the average 90-second descent or ascent.

“We’re giving advertisers flexibility,” says Cheshire. “In the past advertisers have had to spend two weeks putting a campaign together and getting the posters printed. Then they’d be up for two weeks so, by the end of it, the message is a month old. With digital, brands will be able to change offers and promote different products at the flick of a button via our central network.”

Tighter targeting

With this flexibility comes a new means of targeting Tube users, not just by station and time of year, but also by time of day.

“It’s important to stress that we’re effectively moving to a broadcast model where we can sell space in timeslots throughout the day,” Cheshire says. “Advertisers may want to reach the morning rush hour with, say, a breakfast or shampoo ad, when people are most receptive to that kind of message. In the afternoon and at lunch time, it may be more about shopping and offers in local shops. Then for the commute home, advertisers may want to take advantage of the fact that people are planning their night out so will be receptive to, say, drinks advertising.”

Undoubtedly, Viacom’s upgrade will change the look and feel of the Tube, at least for those key stations in the City and West End, replacing fixed posters with ads that move and are constantly updated. This is going to be crucial in attracting a new type of advertiser, says Lewen.

“When you look at press, it has lots of big retailers flagging up their latest offers,” he says. “With outdoor, you’ve never been able to do that because no one knew their prices for, say, PCs or digital cameras a couple of weeks in advance. Now, with our digital screens, we can go to these people and show them they can change the products and prices they’re pushing centrally, so they can now consider outdoor.”

Charging considerations

While the company is very keen to extol the virtues of the digital rollout, it’s less keen on giving a direct answer to the most obvious question of all: cost. If it’s asking an advertiser to occupy a fifth of screen time, sharing a screen with four additional advertisers, then is it going to be charging a fifth of the price a brand would have previously been paying?

“We think advertisers should, and will, be happy to pay a premium for having eye-catching moving images that have the flexibility to be remotely updated,” says Lewen. Cheshire argues that, by offering greater control, the new technology will be worth more to advertisers.

Naturally this meets with some cynicism from media agencies. “I think Viacom could be more upfront about this,” says James Davies, director of Posterscope. His agency claims to buy around 40% of the country’s outdoor inventory for a variety of agencies, including Carat, with whom it shares a parent in Aegis.

“There’s one overriding reason why Viacom is rolling out digital: it gets to sell the same space over and over again,” says Davies. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Outdoor companies have their territories and that’s that. It’s not like print, where you can launch a supplement to give you extra pages to sell. The only way to make more money from outdoor is to sell the same, finite amount of space more than once, and that’s exactly what Viacom is doing.

“I’ve had some conversations with it and it’s obvious that Viacom won’t be charging, say, five escalator advertisers a fifth of the price they would usually pay for fixed posters. But it’s not going to be charging five times the full whack either. It’ll be somewhere in between.”

By dissecting the same space, Viacom will have more inventory from which to raise more revenue than fixed poster sites. As such, Cheshire sums up the digital strategy as a move to make the company – currently the second largest in outdoor, it claims – the largest, or at least the largest digital outdoor player.

“That might not necessarily be in terms of the number of sites or in revenue,” she says. “It will probably be more on the basis of us offering the most relevant and attractive network to the market. We’re not going to be like Clear Channel, with masses of billboards next to one another, all fighting for the attention of people who aren’t truly a captive audience.”

Silent suffering

Rival outdoor network Clear Channel is sanguine about how much impact Viacom’s digital rollout will have. MD Barry Sayer believes that video footage is a much overrated experience.

“We had experimental plasmas at the entrances to some New York subway stations. They were very pretty, but what’s the point?” he asks. “They weren’t successful because there’s no point in having video without audio, it’s just not entertaining. That’s why we’re focusing on our Magink reflective-light screens. We have ten on trial that we’re ironing out teething problems with to ensure they’re clearly visible in all lighting and weather situations.

“We believe we’ll get there and, if they prove successful, we’ll be rolling them out. They allow a little animation but the main thing is they’re huge and impactful, and can still be updated centrally at the flick of a switch. But we’re not pretending that they’re video entertainment because there’s just no point without audio.”

Cheshire disagrees. Citing research that shows nearly nine in ten people believe Tube advertising improves a journey, she says the screens could be informative and entertaining.

“I don’t think the best approach for advertisers will be to replicate TV ads, because that wouldn’t suit the space,” she admits. “However, I think you’ll see brands shooting special ads for the screens, although in our early days of offering the network this hasn’t happened yet.

“There’s nothing to stop brands using the screens to inform or entertain. I can see a brand wanting to reach people in the City on the commute home with closing prices on the screens, or putting up the scores of a major sporting event or other news headlines so that people can keep up to date on the Tube.”

Missing mobile

However, with so many people carrying mobile phones, portable game consoles and iPods with them on Tube journeys, it’s arguable that advertisers will prefer other routes to reaching people on their commute. There’s even the potential from 2008 onwards that London Underground could enable mobile phones to work on the network. How would Viacom’s screens compete?

This doesn’t seem to be something that it has factored into its multi-million-pound investment. “We’re not sure about mobiles working on the Tube – there’s apparently a tender document out, but we just don’t know now if it’ll mean people will be able to use mobiles in stations in a couple of years,” says Cheshire.

Besides, she believes the ambient power of outdoor won’t be diminished. “If you’re using an iPod you’ll still see our ads, and we’ve already started working with mobile phones to allow, in one case, those with Bluetooth to download Channel 4 documentary footage. Just because we can offer it doesn’t mean that people want it. We find the majority of mobile phone owners have their Bluetooth set to not be discovered, or simply don’t know how to use Bluetooth.”

Ignoring interactivity

This is the Achilles heel of outdoor providers, according to Giles Rhys Jones, director of interactive at OgilvyOne. With advertising moving towards a digital future, he believes Viacom and its competitors haven’t focused enough on making their medium more interactive and accountable.

“With fragmentation in TV and radio, outdoor is the last broadcast medium where you can reach a lot of people in a very short time,” he says. “Digital outdoor is attractive to all parties, but its power could be diminished if it doesn’t engage with the mobile phone and get people consuming advertisers’ content instead of playing games or accessing information. There’s a tickbox mentality where someone like Viacom will try it so they can say they’ve tried it, rather than actually pushing it. People won’t miss what they haven’t been offered. Outdoor advertisers can’t hang around waiting for people to ask for Bluetooth advertising, it’s something someone like Viacom Outdoor must push.”

Certainly Rachel Harker, co-founder of Hypertag, believes Viacom should be doing more with mobile. Her company supplies the Bluetooth, infra-red and, soon, Wi-Fi technology to allow consumers to interact with posters.

“Viacom will have to go to clients and say it can add entertainment to outdoor but there’s no sound, so tough,” she says. “The problem is outdoor people like Viacom haven’t woken up to the mobile phone and how it can give the interactivity that would actually allow their advertisers to have real entertainment, with video and audio.”

Harker wonders if this is a deliberate oversight. “Outdoor digital, compared to online, will be the usual finger-in-the-air estimation of how many people saw an ad. But if they really wanted to improve on that measurement and give interactivity, they could just use mobile.”

Despite the advice, Viacom Outdoor is giving no indication it will push mobile as hard as some digital evangelists would like. It believes that people’s attitudes need to catch up with what mobile technology can do before it can become a mass-market proposition.

Territorial tussles

In a way, Viacom is navigating between traditional poster media buyers, who think moving images and ads bought in timed slots are a step forward, and digital agencies, who see it as a halfway house that will need to embrace mobile.

For now, it’s pushing out its digital strategy on the London Underground before it decides whether some of the panels, particularly the six-sheet-poster-sized LCD screens, will also work in mainline train stations on GWR and Scot Rail routes, which would reach a third of rail travellers, as well as the tram networks in Croydon, Blackpool and Sheffield.

Hence OgilvyOne’s Rhys Jones believes that, certainly for the year ahead, there will be “a clash of cultures” between outdoor and digital and a general “battle of wills” as the two types of agency thrash it out over whose remit the screen network should fall within.

Ultimately, the fact that the screens offer an unprecedented opportunity to tailor and amend messages on the Tube will be powerful enough to make agencies resolve their differences, he says.

The general opinion is that the new Alive digital division will prove successful in boosting ad revenues. But with all the major players rolling out digital networks, quite whether it will make the company number one in digital outdoor remains to be seen.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that when Cheshire sums up the company’s strategy as wanting to be number one in digital outdoor, it’s in rather blurred terms, such as being the “most relevant and attractive”.

Recent research from Posterscope suggests that Viacom Outdoor’s £72m investment is more than twice the size of the country’s total current spend on digital outdoor. Advertisers will need to take to its digital technology very positively if the investment is to prove a success.

Company history

• 1994 TDI enters the European market and wins a contract with London Transport
• 1997 TDI is acquired by Infinity, which is later itself acquired by CBS, and then by Viacom
• 2001 Viacom Outdoor is chosen as the company’s name
• 2006 Viacom Outdoor wins an eight-and-a-half-year deal for the London Underground and starts rolling out a £72m digital upgrade to its network
• 2007 Company will become CBS Outdoor and digital division will be called Alive from 1 January

Viacom’s digital display technology

Viacom Outdoor has three digital propositions: escalator LCD panels, six-sheet-sized LCD panels that will be located mainly on exit routes (particularly in West End locations near shops) and platform projectors. The latter beam 20-second video (no audio) ads across the platform and are immediately stopped as a train approaches the station (hence the 20-second slot, rather than 30 seconds, because it means fewer interruptions).

The only potential problem discovered at Viacom’s exhibition centre was an LCD panel that was losing brightness after six months’ continuous play. But this was a consumer screen. Apparently the screens that are being rolled out are far more rugged.

The company also has a fleet of 25 London buses that have LED screens along the side. These are linked to a GPS system that ensures ads relating to the bus’s location are displayed.

Barry Sayer, chief executive officer, Clear Channel Outdoor UK told NMA in September that Clear Channel was beginning this change and was geo-coding every one of its sites in the UK to get a better idea of where sites are and how they affect different consumers. He told NMA that outdoor advertising companies have not grasped the benefit of digital advertising yet.”I find it interesting that as soon as the outdoor industry, which is steeped in the tradition of posters, sees an electronic system they’re hell-bent on creating TV ads and introducing sound, rather than seeing the real beauty of the medium.
“If we could get to know who people are through, say, supermarket loyalty cards, I would then know who you are when you walk past my poster site. We would like interaction to be two-way, and therefore we would have to work in collaboration with supermarkets, shopping malls or even mobile companies using GPS to know more about the people we’re trying to reach,” he said.

Consumers on the move can plug their headphones into the posters to listen to a selection of songs from the unsigned bands appearing on Channel 4′s recently launched music and gossip Web site.The idea is to drive traffic to the Slash Music portal, which offers an extensive library of downloads, as well as exclusive editorial content provided by the creators of gossip sites HolyMoly.co.uk and PopJustice.com. Created by outdoor media company JCDecaux, the interactive posters will be supported by a heavyweight online marketing campaign running across MSN and other high-traffic sites. This will coincide with TV, radio and press activity over the coming weeks. “We hope that allowing people to sample unsigned bands via these interactive posters will create a buzz around Slash Music,” said Tracy Blacher, head of marketing at Channel 4 New Media. “Online music is an area of great priority for us going forward.”

Source: NMA magazine

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