ABDOH - Associação Brasileira de Mídia Digital Out of Home

It’s not the economy

Of course, the condition of other industries will have a profound influence on the scale of rollouts, on order levels for DOOH systems suppliers, and on advertising sales and rates. But beyond that, I believe most of the biggest forces shaping our sector in 2011 will be specifically media and tech trends, rather than state-of-the-nation stuff. So, in no particular order, and reserving the right to make other predictions later...

More big names will enter the sector. We’ve already seen Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, NEC, HP, Tech Data and others make apparently serious commitments (beyond “proof of concept” sandbox games). I expect to see others from the systems side, providing underlying technologies rather than DOOH applications as such. Also very likely we’ll see some big media owners take an interest (Facebook on pub screens?) and agencies too.

Measurement. You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? Because in DOOH, every year is the year of metrics. But actually, I don’t think that 2011 will be when the universally-accepted gold standard emerges. More important in the long run is that we spend time as a community discussing not the nitty-gritty of how we measure, but exactly what it is we want to measure. There will be multiple answers, with different parties – advertisers, retailers, corporate networks – needing different metrics to address the question of whether their screens are doing the job. Every year is, of course, also the year of content. It’ll get even better in 2011. A few more DOOH-dedicated content shops will emerge; bigger agencies' creative departments will employ more DOOH specialists.

Integration with mobile and social media may be the biggie. It’s already not remarkable when a Times Square billboard features Facebook feeds or text messages. We’ll know this integration has really arrived for good when it’s standard on much more modest screens – when you can use your phone to give a Facebook "like" to items on a digital menu board, for example. Other enhancements like 3D and touch interfaces will also become steadily more ubiquitous (though there are still a lot of practical problems to overcome with 3D). The principle driving this, as well as mobile and social integration, is that the out-of-home screen is not just a TV on the street or in the mall: it’s a new platform which may look vaguely TV-like, but is best suited to messaging and communication in entirely different ways.

Digital cinema will rapidly seize much more market share from 35mm film in every advanced economy and make the movie theatre ever more part of this sector, with the ability to link advertising directly into DOOH networks.

As for the back-end systems, I reckon cloud computing/software-as-a-service (SaaS) models will continue to strengthen their hold over DOOH, for exactly the same reasons as they are in a multiplicity of other sectors. That doesn’t mean digital-signage networks running on local hardware will vanish overnight, but they’ll slowly become the exception, rather than the rule.

Supermarket retail will, for this sector, recede further into insignificance. Half a dozen years ago putting networks into the major grocery chains was seen as the big goal, but although there have been some successes, much more striking has been the lack of take-up.

And finally: the rows over digital billboards in U.S. communities will, sadly, not stop. It might be that a truly conclusive ruling on their safety from a body like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will at last put that part of the argument to rest one way or the other, but – as we reported recently – there are other fronts where fighting will continue, like light pollution and energy efficiency.

Digital billboards are a stand-in for the advertising sector as a whole here. It’s not that people particularly hate digital out-of-home, it’s that they’re annoyed by the glut of commercial messages in everyday life and our medium is easily opposed because billboards require licences. I don’t know how to solve this problem. I wish I did. Barnaby Page - 05 Jan 11, 19:02 PM.