Thursday, November 08, 2007

The future of advertising and retail digital signage

Adrian Cotterhill, editor of the Digital Out of Home Advertising Networks (DOOHAN) directory (published in the UK by The Screen, an industry body devoted to digital signage in Europe), posted a PowerPoint presentation on his blog, the Daily DOOH, focused on the status of retail digital signage in the UK, and where it might be headed.

The first few slides are pretty parochial and are obviously geared towards people as industry-savvy as the average reader of this blog might be, but the rest of the content is quite good. In particular I was pleased with his requirements for success (including such remarkably elusive things as clear strategy and vision and good content), and several pages of slides trying to convince the audience that digital signage really isn't like television. I wish people would get that.

On the heels of that presentation comes another, this time from IBM. Titled "the end of advertising as we know it (PDF link)", the 28-page report looks at the current state of the advertising industry and predicts that there will be more disruption to advertising in the next 5 years than there have been in the past 50.

The IBM report looks at a number of trends, like electronic inventory management, user-generated content and of course the rise of out-of-home advertising. In general, it's an excellent summary of where a big company sees the industry headed. They're not actually involved in the advertising industry, mind you, but with their fingers in so many pies and so much of advertising going towards high-tech these days, I found more than a few insights while reading it over.

If you have a few minutes today, do yourselves a favor and download these two reports.

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