Cookies, grass, and other stuff: giving 'multimedia' a whole new meaning

Whether digital or not, alternative out-of-home formats are exploding as advertisers try to catch consumers during those few precious minutes between work and home (or anywhere and home, for that matter), when their guards might be down and they might be a little bit more receptive to viewing ads.

So aside from digital, what other kinds of things fall under the 'alternative' umbrella, you ask? Well, a few recent ad campaigns were highlighted in the New York Times and other media for their uniqueness, always creative, though not always directed entirely at a point-of-sale:

My favorite involve unusual sites and familiar materials. One was a giant Oreo cookie decal on the side of a glass elevator that dunked into a giant decal of a glass of milk on the exterior of the bottom. The giant dunking Oreo is gone now, but the You Tube video is still popular.

Another great example is from Wimbledon, where the firm J. Walter Thompson hired UK-based artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey to create grass portraits of three figures in the tennis world. The process involves exposing the seeds to different amounts of light in order to get shadings of green, creating a kind of negative effect, varied by the length of the grass. The campaign originally involved planting grass in other sites (bus stations) to highlight Wimbledon’s uniqueness, but the company ended up using artificial turf (which, of course, is precisely what’s NOT in Wimbledon). Either way, the portraits have gotten Ackroyd and Harvey some attention and while it may not have directly increased revenue for the tournament, it did put it back in the news.

The Times also noted Papa John's giant pizza construction, which is designed to bring attention to their new whole wheat crust. While I think giant food is always fun, I'm not sure it's in the best taste at the moment, where people are beginning to strain to fill their supermarket carts.

For some other companies, it’s not about where the ad is placed or how it’s constructed, but the stories being told. Using a format similar to “This American Life,” KeyBank is running a new version of testimonial ads that are designed to encourage people to figure out how to manage your money. In a timely fashion, one ad features an animated video voiced over by U.S. Olympic swimmer Diana Munz who tells how she decided where to keep her gold medal:

As she tells her story, animation depicts her storing the medal in a clam, à la a pearl, putting the clam in a blowfish and having the blowfish swallowed by a secure steel whale. Instead, she opts to put it in a KeyBank safe deposit box. Other spots depict a man's decision-making process on how to finance a home remodel, and another family's work to create college savings funds.

All three of these campaigns do something unique, but all three tell a story, whether it’s a short familiar one (Oreo into milk) or a more complicated one (taking care of you money), it’s all about using different tactics to engage the jaded viewer.

Tags: advertising, out-of-home, ooh

3G IPhone: Place-based advertising, whrrling through New Orleans and Atlanta

My daughters and I are just back from a trip that involved a lovely five and a half hour layover in the Atlanta airport. We had a lot of great things to eat that we’d bought in New Orleans, so the only food review I have is from the C Concourse is of the Ben and Jerry’s stand (milkshakes: B+ for thickness, A- for taste).

Swallowing my annoyance at having to pay for internet access in an airport (bad form and lousy public relations for arguably the busiest airport in the world), my daughters and I sat and watched streaming videos on my laptop until we were unceremoniously booted off for “excessive traffic.” As I told the tech support person on the phone, isn’t excess traffic what everyone wants from the internet? After a few irate phone calls and some more muffuletta, I calmed down and walked around the concourse. My mood improved considerably when my daughter found a kiosk where we could rent a dvd and return it by mail the next day. While we were hanging around, she kept pointing out all the folks around us with iPhones. I grimaced jealously and went back to “Be Kind, ReWind,” a celebration of older techniques and technologies in its own modern package.

Judging from this week's highly anticipatedWorldwide Developers Conference, our envy is only about to go up. The 3G iPhone is cheaper than the original version, but in opening the door to more carriers, service costs will likely be higher. With increased speed of data transmission and the launch of the App Store pending, many companies are busy developing downloadable applications for the iPhone. It’s a win-win situation because Apple plans on taking a smaller cut of the profits than other cell phone companies. Here's another interesting tidbit:

Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey expects iPhone and iPod users to download 20 million applications from the App Store by the end of this year, about 110 million more in 2009, and 210 million in 2010. Broken down, that means the average iPhone user will download five applications in 2009.

The store itself has another neat feature: many of the applications available will be free, since it’s a source of great advertising. And for the pay-for-use applications, it’s the easiest form of selling in the world: credit card information is already stored on most people’s iTunes accounts, so iPhone users can shop quickly. With free stuff and easy access, I'm sure it wouldn't take me very long to hit my five-a-year average. That all depends on the applications, which, even at this early point, pique my interest. For example, according to Business Week,

One free, ad-supported application for Tribune that's expected to be available when the App Store launches keeps track of an iPhone owner's commute, estimates the travel time, and suggests alternative routes.

Other applications include: video games with motion-sensing technology, interactive study guides for medical students, and, of course, many GPS-based programs. Apple also announced "MobileMe," which creates a link between the iPhones and your computers, allowing you to standardize calendars and receive updates on both devices.

Pelago’s iPhone-only application, named Whrrl, has a GPS-like capacity to help you find bookstores and restaurants, but with a twist: the recommendations are based on what the people in your social media networks used and liked. Granted, the public availability of this information will generate some of the same consumer backlash being waged against other applications that gather roaming data on people’s habits. It’d behoove Apple and its partners to develop privacy-protection practices before we find out the drawbacks of treating the phone like an elk migration tracking device.

Even so, I hope the next time I’m stuck in the airport, I can avoid the pay-as-you-play, not-so-customer-friendly wireless network and do everything we need to keep entertained through my brand new iPhone. By then, you can give me a Whrrl and check out my favorite New Orleans restaurants. In the meantime, I think I'll keep them secret.

Tags: iphone, place-based advertising, ooh

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.

Tags: digital signage, out-of-home advertising, OOH