Ivan Clark

If you not interested in Outdoor advertising, or more specifically DOOH (digital out-of-home) and digital signage, you probably want to stop reading now.

Yesterday I went to #ScreenMediaExpo at Earls Court in London, an exhibition and conference programme that “that mixes media and technology”.

Although I am not wholly involved in Outdoor advertising, I like to know what is going on and believe combinations of broadcast, interaction, mobile, social and big data guarantee the ad funded future of the medium.

However this exhibition should have more accurately called ScreenExpo, as there was little of interest to brand, media and advertising people.

I did see a couple of decent talks, particularly the case histories of his own that Grand Visual’s Neil Morris presented. I didn’t go to the Love Content awards and drinks, which I should have done, as my glass was full already.

What the organisers of this event and other spokespeople for the so called digital signage industry need to understand better are the needs and processes of advertisers and their agencies.

I saw a misguided comment last week that if a few media buying companies didn’t have a stranglehold, DOOH advertising would sell better. Advertisers in general pay agencies for their expertise in what media works and at what price.

Just because you put a screen up and write a ratecard doesn’t mean it’s going to be an advertising “must buy”. More often than not the DOOH business models I have looked at work backwards from what money they need to make and set advertising rates accordingly, rather than where their “media” will fit in brand’s communications plans and the value it offers.

Screen Media Expo has become almost wholly a trade show for screen manufacturers and software companies inventing solutions for business problems that don’t generally exist. Of course if you’re a retailer or venue owner digital signage will improve your sales and save you money, therefore you’ll be happy to pay for installation and service, won’t you?

After five or six years of attending ScreenNotMediaExpo, this will be my last.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

People are entitled to their opinions, and those vociferous minorities who attack advertising are no different. I saw a comedian once who considered working in advertising less ethical than being a landmine salesman, not funny to most, riotous whooping from a few radicals.

In my opinion the latest ad-attack, including the campaign to ban all outdoor ads in Bristol, gifted oxygen by the Guardian, is less freedom of speech and more ignorant ranting.

The full article is here, but the writer Ian Lawson does not acknowledge he is recycling the thoughts of a certain semi-anonymous, street-artist-to-the-stars and presumed Bristol ex-pat, citizen Banksy.

Patronising most of the population with the assumption they can’t make choices and are natural lemmings is one thing. Stating that Outdoor advertising should be exterminated because it can’t be chosen or tuned-out-of is another.

The logical conclusion to that argument would be no shop-window displays, no branding on packaging, logos removed from outdoor clothing.  Most importantly however, it would lead to less choice for people on what they could buy and the disappearance of many things people find useful and entertaining. Councils would lose bus shelters and rental income from billboard sites, inevitably leading to increases in rates or more cuts to local services. Public transport fares would rise and Piccadilly Circus would be a drab-backdrop to many a shared photo-opportunity, anti-stunt patrols would roam.

The next step would be banning TV advertising; after all you can choose the channel but not the brands within the breaks. Subscription, like an increased license fee, could of course fill the funding gap, but I believe most people get the relationship and derive benefit from the free, advertising funded programmes they enjoy indulging themselves in Britain’s number one social activity, whatever the cultural elite would prefer them to be doing.

Banksy and some others like Stik, might create thought-provoking street-art that benefits city landscapes, most is gang-related tagging and/or derivative of hip-hop culture and early 80’s New York City Subway graffiti. This inhabits no cultural or moral high-ground, nor purifies the urban vista.

People who would want to see all advertising banned perhaps also want a return to the local economy and a mythical view of the serendipity of rural life, or serfdom and banditry as I might see it.

I hope those grown-ups from the Outdoor Media Centre and the Advertising Association are on  the Front Foot and sharpening their pencils to intelligently, imaginatively and urgently articulate why most advertising including Outdoor, Is Good for You.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

At lunchtime I like a sandwich, if I am not enjoying fine-dining at the taxman’s expense. Recently I have been working with a Jackanory of PR’s and one day I asked them where I could get a decent sandwich and a fresh juice. You’d have thought I’d started a game of bullshit bingo.

“There’s a really good tapas place round the corner, the falafel king is fantastic, and the burrito cart is the dogs.” Because PR pixies are always selling dreams, to their clients and the media, their natural instinct isn’t to give you what you want, when they can sell you something better, in their minds anyway.

I wonder what the answers would have been if I’d have asked people from London’s other advertising villages.

Creative team: there’s a supertastic pop-up deli cart under a railway bridge in the East End that sells the best looking stuff, then you can make your own.

TV Buyer: the greasy spoon in Gray’s Inn Road does a top all-day breakfast roll, although make sure you get plenty of filling in the centre and tell him you want a discount or you’ll go to the café in Horseferry Road.

Client: thanks, can you get me what you’re having.

Press buyer: they do a great spread in the Dog and Bollock and I can get you upfront for a small cover charge, or how about a wrap?

Poster buyer: lunch should be taken liquid, I know a place where they keep a barrel for me.

Account director: make sure you get a receipt with delivery included.

TV salesman: we only have food for young adults or upmarket men around here.

Techie: well that depends what day of the week it is and I’m not sure how much it’ll cost. Anyway what do you want a sandwich and juice for, there’s microwaveable pizza and coke in the fridge.

Media agency head: we can guarantee we know where you can buy at the best prices, as long as you pay upfront.

Trade body head: best to organise a committee and agree some standards as a group.

Researcher: after extensive studies, it is fifty-percent more tasty at……..

Social media guru: have you looked at what’s trending on Twitter or what your 10,000 friends like?

Art director: in a monochrome world I recommend vibrant red tomato and golden butter on black-rye, here borrow my pantone chart.

Poster seller: I’ve got the best sites at all major junctions, where are you? I’ll tell you how hard it is to spot, and you get cashback.

Radio buyer: I frequently recommend locally-sourced old-spot pork, if it’s am the crackling’s particularly good.

Trade magazine journalist: I’ve had two calls about that already this morning, let me speak to a few more contacts and I’ll get back to you with an exclusive deal, might take a few days.

Barter specialist: I’ve got access to hotel rooms, you can get something on room service, pay 80% of the value in cash and I’ll take what’s left in the office fridge.

Strategic planner: let me chew on that one.

Copywriter: it should be Jooce & SandWiches.

Man with short back and sides, a bushy beard and brown shoes: I can create for you a fully interactive, holographic hunger satisfying experience, and all you need is the latest iPad and a couple of year’s wait.

Consultant: I can get you the best value if you tell me what you want, and I’ll show you a great way to make it marginally better, for a fee.

Teenage son: I don’t eat sandwiches

Wife: I’ll make you something, and I won’t mention when I want to watch America’s Next Top Model when football’s on live TV.

Young son: why not go to McDonalds

Good idea, Big Mac and Shake it is.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

We all know how media and advertising people love nothing more than gazing at their own navels.

Mad Men has garnered more ink than in the broadsheets and media press than any minority interest show I can think of, hats off to the Sky Atlantic PR team.

With an opening episode audience of less than 100,000, that’s around 1% of Sky’s subscribers, hardly a family favourite.

Personally I love the show and even with Sky+ I watched the ad breaks last night to see some original 60’s ads, good stunt that too.  American Airlines had a winner with a prime product placement, at least three name-checks before the first commercial interlude.

What interested me, as part of the media herd, was how few ads were shown compared to the norm. Presumably to keep up a fine illusion, Sky chose to only run “classic” ads, and they were in short supply.

I also think it’s interesting than on one hand most of the media are relentlessly painting Rupert Murdoch a satanic red hue and shouting not-fit-and-proper, with another stroke of their pens and pointers, they give one of his TV shows acres of print and pixels.

All the signs are that ad revenue is of rapidly diminishing importance to Sky, within its concrete business model. If they can keep on securing rights to the shows the media want to talk about, their subscriber base will keep growing and sticking. This will eventually mean they’ll be able to drop all those irritating interruptive ads, like they have in F1 races.

Adlads and Laddettes beware; you’ll be needing to make mini-films as fresh-looking as they did in the 60’s, well at least the minority of ads that weren’t 2C’s in a K, if you want more than a few thousand views on YouTube, or £100K’s worth of X-Factorphiles.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

A colleague and I had a debate last week with some business people about brand and retail marketing.

We believe there is a simple truth and captivating narrative about their brand which needs to be promoted more. They believe they have the balance about right with their advertising, promoting the brand and directly driving sales.

Econometrics and ROI were mentioned and we got measurably tired.

Ever since Dave Trott was a boy, and Lord Leverhulme made his famous quote, battles have raged about advertising’s effect, how it drives sales and what is wastage.

I am a student of Jeremy Bullmore and his story (which I can’t find online) about why Coke consistently see’s off cheaper, taste-test winning sugar-water makes me believe the brain has space for brand imagery to ferment.

Jonathan Durden also tells me most media targeting is only like shooting for the plughole when there are lots of reasons to stir-up the rest of the water in the sink.

Back to our brand chat, they had recently run a big Outdoor campaign, I hadn’t noticed.

I hope we’re not seeing creative and media brains pandering to the fame of bigger, fatter, digitally shaped Outdoor ad campaigns, at the expense of other more traditional Outdoor formats. Often a budget is allocated to the Outdoor channel by the media-nerd’s channel planning sausage machine. If someone wants to pay £50K a fortnight for a share of time on a single LED screen, however busy the road is, this likely works against the many thousands of posters (6 sheet) and billboards (48 sheet) needed to deliver one of Outdoor’s simple, brutal strengths, ubiquitous coverage. Almost everyone sees broadcast Outdoor campaigns, like product placement in your life.  If the mix of word, image and colour is eye-catchingly simple, the brand will be stored in the brain, waiting to be triggered into action.

I also understand posters, particularly nationwide packs of 6 sheets, are better value now than they’ve been in a decade.

Outdoor struggles to shine in most econometric models, mainly because the time at which it’s noticed is hard to measure and people often don’t remember, or are unaware, they’ve even seen it.

I hope the ad industry’s love of all things new at the expense of the old isn’t leaving some brands’ health at the mercy of the ROI mob, and to the detriment of staying dry at the bus stop when it’s raining.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

This summer, if you have a café in the UK and put a sign in your window advertising your special Olympic breakfast, a government backed jobs-worth will make you take it down, for infringing Olympic commercial rights.

However, if you’re an advertiser wanting to book a poster site within a javelin throw of an Olympic venue, that’s OK whether you’re an official sponsor or not, according to a barely remarked upon Brand Republic story last week, “LOCOG to open Olympic outdoor auction to non-sponsors.”

If I was a sponsor who’d been sold an exclusive opportunity I might think I’d been dealt a blow below-the-belt, particularly if I’d paid a premium rate, over an extended period of time, with a substantial down-payment. Although directly competitive brands have been barred from within the so called exclusion zones around Olympic venues, I’d still want to know under what terms these billboards are being knocked-out at now.

Outside of the exclusion zones outdoor advertising was always available to all brands after sponsors got first dibs, although most will have been made to pay for twelve-weeks of display, rather than the more usual fortnight.

Again if I was any of those brands whose media buyers had won them space in the auction rounds, I’d want to know that opportunistic advertisers with a bag-of-cash on the table right now can’t buy similar sites to those I’d secured, but for shorter periods, at a heavily discounted price.

It looks to me that if you wanted ads on buses or taxis, and some special locations, the auction did you well. Otherwise you may have paid platinum, for what have turned out to be, bronze, silver and gold.

If auctions are the future for buying and selling premium media space, I am a cat.

Although in fact I am Wobbly “the Cat” Clark, but that’s an old-story

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

In 2012 London will have an unprecedented profile as a World city, and not just for the Olympic main event.

This doesn’t just mean there will be more people in the City, a planner told me an extra 500,000 people every day during the games, global media channels will be focussed on the UK more than ever before.

In order to secure the Olympics for London the government agreed to impose draconian restrictions on advertising and to prevent traders seeking to exploit trademarked Olympic logos and terms. Official sponsors will be protected from other brands attempting to ambush games visitors with unauthorised marketing.

Surely they can’t stop your local Little Chef from selling an Olympic breakfast.

Diamond Geezer has an opinion on what he calls this commercial quarantine, and links to maps of exclusion zones around many venues nationwide.

I know why the government have done this and I believe sponsor’s mega-investments should deliver commercially.

But, in reality this is a fantastic opportunity for UK advertising and communications agencies to showcase their creative and practical skills, particularly against a backdrop of  South American and Scandinavian talent currently garnering rapture in the competitive arena of international creative and media awards.

Exclusion zones don’t respect what people can get on their personal media devices like mobiles and tablets, with content tailored to their locality.

Posters outside fairly narrow exclusion zones around event venues can take any legal advertising, as long as copy doesn’t infringe Olympic trademarks.

Routes to and from the games will no doubt have higher than usual numbers of the transport Stasi, no doubt augmented by Olympic enforcement jobsworths but social-fuelled stunts should still be encouraged.

Current London cultural hotbed, Hackney Wick, a javelin throw from the Olympic Stadium, is inside the main exclusion zone but surely the leftfield won’t worry about that.

I am not a creative and my imagination doesn’t always get out enough, but here are a couple of my ideas.

T-Shirts with logos printed in invisible ink, activated by loud cheering and clapping.

Projections on the Moon, outside (I think) the UK government’s own exclusion zone.

Here’s a list of major London events for 2012, and here’s a legal warning to advertising buyers.

From  the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June to the Paralympic Games and West Ham’s return to Premiership football in August, London with be a hot media-property Worldwide, I am looking forward to the UK’s famed creative industries stepping-up to the plate.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

It is that time of year when I renew my mobile phone contracts, business and family.

Apart from a brief, unsatisfactory foray with T-Mobile some years back I have always used Vodafone exclusively.

Two years ago I struggled to get the upgrades team to stop contract hard-sells, all upfront discounts and back-end stings. I contacted Vodafone’s UK office and asked someone whether they thought I was being treated fairly as a customer. The obviously didn’t because they agreed an off-ratecard package deal for me, taking into account my overall usage and spending. Last year they advised me to deal with upgrades first and they would adjust the pricing (down) afterwards. That worked fine too.

This year I called the upgrade’s sharks and it took no longer than two minutes to fall-out with them, them not listening and me cynically suspicious.

I sent an email to the Vodafone’s UK office and got a reply from the overseas customer support team, English marginally more colloquial than a Nigerian email scamster.

No joy there then, I decided on new tack.

I called Vodafone’s upgrades team and played charming, in fairness the person on the other end was dead friendly.

I asked, she made offers, we did the deals, and I’m actually happy.

I didn’t go for phased discounting and everything is for a maximum of 12 months, even the contract including the brand new Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone.

Many service companies accept high customer churn as a business reality. They might have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programme they like to brag about in their marketing, but in practice they prefer their customers to take what they’ve got, or bugger-off.

Most people don’t want conversations with a brand but they may need to talk to support and sales teams. If the service is less than good, social media networked word-of-mouth will encourage ever more people to switch brand loyalties, regardless of polished, high-impact ad campaigns.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

Last Thursday evening I was at the Science Museum for Clear Channel Outdoor’s latest marketing initiative, to do with changing the digital word to Play and their rollout of more Play media.

Outside for a cigarette, a man approached. Talking out of the corner of his mouth he offered me a slim brown envelope. There would be more where that came from in exchange for me writing articles about corruption in Outdoor Advertising. I would receive increasingly fatter packages as the published word-count passed certain volumes, and a big payoff for selling-on tales to proper journalists.

Then I woke up with a hangover and a copy of Campaign beside the bed.

As it was only 9.30 am, I had time for a cover-to-cover read.

Page twenty and media journalist Jeremy Lee’s column was headed “Outdoor has been caught out yet again and it’s getting tiring” (subscription needed)

The previous evening’s subterfuge must have been a set-up, an attempt to find out if I was a real Outdoor professional. If I had taken a bung, I would be labelled an Outdoor Insider, with a sacred bond, unable to be an Untouchable. If I had declined, I couldn’t be close enough to the Godfathers, not even a trusted Capo, just a foot-soldier too far down the command chain to dish any real dirt.

As it happened I had paid two quid for a copy of the Big Issue and chased off the bloke with my tickling-stick.

Back to this morning, I’d had a heart-starter and put on my bothered head, I got thinking.

What Jeremy is indirectly saying, not for the first time, is that Advertisers, who bankroll media spend in the first place, have just come down from the trees to be repeatedly seduced by the juicy Outdoor apple, while a snake in the grass runs absolutely free.

Is it really possible an army of media auditors, forensic accounts and procurement experts are as unaware of the Outdoor Advertising business model as a newspaper proprietor is to his journalist’s investigative techniques? I don’t think so and my nose might be red but it is not as long as Pinocchio’s.

I expect the letters page of Campaign to contain measured responses to Jeremy’s polemic. Any frivolity in these statements could be interpreted as disrespect for their clients and lead to much wasted time for all parties involved. Time that would be better spend on devising smart campaigns able to deliver the outcomes brands need and want, at the right cost.

Fraud should always be dealt with by the law, however, innuendo and finger-pointing often leads to investigations liable to stifle media spend, the lifeblood of most advertising, and not just Outdoor.

Jeremy can and should write about what he likes but I think this particular record is broken and should be swapped for a CD.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk

I saw an interesting article titled Twitter and TV Get Close to Help Each Other Grow, what is being termed, the symbiotic relationship between TV and Social Media.

Dual-screening, as it is now called, was first discussed from a position of it distracted the audience from watching TV, and the ad breaks. People, particularly the young, would be doing stuff like surfing the web on a laptop while the telly was on and texting their mates. Therefore TV commercials would be less effective.

Well I was involved in some research many years ago into whether people remembered TV ads better when they were in commercial breaks of shows they were most involved with. One of the interesting facts that came out of an initial survey was that less than twenty percent of all TV viewing was wholly-uninterrupted. People could and would be reading, talking, ironing, or even getting an old-fashioned, South Park example here, while in the room with the TV on. The stereotypical view of a family glued to the goggle-box never has been strictly true since the novelty factor wore off, before even I was born. Therefore dual-screening has to date had a limited effect on the viewing of TV.

With social media now the main use of many people’s mobile devices, this has been flipped by techies and media experts as an opportunity to get people to participate, to play along with or complement what’s on the TV screen. An excellent opportunistic approach and I look forward to developments that will improve my TV experience, as long as it doesn’t involve seeing different versions of ads.

Why is dual-screening not talked about in the context Outdoor media?

Many “Marketers Had Their Eyes on the Third Screen” back in 2007, but the main thinking was serving-up some kind of ads, just as irritating at online pop-ups, through the small-screen mobile web, or dicking about with clunky Bluetooth downloads. Just shows how four years in the new economy is like forty in the old.

But if someone is on public transport, a passenger in a car or grazing at a leisure destination, they might be more up for dual screen participation than when at home watching their choice of TV programme. For example, I noticed this idea for Debenhams virtual pop-up stores last week.

Dual-screening as a route for marketing communications shouldn’t be limited to couch-potatoes.

On a slightly different note, everyone tells me I should get an iPad as I would love it. To me a tablet is for people who like to eat, a notebook for those who like to cook. I have a smart-phone for gobbling and a Dell Duo for conception.

You can read my other blogs and about what I do here: www.balloo.co.uk