Office Media Network is expanding the marketing opportunities of the Wall Street Journal Office Network to include more live demonstration tie-ins, said Jim Harris, CEO.Our take:
The two-year-old network of 630 office buildings in 14 major cities stems from an investor partnership and exclusivity agreement with New Corp.'s Dow Jones and features advertising-sponsored WSJ content.
As the network prepares to expand into Miami this quarter, OMN has amassed 800,000 daily viewers, Harris said.
An Arbitron/Edison Media Research study conducted last fall concluded that 97 percent of office workers were spending an average of three-and-a-half minutes per day reading the news. That's the captive audience OMN has been chasing and, in many cases, luring to its screens.
Much like Captivate Network and even the original incarnation of China's Focus Media, Office Media Network makes much of the fact that their audience is primarily businesspeople who have higher earning potential and more expendable money than the average joe. In addition, the audience for their digital signage network is relatively captive, either waiting for elevators or waiting to meet people in building lobbys. While they've been quiet about how this translates to performance in terms of ad sales, their planned expansion would seem to suggest that either a) they need a larger footprint to get said advertisers to take interest, or b) the current network is generating significant revenue (and maybe is even profitable), and theoretically a larger network would thus generate more revenue.