SignageWire

The secret of place-based media

Published on: 2015-02-05

Having worked for Hotel Networks, Juke Box Network, Burly Bear (college) and Captivate Networks, Mitch Oscar shares some of his insights on the power of place-based media:

 As an acknowledgment of rite of passage, the place basers have successfully established a trade association, the Out Of Home Video Advertising Bureau (OVAB); their annual percentage growth is only second to the Internet; and most recently, consummated a measurement deal with Nielsen to produce monthly pocketpieces utilizing components of third-party provided gross venue traffic, presence in zone, notice-ability that will be coupled with primary Nielsen research conducted by telephone that would ascribe demographics and other important information to the gross audience estimates.

Over the years I’ve consulted for a number of place-based companies, such as Hotel Networks, Juke Box Network, Burly Bear (college) and Captivate, and taken meetings with myriads of others. A word of caution. Scale is great. Metrics are even better. Don’t get me wrong. It is what the media community always clamors for. But in my opinion, it’s the place in place-based media that is of primary importance to the marketer. The ability to connect with a community in a specific location and own the space.

In my estimation, place-based media offers a value proposition unique to our media community — and I cannot impress upon its members the significance of owning an environment for a marketer to share with the inhabitant for the period of time they cohabitate.

Our take:

Digital or not, place-based media does have the advantage of place-specificity.  Of course, digital also adds time-specificity and a host of other tools as well, but that's secondary to the argument above.  In addition, while mobile marketing has received even more hype than the digital signage market of late, the simple fact is that mobile devices are all different, people use them differently, and they have different capabilities.  There is a large degree of consumer control which makes them (in our opinion) poorly suited for general marketing purposes.  Not so with digital signs and static forms of place-based advertising.

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