Last week, I stood in front of an advertising billboard that recognized my gender, another that recognized my movements, and others that asked me to touch them, text them or otherwise interact, and offered everything from drink recipes to music and 50 percent-off coupons texted to my phone.
The giant ad agency Ogilvy had brought together vendors to show off the latest in what’s known as “out of home” (OOH) advertising, and show how it could all be linked up to other systems such as point-of-sale (checkout stands and other in-store setups), shopper loyalty cards, mobile devices and retail and consumer databases.
The news industry made cameo appearances, too, usually as headlines running along the bottom or the side of a screen — seen as enticements (at least at this conference) to get consumers to stop and look so they would also see the ads.
Ogilvy launched the half-day conference in large part to show off their new Digital Labs in New York, a complement to other ones already in place in cities such as London and Singapore. New York Digital Labs chief Maria Mandel told me they’re planning labs elsewhere, including Rio de Janeiro, and together they’ll help Ogilvy stay abreast of technologies their clients can use to get ever closer to the holy grail of advertising: get a message in front of someone at the exact right moment, get them to buy, and buy again, and even give up some personal info in the process.
Companies showed off mobile technologies that would let you take a picture of a code on a page or billboard and have coupons, info and such sent to a cell phone or a smart phone or even entered directly onto a shopper loyalty card. None of this would surprise many Europeans or Asians, but it seems new here in America. Ogilvy also, Mandel said, has engineers working on new technologies, and may look into licensing or patenting.
It all got me thinking about how news organizations can make the best of it. Some are already experimenting beyond the “we’ll provide headlines for screen” stage. CNN, for example, has operated a billboard in Times Square that lets users text messages and see them appear below the news. Reuters and other companies have let people send photos and messages directly to screens and lighted news crawls on the sides of buildings.
But what other ways can a news organization use the technologies to seize the initiative and get people interested and engaged — and help support the news operation in the process? How many companies are inventing applications specifically for news and information, rather than having that info as an adjunct to marketing?
Is the best business model to just be ready to provide the news, whether text or images with audio, on screens around the world? Perhaps a more powerful and long-lasting model, which would bring in more revenue and control over time, would be to build applications that feed different stories to consumers depending on information they provide about themselves.
Motion-sensing applications could be useful beyond enabling someone to select a headline or type of story. How about a virtual tour of a Baghdad hotel in the news, or ways to navigate through virtual financial corridors to better grasp how spending in a mall affects a pocketbook — or the economy. Perhaps a scientific tour of some of the newest inventions relevant to a person’s locale (or some other characteristic chosen by the user). And, with creative business thinking, there are ways to imagine advertising and other offerings that jibe nicely with the editorial content.
I’m not saying I’ve modeled any of this out — or that anyone really could, since it’s all such new ground. And it’s hard to guarantee that the development costs will justify the ultimate profits.
News organizations have done much groundbreaking work with technology, as heralded recently by the Knight-Batten awards. But we are in an era in which it pays for editors and editorial thinkers to consider any and all technologies, including ones that today are primarily thought of as marketing vehicles.
