Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
If you don’t know Joel Fredman Klockar yet, its not surprising, although we, like many who attended New York Digital Signage Week, had a chance to meet this enterprising young man at The DailyDOOH Investor Conference and other events that October week.
Klockar came to visit New York that week, from Stockholm, Sweden, where he is majority owner (with three partners), of Brick Digital Outdoor Media, not to chase investment money – although the contacts made may be helpful for that in the future – but to learn all he could about what other companies are doing, trends, new technologies, and whatever else he could to take back to his staff and especially his clients.
“I’ve already had a meeting with Volkswagen (one of Brick Digital’s major clients) and its people were really interested and asked a lot of questions,” Klockar said during an exclusive interview Tuesday, Nov. 4/14. “I can see that our situation in Sweden is quite unique.”
Klockar is only 25 but he not only has considerable experience, but one of his main focuses is educating the advertising agencies in Sweden about buying digital out-of-home advertising.
“Considerable experience at 25?” you may ask. Well, yes. Klockar, out of Västerås, Sweden, has been an entrepreneur since high school when he ‘got the bug’ when asked to develop a fictional company for the European market. By age 20, he and another friend had launched one digital billboard. But he ran into the problem of not having scale when he went to agencies for advertising.
“They said to come back when we had 25,” he says. But then there came the ‘Ah!’ moment when he looked around and saw that many of the OOH companies in Sweden had only one or two digital billboards. Further, ad agencies didn’t know their locations to be able to make an efficient media buy. If he could group them, Brick could handle the advertising sales.
“We started with 35 billboards and we now represent 128 digital billboards, or 80% of all the digital billboards in Sweden,” he says. “We don’t own any boards ourselves. Those 128 boards are mainly in Stockholm and smaller cities of about 100,000 population in southern Sweden. They vary in size and are mainly on highways and in commercial districts. We don’t handle digital place-based screens, only digital billboards.”
Klockar credits Posterscope and Kinetic for helping the young (three years old) company get rolling with some solid advertising buys, but, as previously mentioned, it’s still a matter of educating ad agencies about what dynamic things can be done with digital screens and how campaigns can be easily planned and bought.
“We’ve had some really great campaigns,” says Klockar. “Our biggest buy across all our boards was for Postkodlotteriet, the lottery. But we’ve had some other really great campaigns that we are really proud of that used most of the screens.
“One was for Ikea where the screens were triggered by the weather. As soon as there was a feeling of spring in the air, Ikea wanted to show its garden furniture, so screens near Ikea outlets would automatically run those ads whenever the temperature was 5 degrees Celsius and there was no chance of rain. It was a very cost-effective campaign.
“Another that we are very proud of was for broadcaster Viaplay. It used over 50 screens across Sweden during the Winter Olympic Games. Viaplay wanted to give the message that it could be accessed anywhere, at any time and on any screen. It needed flexibility to show what it wanted in real time. For example, when the biathlon was delayed because of fog, we were able to immediately update the new starting time for the event.
“The message were changed multiple times each day, and Viaplay had a higher share of voice during the morning drive. If the campaign had been produced similar material as independent productions, it would have had to produce over 2,500 separate messages.
“And Viaplay was happy. It increased its customer base as a result.”
Volkswagen has used the screens numerous times, It sponsored the Swedish ski team during the Olympics, and it ran a weather-triggered campaign, among others.
The Swedish digital screens are now mainly using Scala players and Brick Digital has helped to develop Visual Advertising content management software, which it recommends to screen owners.
By the end of 2015, Klockar hopes that Brick Digital will have a bigger percentage of the traditional out-of-home budget going to the digital screens, “and with customers learning how to use them efficiently, we hope that we’ll be part of more agency plans.”
To date, there has been minimal use of social media in association with the screens, although Twitter was used in conjunction with congratulating the Swedish Ski team.
At this time, Brick Digital is only in Sweden and has no plans for expansion abroad, but, as Klockar says, “I don’t know about in the future. Right now our focuses are outdoor digital billboards and educating buyers on how to use them, as well as working with the billboards being launched by new companies.”
And Klockar himself is continuing on his quest for learning more on behalf of his clients. We fully expect to see him circulating through events come the next London Digital Week in May.
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