Dave Petschack Discusses doohfa
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
When we wrote last month about the new product doohfa, which provides off-the-shelf dynamic content for Digital Out-Of-Home networks, we decided to find out more about it, the company and the people behind it, so interviewed Dave Petschack, CEO and founder of OFA Marketing Production in Chippendale, Australia.
Neice Waddington, Dave Petschack
Petschack began his career 30 years ago, working in ad agencies, mainly in the creative and production side, until his entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and he founded OFA Marketing Production in 1996.
“We are a service and creative business, working for many brands and putting a lot of them, such as Land Rover, Revlon and Universal Pictures on Out-of-Home media across Australia,” says Petschack.
“We were seeing gaps in the way companies were using OOH and DOOH, so when our broadcast client Channel Nine asked us if we could find a way to simplify using social marketing with DOOH, we produced doohfa about 12 months ago. It’s a web application that’s simple to use, and while Channel Nine was initially interested in using it in relation to sports scores, we’ve now been using it for all types of clients who want to incorporate Instagram or Twitter or any social media into their content.
“In Australia, all the main players are rolling out DOOH because they see that it’s dynamic and it engages consumers. But until recently, they’ve been grappling on how to make social media work for them. Although doohfa has only recently launched, we’ve had 10 different activations so far.
“Because it’s a web platform, clients can get the material, curate it, approve, and post it and it can be on its DOOH boards or screens in seconds. We provide a doohfa template so the client can see how it will look and can set parameters as to what he wants.”
doohfa (ie. Digital Out-of-Home For All) can be used on any size indoor or outdoor digital screen – “anything that has a media player,” says Petschack – and for anything from sports scores (which obviously don’t have to be curated) to corporate messages, campus info and much more. As we wrote previously, when doohfa was used at a recent arts festival, it delivered over 2,000 Instagram images to the digital screen in a five hour period.
If used on an advertising loop where the client has one ad out of eight, for example, with doohfa, the new social media content can overlay the ad originally scheduled.
OFA Marketing Production provides the information, training and support associated with doohfa. Pricing is in two parts. One is the annual licencing fee. There’s a sliding scale, and, obviously, a short term fee for, eg. a festival or other event held only once a year. Second is the activation fee.
“It’s web based and hosted in the cloud, and we’ll licence it around the world,” says Petschack, who works with business partner Neice Waddington, operations director, who takes the lead on doohfa. Waddington also has a background in advertising, creative and film production.
“There’s no installation needed, no great technical knowledge needed,” Petschack says. “It’s off-the-shelf and, we believe, simpler than anything else out there for using social media content on DOOH.
“At the moment, doohfa is only a small part of OFA Marketing Production’s business, but we can foresee it becoming a major focus for us in the next 12 months.”
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