Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
The full-house audience at The DailyDOOH Media Summit last week during London Digital Signage Week had a fast presentation from Alex Matthews, who joined JCDecaux SA (Euronext Paris: DEC) from BBH (alongside Rick Burgess) to jointly head up its London based digital creative hub called ‘JCDecaux Dynamic’.
Matthews has 20 years experience as a technologist developing campaigns, products and services in advertising and media, working in startups, digital and creative agencies.
He explained that Dynamic is a new global content and services division focused specifically on what goes on the screen. “We’re here to make dynamic, contextual ads easy for brands,” Matthews said.
Online advertising had a 19% year-over-year increase in terms of digital ad spend.
“All those ads are contextually-driven,” Matthews said. “Why has there been so little dynamic digital out-of-home until now? Dynamic DOOH has been a bit of a mess. Dynamic’s role is to make it easy for dynamic ads to be made simply for DOOH.”
Whilst making a brief mention of SmartBRICS, a new in-house planning and buying tool that allows JCDecaux to plan at a frame level by audience, selecting the right frames for the product, demographic and budget of each client, he then went on to discuss in more detail SmartCONTENT, a content management system for dynamic ad delivery of DOOH campaigns (announced here during London Digital Signage Week).
“Using SmartCONTENT requires no technical experience,” said Matthews. “It’s web-based with a simple, intuitive interface. In terms of management, you can check whether you’ve uploaded your materials in the right size and format, change it as necessary, and then set it for specific locations, weather, daypart, environment and more. You can embed Twitter or Instagram and when you see posts that you like, you can drag-and-drop them in. And you can take custom data feeds and add them in the vary the creative.”
“The CMS system makes dynamic DOOH ads contextually relevant.”
Matthews then went on to show how British Airways, Tesco, and others have been using the system.
Not surprisingly there was a lot of real interest in this tool from almost everyone in the audience – a tool by the way, that JCDecaux has no plans to release to the wider world.
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