DailyDOOH

Russ Curry, Ministry of New Media

Thursday’s mornings Viscom Paris conference had a title even longer than a Welsh village name, which meant that the focus was a bit vague but the aim of the meeting was to cover the questions to be asked and answered before embarking on a DS project.

The Panel consisted of Marc Ballu, CEO of Retail Media; Lucille Beneschi, Communication Content Manager at Nexans; Guillaume de la Tour of Bluefox; Sabine Massin, Digital Signage Sales at Infotrafic and Emmanuel Pottier of Clear Channel France, and the discussion was chaired by consultant Pierre Reitlinger.

Marc Ballu has a lot of real ‘hands-on’ retail experience, dealing with some of the toughest  major supermarket chains in the country, such as Auchan, Monoprix, Géant Casino and Carrefour as well as car parts chain Feu Vert. Each has its own business model – in some cases Retail Media is just a supplier, and the network is financed by the store as part of its communication programme (e.g. Monoprix) or by twisting its suppliers arms to advertise (Géant Casino) – in others it is funded by Retail Media who then sells ad space (e.g. Auchan Music, which is now profitable). Marc stressed that good content is fundamental to the success of a network – it’s essential to have interesting content to attract audience in order to be able to sell ad space. And the key to having a successful integration is to have a CEO who believes in the project and who knocks heads together to make sure that all departments cooperate – otherwise you get stuck in turf-wars.

With Clear Channel’s outdoor focus, Emmanuel Pottier was more concerned with federating local communities and involving them in the media. Clear Channel is currently working with local associations with a cultural bias in Nantes and is also testing in Bordeaux. He emphasised the need to create value for citizens with ‘geo-localised’ information, and places the value of the content above technology – “It’s all very well having the best of the latest technology, but its worth nothing if public isn’t interested. We need a new approach to creating content – we would like to organise a round-table of local interest groups to agree on a common approach, with the objective of creating a network which is useful for everyone.”

For Pottier, the Business Model is quite simple – it’s up to Clear Channel to generate income from advertising and when the money is there, then its just a question of sharing it up between the various stakeholders… which pre-supposes of course that the content works !!!!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 07:36 @358 and is filed under Scuttlebut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.