Secrets of Selling DOOH
Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
Market Works International Inc., a business development and strategic marketing firm specializing in digital out-of-home and the digital signage industry, has released a White Paper entitled, Secrets of Selling DOOH Advertising to Agencies & Advertisers.
Authored by Geri Wolff, president and CEO of Market Works International and well-known conference program chair and media liaison for Digital Signage Expo, the White Paper not only endorses a bright future for ad-funded digital signage, but also suggests ways in which DOOH network operators can best generate advertising dollars in the short-term, citing examples of specific approaches.
The White Paper is based on Wolff’s own years of advertising agency and corporate marketing experience. Her more than 25 years in that sector included responsibility for planning, buying, and training others to plan and buy media, and then responsibility for a $60 million corporate marketing budget for the largest cruise line in the world. She then moved to Market Works International – founded in 1993 in Palm Coast, Florida, with an affiliate office serving Europe based in the Netherlands. – and has been involved in the digital signage industry for the past five years.
“I believe that there is most definitely a future in ad-funded digital signage, but I also believe that, to be successful, the medium needs to be properly positioned,” says Wolff. “DOOH network operators are, in the main, technology experts, but have not had the benefit of experience on the advertising side. This white paper is intended to help them clearly see where the medium ‘fits’ in a marketing plan and how to identify the dollars to support it.”
In addition to containing lessons learned from other media and possible strategies to employ, a few points chosen at random from the White Paper include:
- The industry may have unwittingly created an obstacle in the minds of some advertisers and agency planners/buyers by using, or allowing, potential clients to use a paradigm that compares DOOH to the wrong medium. While DOOH networks look like TV and offer the opportunity to convey advertising messages with the powerful combination of ‘sight, sound and motion’, this perception actually limits the medium’s acceptance at the advertiser and agency level. DOOH Networks are not and should not be positioned as an out-of-home “version” of television, and potential clients should be disabused of this notion.
- Change in the media landscape is important to DOOH operators because it means that advertisers and advertising agency planners/buyers will be receptive to new message distribution channels that target and deliver ‘vertical’ audiences geared to specific lifestyles and interests. And how do we deal with the current lack of metrics? … By delivering marketing solutions, not just advertising.
- An advertising agency professional will be willing to champion a limited trial if the results will truly make him or her a champion to his or her client.
- The old sales adage, ‘find out what they want and sell it to them’, still applies. Because the market for DOOH is still developing, the key is to take the old media paradigm and adjust it to emphasize the strengths and solutions that the DOOH offers, not emphasize the medium itself, because what we really want is for clients to buy DOOH as a solution to their business challenges.
The complete white paper is available at the DSE and DSF websites.
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