Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
The Out-of-home Video Advertising Bureau (OVAB) European chapter was announced today and although we have a couple of reservations and a few words of warning we are VERY excited about what this organisation might achieve going forward.
First of all, OVAB Europe is at the moment pretty **German centric. That’s not an issue nor surprising given the founder members…
- Neo Advertising
- Invidis Consulting
- ECE Flatmedia
- IBM Deutschland
- PHILIPS
- NEC Display Solutions
- Minicom Advanced Systems Ltd.
**Minicom and Neo will argue that they are in Switzerland but this is primarily being driven out of Neo in Hamburg and the rest of the founders are German based.
There are plans of course to have coverage in each European country and with the likes of Neo Advertising helping to drive this that probably won’t be too much of a problem – nor will it take that long for it to get sorted.
There are probably two main reasons why OVAB Europe has come about – the first and foremost is obviously that OVAB in the US has done such a fantastic job and secondly because POPAI, especially in Germany has not!
POPAI is as good as the local people in each country who run it (and the commercial organisations who support it) – in the the UK for example, not bad, in Germany absolutely AWFUL!
OVAB Europe will compete squarely with POPAI as it aims to be ‘the first European centric representative of the interests of providers and suppliers of audio visual media at POS and POI’ as well as the ‘central point of contact and information source … to the existing digital out-of-home industry’
The Board of OVAB Europe consists of Dirk Hülsermann (Chairman or President), Ronni Guggenheim (Vice Chairman) and Richard Malley (Treasurer).
Dirk of course is from Neo Advertising, Ronni from Minicom and Richard (probably the least known of the three) is from ECE Flatmedia (ECE are a shopping mall owner and previous Neo customer).
We spoke to Dirk this morning and he told us “Today marks an important date in the still short history of the digital out-of home industry in Europe. With OVAB Europe, an industry with such a tremendous future in front of it now receives the representation it deserves by the entire industry”
Have no doubt that this is an exciting announcement and just the first of many. At the moment OVAB Europe has no relevance to the media planners, buyers, ad agencies, retailers and the like AND that obviously needs to change.
Two of the founder members are ‘media owners’ which is a great start but there are other members whose interest is purely technical (and commercial) of course.
OVAB Europe now needs to quickly demonstrate what membership would mean to other media folks and get them on board.
About Richard Malley
Richard Malley was previously Managing Director of the YOC AG in Berlin. Since its founding, he was responsible for the strategic development of the company and for national and international distribution. Before that he worked at CIAO.COM AG in Munich in its International Business Development/Distribution group. After completing his studies for his BA in international business/marketing in New York and Brussels, he worked at Kynast AG in New York and subsequently at Emmerson Communications AG in Frankfurt/Main. Richard Malley is responsible at flatmedia for the distribution and strategic business development.
November 18th, 2008 at 16:16 @719
We follow everyday DailyDOOH as the main website for interesting contents reporting about the DOOH industry.
We would consider this post an open space to confront each other and express our point of view about your article.
Today we have read this interesting post, and we were really surprised that you have talked only about POPAI UK and POPAI Germany, without saying anything about POPAIdigital Italy.
POPAIdigital has started work in the digital out of home industry before even POPAI UK.
We every day work to enhance the culture about retail digital technologies by organizing conferences, roundtables, publications and making available a lot of information by our website.
We organized last May the first conference in Italy about this new engaging media, titled “Who’s afraid of Digital Signage?”, and next February we will have another new event also.
We every day represent the interests of providers and suppliers of audio visual media at POS and POI and in Italy we are the central point of contact and information source for the digital out of home industry in our country.
I would invite you to visit our website, http://www.popaidigital.it to take a look of what I’m talking about.
Best regards
November 18th, 2008 at 17:55 @788
Simone, thanks for the comment. Your English is 1,000 times better than any of the Italian we have in the office so thank you for taking the time to write in.
This post was ostensibly about the creation of OVAB Europe – we threw in the mentions of POPAI as a comparison and to point out the competition that POPAI now has.
Our other point was that POPAI is as good as the people in each country who run it – we can only speak for our experience with the UK (was awful, been getting better) and Germany (appalling and we think that the majority of the German industry would agree with us).
By the way we gave your event back in May a lot of exposure – http://www.dailydooh.com/archives/1688