DailyDOOH

Gail Chiasson, North American Editor

I originally met Jorg Cieslok, president and CEO of Cieslok Media, about 20 years ago when, newly in Canada, he was already innovating with new outdoor media, and since then, watched his progression through various companies (his own and others), very often at the vanguard of what was developing in the industry.

A couple of years back, he was heading Titan’s Chicago office, and then moved back to Toronto to head that company in Canada, finally buying Titan’s interests in Canada last September.

Today, Cieslok Media is probably the fourth largest outdoor media company is Canada and the company is riding high, with growth, new projects, a new website, and a recent company move to spanking new offices at 204 King St. East in downtown Toronto.

I talked to Cieslok, accompanied by Amanda Dorenberg, marketing director, Friday, to find out what’s new.

“We’re really proud of our new offices,” says Cieslok. “We have 7,000 sq. ft. in a 100-year-old building, open concept for the most part, with our orange-and-black colour scheme.

“Following our recent move with our new digital billboard in the Edmonton, Alberta, market, and our own office move, our next big project is the cleaning and enhancement of the façade of a historical building at Yonge and Gerrard Streets in Toronto, where we are wrapping three sides of the building in digital signage,” says Cieslok. “It will be the first time in Toronto where advertisers could ‘own’ three linked signs to dominate the location, and to really show, eg., creative content moving from one board to the next and then to the third.”

The building was originally a bank, and was recently occupied by Elephant & Castle. The digital signs with 10mm pixel pitch will run 10 advertisers on a loop.

I asked what content management software is behind Cieslok signs and, while several are currently used, “We like CoolSign and will be using that for all our new signs going forward.”

Cieslok, who is also the current chairman of the Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada, owns static as well as digital signs in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton, and this year plans to change several static ones to digital. How many and how quickly will depend on the usual time taken and hassles with obtaining municipal permits.

“We are also interested in acquisitions,” says Cieslok. “But we are only interested in Canada at this stage. We have our hands full with Canada.”

We asked Cieslok if his network of billboards often gets full national campaigns from advertisers.

“Occasionally,” he says. “It all depends on budgets and distribution. “More often we see budgets split between us and other major companies, depending on the markets targeted.”

Cieslok products will be involved in an innovative new campaign that was not quite ready to be revealed when we spoke but should be within a few days. We understand, however, will involve a seven-minute commercial. So there’s definitely more to come!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2014 at 17:00 @750 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.