DailyDOOH

DowJones and the Wall Street Journal admittedly beat us to the punch yesterday with the announcement that JCDecaux‘s airport advertising unit and BAA Ltd. jointly agreed to end their advertising agreement – but it doesn’t really seem to be the end of the two working together.

Under the agreement with BAA, which operates the U.K.’s Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports, JCDecaux Airport provided advertising for seven U.K. airports, and it still holds the U.K. advertising contracts for London Luton airport, Eurotunnel and the Gatwick Express train service, the companies said.

That current agreement, made in 2006, was scheduled to end in April, 2010. However, a process to structure a new contract will commence shortly, the two companies said in a joint statement to Dow Jones.

What that means is uncertain.

Earlier this month, Heathrow launched 47 ‘Power Poles’ designed by JCDecaux Airport. The Power Poles, which enable passengers to charge up their mobile phone, laptop, netbook or other electronic devices completely free of charge, also allow their first sponsor, Samsung, to display its products. These Power Poles represent an investment by BAA of over £300,000 in research, development, production and installation to develop.

The ‘Power Poles’ are positioned in the departure lounges and gate areas of Heathrow terminals 1, 3, and 4, reaching 100% of the departing airport audience. (Easy to use, all customers need to use the ‘Power Poles’ are their own chargers.)

Those travellers – about 140 million flying in and out of London annually – are of great interest to JCDecaux. In March, JCDecaux formed a new division called JCDecaux London, a cross-divisional initiative spanning key sites on roadside and across JCDecaux Airport’s London airports. Under David Lambert as director, the division is to promote its entire portfolio of Première, roadside, airport, street furniture and StreetTalk poster sites as a way to reach Londoners and to follow the travelers in their moves.

With BAA and JCDecaux so intricately linked it seems unlikely that there has been a falling out. At the moment, we don’t know if the JCDecaux and BAA want a new, more extensive agreement to replace their current deal, or what’s up. But we intend to find out!

InAVate reports rather nicely on ‘Paper Thin Speakers Aimed At Signage Applications‘…

Talking posters are set to hit the streets as researchers from Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute aim to mass produce poster-size, paper thin speakers for just $20 (€15) each. Rolls of the paper speakers have already been produced in Taiwan and the Institute claims they will start to be used in cars from next year.

The $20 sheets will be 8.5” by 11” and currently have a frequency response of 500Hz to 200kHz so aren’t really designed for serious listening applications. However, researchers are confident the product will be attractive to advertising agencies enticed by its low cost and potential poster applications.

Layered thin electrodes and a prepolarised diaphragm are sandwiched between two sheets of paper to create the speaker.

The Institute hopes to introduce the new technology at an upcoming exhibition in Taipei and plans to unveil a huge, three-story-high banner that plays music.

Well worth a look at the speaker demo on the site.

Intel’s biggest marketing campaign in nearly 3 years and the first that spotlights the promotion of the Intel brand rather than a microprocessor product launched today Monday 11th May in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany and includes print, online, outdoor and various in-store and online retail campaigns. Global media planning was handled by OMD.

Over the next month the campaign, entitled ‘Sponsors of Tomorrow’ will expand to more than two dozen other countries with Brazil and Japan rounding out the planned markets in the third quarter.

Gail Hall, Intel UK and Ireland marketing director told us “For over 40 years Intel has been delivering tomorrow’s normal, and our new marketing campaign is a way for the world to be made aware of this fact,”

To ring in the new campaign – literally – a group of Intel employees will ring the ceremonial opening bell for the NASDAQ Stock Market at 09:30 a.m. EDT on the 11th May. The ceremony will be broadcast live in Times Square on the video screen of the seven-story NASDAQ tower.

The digital billboard in New York’s Times Square will feature scrolling messages from texters not only there at the famous Manhattan intersection, but those in Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco and other locations where storefront digital signs are linked for a multi-site, international texting experience.

Intel’s campaign Web site also ties the ‘Text for Tomorrow‘ effort together – traditional billboards and bus stop shelters in various markets will bear witty factoids along with the ‘Sponsors of Tomorrow’ slogan next to the Intel master logo.

Interesting quote from Sarah Carroll, Director of Continuous Services, Futuresource Consulting in their recent research ‘Strategic Impact of 3D’ report on the 3D enabled home, she said “Consumers are starting to experience the new wave of 3D technologies at the cinema and through Digital Out of Home advertising, and it won’t be long before there’s a groundswell of demand for 3D within the home”

Bottom line Futuresource Consulting believe that by 2012 more than 10% of US and Japanese households will be ‘3D enabled’ and Western Europe won’t be far behind.

Now more than ever it seems that 3D is coming to the fore, with backing from all major sectors of the entertainment and consumer electronics industries.

3D movie production of course is intensifying and cinemas all over the world are investing in 3D technologies – feedback too, from audiences has been highly positive, with encouraging ticket sales.

Futuresource Consulting however believe that the ultimate goal is to bring 3D to the home. Their report reveals studios, consumer electronics companies, broadcasters, video game vendors and network operators are all poised to power 3D through the consumer diffusion curve.

We’d like to apologise to our readers and our advertisers as earlier today (Saturday 9th May 2009) we had an outage which affected DailyDOOH between 08:00 and 14:50 GMT.

This meant that both our English and Chinese sites were unavailable, and today’s email arrived nearly 3 hours late.

It was due this time to a power distribution problem in the data centre (why do these things seem to happen out of hours at the weekend/luckily it happened at the weekend so disruption was minimised).

Jeff Bell, recently Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of global marketing for the interactive entertainment business, has joined DOmedia, a Columbus, Ohio-based online marketplace for buyers and sellers of out-of-home and alternative advertising media, as chairman.

Bell has more than 20 years experience managing world-renowned brands and award-winning campaigns. His hands-on approach and reputation for innovation are expected to drive the vision of DOmedia and accelerate the growth of the company as he oversees its overall strategic direction.

Bell succeeds company co-founder Rich Langdale as DOmedia chairman. Through his role with NCT Ventures (a primary investor in DOmedia), Langdale will continue to provide counsel and maintain an active presence in the company.

With a goal of the two-year-old company to connect buyers and sellers, Bell is expected to spend a lot of time reaching out to agencies. The online marketplace encourages the creative use of people, places and things (such as place-based digital networks, street teams, sides of buildings and more) to communicate a marketing message. Innovative inventory management tools and in-depth search functionality simplify participation in this growing channel.

At Microsoft, Bell led Xbox to its first profitable year and launched Halo 3, Rock Band, Gears of War, and Guitar Hero II. In addition, his global marketing team oversaw the rapid expansion of the Xbox LIVE community from 4 million to more than 15 million members through the introduction of advertising, a video store including Netflix, and a premium transaction marketplace.

Before joining Microsoft, Bell served as corporate vice-president at DaimlerChrysler, where he was largely credited with helping revitalize the Dodge, Jeep and Chrysler businesses, returning them to profitability in a significant turnaround from 2000 to 2006 with the Dodge Ram, Jeep Wrangler and the Chrysler 300 product launches. He led the Dodge ‘That Thang Gotta Hemi’, ‘Jeep Trail-Rated’ and Chrysler’s ‘Inspiration Comes Standard’ campaigns.

“DOmedia is introducing leading-edge technology to provide efficiency and value to a fragmented advertising and marketing industry,” says Bell. “Working alongside media planners, buyers, media companies and brands to bring creativity and innovation to the industry has long been a professional passion.”

Bell has received numerous accolades and awards throughout his career. Advertising Age named Bell Interactive Marketer of the Year in 2005, Entertainment Marketer of the Year in 2007 and one of Marketing’s Top 50 in 2008. His work on the Halo 3 launch was recognized with the Cannes Grand Prix Titanium Lion Award for best marketing campaign of 2008.

Even the mighty Bill Gerba agrees that we were the first in the industry to harness the power of Twitter.

Twitter started off being a tool for us when sitting in conferences – Barnaby Page from screens.tv questions the usefulness of that BUT you have told us different and that you have found our tweets from events to be useful, interesting, informative and (importantly) fun. This has come from both those at the event and those not present and whilst that feedback continues so too will we.

Aside from conferences, we typically use Twitter on a day to day basis, as it was originally intended, for micro blogging – all of our breaking news goes out on Twitter first – including a lot of gossip and a hell of a lot of backchat!!! Think us strange (or anal) but we REALLY do like to get part of a story up on Twitter first before doing a fuller / more detailed ‘post’ on the DailyDOOH blog itself.

DigSignageToday, signagelive and JohnRyanGlobal soon followed us in our use of Twitter and are all nice and active. Most recently ScalaInc and Symon (in the guise of Steve_Gurley) have joined the fray.

For those organisations that have more than one person tweeting then we have been playing with CoTweet. It might be worthwhile taking a look, see https://cotweet.com/

We believe that the jury is still out on Twitter and its usefulness but having said that we would encourage you to take a look at some of the industry tweets (above) and see if they are of any use to you.

A couple of years ago who would have thought that brands such as Apple and Google would end up playing in the mobile phone space? If you had said to your friends then that you might be carrying around an Apple (or Google branded) phone they would probably have laughed.

Anyway, those who followed our Twitter over last week’s long bank holiday weekend will know that we are all now proud (and very excited) owners of HTC Magic Google branded, Android powered phones courtesy of Vodafone.

A few years ago Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola etc. (and even way before that when Sony and Ericsson were separate businesses) these companies had the phone market to themselves (and although the Apple and Google phone shipments are actually quite insignificant in the total scheme of things) the ‘old’ industry has had to look on in horror as these new upstarts seem to win hands down in getting a lot of the attention.

In our own business we have long debated the merits of different phones. Getting a company standard was important but we could never agree on Blackberry vs Apple vs Google vs A.N Other.

Whilst we are Apple fans big time elsewhere in our lives (and in business) the iPhone just never cut it for us as a useful business tool. Blackberry’s are great for email but not best for web access and a lot of the work that we do is not surprisingly WordPress based.

We held off getting hold of the first generation of Google phones – mainly because we didn’t like the style of the handsets (not the best reason but important to us nonetheless) but the new HTC Magic phones both look and feel good.

We have had the new phones for a week now and have been very happy. There are a few niggles – one of which caused me to lose my 6 digit security pin when trying to do my business telephone banking but on the whole we have been very pleased – our R&D folks have been playing with the phone’s camcorder feature and the instant YouTube upload facility which we have now almost integrated (automatically) into our blog – a very useful tool for our intrepid reporters!!

Anyhow, we know of a couple of very useful Android OOH applications in the works at the moment so watch this space!

JCDecaux SA (Euronext Paris: DEC), announced this week its revenues for the three months ended 31 March, 2009 – revenues decreased by 11.9% to €424.6 million compared to €482.2 million in the same period last year.

JCDecaux said that market conditions further deteriorated in the first quarter of 2009 leading to weaker demand and subsequent fiercer competition in many markets.

Commenting on the first quarter revenues and prospects for 2009, Jean-Charles Decaux, Chairman of the Executive Board and Co-Chief Executive Officer told us “As previously indicated, our first quarter revenues were strongly impacted by the unprecedented economic downturn which has caused advertisers to significantly reduce their advertising spend … Our Billboard business, and for the first time, our Street Furniture business subsequently saw double digit revenue declines, while our Transport division benefited somewhat from newly won contracts”

France experienced some resilience over the quarter with a low double-digit organic revenue decrease while the United Kingdom and Southern Europe recorded significant double-digit organic revenue decrease.

Positive organic revenue growth was recorded in Austria despite a high 2008 comparable.

Easy to be cynical about yet another announcement from a digital network about how green they are BUT hey! it’s one of our industry’s true USPs so why the hell not shout about it. Here we see EnQii powered CARE Media’s new initiative saving advertisers money and helping the environment by going paperless.

Beginning 1st June 2009, the company will offer advertisers the opportunity to provide a direct message to viewers of CARE Media’s programming through a text-in message code – interested viewers who text in receive a 164-character text message instructing them how to access detailed information on the product or service of their choice through the advertiser’s website – cutting back of course on the amount of paper being used to print brochures.

Philip M. Cohen, president and CEO of CARE Media told us “Today’s consumers are getting their information from non-traditional outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, predominately through electronic devices like PDA’s and cell phones,”

He added “We feel that providing a direct response component to our program will provide less clutter in doctors’ offices, give our advertisers quick and measureable access to their audience, while helping the environment by using less paper.”

CARE Media will offer this to advertisers of their three reception room networks: PetCARE TVTM, Women’s HealthCARE TVTM, and KidCARE TVR, at no additional cost.