The proliferation of increasingly sophisticated mobile handsets offers the opportunity for a variety of interactive campaigns. To succeed, mobile engagement requires an integrated marketing mindset and attention to scalability, reliability and security.
By Sanjay Manandhar
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| This Kodak LED display in New York’s Times Square is powered by a picture-to-screen application that uses email to submit images and SMS (Short Message Service) to call up the approved images to the giant display. This “Smile Gallery” campaign by Kodak is free to the public — send pictures to kodak@aerva.com. |
Digital signage and mobile handsets are made for each other, but outdoor displays and mobile interactivity are particularly well-matched. Working together with mobile, the attention-grabbing outdoor display becomes a dynamic call to action. With such a successful pairing, it is critical that both mobile and outdoor displays be consistent parts of a marketing mix — “a holistic approach,” according to Bill Donabedian, managing director of Fountain Square Management Group, which manages a 28-by-42-foot outdoor LED display in Cincinnati.
Holistic Marketing
Integrated marketing or the “holistic approach” is easier said than done. For one thing, marketing groups as well as agencies historically have had different teams handle various marketing avenues with labels such as TV, Print, Radio, Outdoor, Internet, Mobile, etc. These demarcations have to be dissolved: End users don’t see these distinctions and are expecting marketing messages to be more integrated. Accordingly, some brands and innovative agencies are starting to integrate various marketing methods and busting the proverbial “silos.”
Kodak, which is powering a digital LED in New York’s Times Square and clearly has marketing programs in all imaginable media, says it integrates the outdoor display in Times Square as part of its overall marketing mix — not as a distinct, one-off display. Hence, it was easy for Kodak to introduce campaigns that integrated mobile and digital out-of-home (as most marketers call the outdoor display) to sharpen the company’s marketing message and enhance its branding.
Mobile Engagement
Hardly anyone leaves home anymore without his or her mobile handset — it’s a very intimate device quite unlike any other. What’s more, these mobile handsets come so feature-rich that they are more than just tools for voice communications — they are typically packed with SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and camera features. The new category of smartphones also allows full browsing, email and many interesting apps.
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| Users sent in photos to an outdoor display in Fountain Square, Cincinnati, running a picture-to-screen application. A sponsorship message appears alongside. |
Mobile handsets by themselves can entertain, engage the users and help communicate with others, but allowing users to interact with an outdoor display adds a new dimension to entertainment, engagement and communication. Providing a call-to-action on the giant outdoor screens for users to collect coupons or sign up for sweepstakes are some of the simpler applications. Multi-user games, text-to-screen, mobile voting, picture-to-screen and even Tweets to the giant screen add much more to enhance the user experience and create a “wow” for the brand and the venue.
Back-end Issues
When high-profile outdoor displays promote their campaigns using mobile engagement, high volume user participation is the goal. It is, therefore, paramount that backend issues like scalability (The application stands up even when many users connect simultaneously), reliability (The applications or campaign continue to perform under user stress) and security (The application or outdoor display is not compromised) become critical.
Users are ingenious in their attempts to test the limits of the system or to use the exposure of a giant outdoor display to advertise their own wares (e.g., sending a picture via a picture-to-screen application showing them wearing a T-shirt advertising their company). So the final must-have is the ability to have system and/or human-moderation capability, especially for user-generated content.
With the proliferation of outdoor displays and increasingly feature-rich mobile handsets, the only limit to the range of marketing campaigns is human creativity. Be prepared for many more interesting and memorable marketing messages and campaigns that connect users and their mobile devices with outdoor displays.
Sanjay Manandhar is the founder of Aerva Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that provides technologies for digital display networks and mobile applications. The company drives networks around the world for customers in industries ranging from schools/universities, bars, clubs, retail, hospitals and doctors’ clinics to sports/entertainment venues. Manandhar and Bill Donabedian, managing director of Fountain Square for Cincinnati Center City Development Corp., shared their experience with mobile engagement in a seminar titled “Utilizing Mobile Calls to Action in Your Digital Out-of-Home Campaign” at Digital Signage Expo 2010.