A marketing revolution is sweeping the nation. Digital Out Of Home Media (DOOH) is coming to a hair salon near you!
New York, NY — The relationship between advertisers and consumers has flipped. Consumers are now in control—they decide when, where, and how they will view content. They're multitasking different media and skipping ads. Advertisers looking to reach affluent consumers have had an increasingly difficult task.
That's one of the many reasons digital out-of-home media is increasingly being sought out by advertisers looking to reach consumers. One of the prime digital out-of-home venues advertisers are now turning to is the salon marketplace. As a medium, place-based digital signage networks command attention—and can't be switched off.
Hair and nail salons offer an ideal environment for advertising and product placement. Salon-based networks provide advertisers with reach, frequency, and attention. According to the Salon Industry Association, 50% of women go to a hair salon every 6 to 8 weeks, and 72.5% visit nail salons every 2 weeks. The average salon client spends between 30 and 60 minutes receiving salon services.
Yes, no matter where you go—the hair salon, the elevator the gas station, the supermarket—They Will Find You, as my local newspaper the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports in Digital Out Of Home: An On-Screen Revolution. You can run, but you can not hide—
It's all around us. Digital Out-of-Home video, or DOOH, is everything from CNN news reports in the elevator, to building-sized advertising in Miami, to snippets of Fox's "House" at the local gas pump.
On a milder scale, it's that tiny video box in the supermarket soup aisle, the silent loop of loan application info on the screen behind your teller at PNC Bank.
"People are accepting that there is advertising everywhere now, and it is our job to make it interesting," said David Leider, CEO of Birmingham, Mich.-based Gas Station TV (motto: "It's always Primetime at the Pump.")
It's not just advertising. Gas Station TV boasts more than 27 million at-the-pump viewers each month. Its chief competitor, Los Angeles-based Outcast, which teamed with rival PumpTop in 2009, reports more than 23 million on-the-go consumers.
How does the DOOH miracle work?
Increasingly, the DOOH model is looking a lot like that of Gas Station TV, whose programming is a quick mix of news, weather, sports, classic TV show clips and, of course, commercials. Mr. Leider said Gas Station TV tinkered with the format and found that 60-second bursts of content were actually too long for anyone spending those five to eight minutes at the pump.
"We honed our experience," he said. "We found that shorter bursts, maybe 15 to 30 seconds of content, worked best."
Advertising makes up roughly 30 to 35 percent of these bursts, he said, adding that the captive audience is ready-made for DOOH: "You're bored, you've got nothing to do for that five minutes you're there."
There are five Sunoco stations in the Pittsburgh market with Gas Station TV programming, and more on the way.
Those 15 to 30 second bursts worked best with "consumers" in the species Homo sapiens. These were human trials. Surely the outcome would be different if you were trying to sell goods & services to "consumers" belonging to other species, like bushy-tailed gray squirrels, bellowing howler monkeys or domesticated sheep.
And now watch this astonishing video. I think it will take your breath away. It certainly set my brain on fire. All that's left to do is ask yourself this all-important question:
Are you in the Active Consumer Mindset?
Why not surround consumers on multiple networks with optimum frequency and exposure throughout their day?
Several years ago a group of us were on vacation, before the great crash, when we went into a restaurant. The waitress was kind enough to turn the TV on for us. She was more than a little surprised when we immediately told her to turn it off. We were on vacation, and could care less if the rest of the world vaporized during our absence.
Yesterday, I'm sitting at my local bar, two large screen TVs filled with advertising are on the wall, the guy next to me had his palm computer out, on the other side, a couple people were looking at a laptop computer, and then there was the occasional ring of a phone. We are addicted to sensory stimulation, but are becoming less able to associate on a human level.
You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
Posted by: BJ | 01/18/2011 at 11:06 AM