Everyone carries around a cell phone today. Over a billion are sold each year (yes each year) and at some point every person on the planet will have a phone number. Now juxtaposition that thought with the growing trend in digital signage, you know, those large displays that give you the departing gate number at the airport, the price for your kids Happy Meal at the McDonalds in the terminal concourse and, more recently, video stream CNN in the terminal waiting area.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

Well in case you haven’t noticed, digital signs are breaking out of the airport and into all sorts of public venues. The advertising industry collectively calls this the "Out Of Home" market (OOH for short) and lust after the targeted demographics these narrowcast networks can provide.

Some technology experts believe it’s inevitable that the worlds of wireless communication and large digital signs collide because the technology enables creating an interactive, real-time social network at the local level. We aren’t talking about a virtual network, these are real people standing around in a real place. This is where patrons, customers - in short, Jane and John Q. Public, interact with each other, via large digital displays - and not just indoor displays at the airport.

Want proof? At the recent Digital Signage Expo (DS Expo) in Las Vegas last Thursday we were treated to a presentation highlighting cell phone users playing an interactive game on a giant size LED billboard mounted in Time Square. (Try it yourself at www.jumbli.tv) A second application allowed sports bar patrons to vote for their favorite ("cutest") waitress by splashing two images of scantily clad ladies on all the screens with American Idol - like, text message voting options.

The idea is catching on and not lost on the DS Expo. In the Advertising and Marketing track at DS Expo, (Session 22) the topic was "Using Mobile Technologies to Connect with Your Customers." The Expo did a good job in assembling a panel of experts in the field including, Sanjay Manandhar, MIT Media Lab graduate and founder of Aerva Inc., Stephen Randall, founder Psion Software, maker of the popular mobile OS "Symbian" and now LocaModa CEO, Graeme Spicer from DW+Partners Advertising, and Dale Stephens, CEO of Vanacomm.

Hands down, LocaModa CEO Randall made a compelling case for the interactivity, real-time social networking and ability to engage large audiences with just a single image in New York City’s Time Square. The interactive game asked folks on the sidewalk to unscramble the message for a prize. This really got the crowds engaged in the usually unnoticed signage above.

Randall uses this simple formula to describe the trend:

He said from the network perspective, you should think of the phone subscriber as a web "cookie" in the OOH experience. "Most carriers don’t understand the consumer from this context, it’s about the web and its ability to connect people and places. If you can’t connect, you waste your audience." Randall concluded.

Make no mistake, OOH advertising on large format displays interacting with individual cell phone users is coming in a big way, and our lives will be changed as a result - perhaps to the same degree and scope TV ads changed our lives beginning some sixty years ago.

Note: The report on the entire contents of the session will be published in the upcoming March issue of Mobile Display Report.

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