Voice recognition, dynamic messaging, beacons and gesture control are just some of the new technologies unveiled by two major out of home (OOH) network's new national networks.
Earlier this week Ooh!Media lifted the curtain on its new Excite screen network, comprised of 50 panels through retail centres across Australia, with the aim of rolling out 300 more.
The fully interactive are multi-touch and have gesture control, voice recognition technology, high definition web-cams and wi fi.
Following suit, Adshel is officially launching its digital street furniture network this week, with 270 screens being switched on, after unveiling plans for the network to AdNews in July.Adshel's screens will offer advertisers dynamic messaging, real-time capabilities and contextual relevance, with the scale of a national network.
They will also include Adshel's other recent product innovations, including beacon technology, and will be segmented through its tie-up with Roy Morgan's Helix Personas.
While the two networks are both different, boasting different capabilities and areas of focus, both point to the strength of location-based advertising in a mobile world.
Adshel chief revenue officer David Roddick told AdNews that his company has a focus on building relevance, and that digital out of home (DOOH) capability makes advertising more relevant and therefore more engaging.
“When you think about what OOH is, it's essentially location-based communication, so it's very much in the moment of entourage the panel,” Roddick said. “The more you can reflect that moment, the more effective your communication is going to be.”
Adshel's launch partners for the new network include brands such as Commbank, Telstra, Arnotts and Hello World, the latter signing an exclusive partnership with Adshel late last month.
Roddick said all of the partners have a varied use of the networks new capabilities in technology.
Ooh!Media's launch partner for its new network is Village Roadshow, for its new movie release, Pan.
Ooh!Media CEO Brendon Cook said that the company had been viewing itself as a “location-based company” rather than an out of home company for several years now, and said that location is one of the things that makes OOH well equipped for the future.
“At the end of the day we are mobile as a society,” Cook said. “We’re not sitting at home all of our lives, we are mobile. The fact that we can combine the power of everyone’s connectivity in their pocket with the physical becomes the great strength of OOH.”
“You remember the old days when you were driving down the road and if you saw something you wanted to interact with you had to wait until you got home. Now you can interact with immediacy, but importantly you can touch, you can swipe, you can do anything.
“The reality is OOH is in a prime spot in the connected world that we live in.”
The challenge, is making the creative opportunity of the medium known. Roddick said that the education piece promoting the new technology in the Adshel network needs to occur through the value chain.
“I think sometimes the information about what we are capable of doing as medium isn't getting through to the agencies and the strategists and the clients themselves,” Roddick said.
“There is definitely an education job to be done in each of those elements in the value chain. And it's absolutely imperative for us because we didn’t put this in the ground to just be a fancy scroller.”
However Roddick added that the new offering has already “piqued the interest of the market.”
Likewise, Ooh!Media commissioned a neuroscience study earlier in the year to help creative get effective messaging out of OOH.
Cook said one of the messages it wants to push is that scale is important when building OOH messaging. He said too many DOOH campaigns that have come to light recently have been “stunts”, appearing on one site and gaining further attraction through online.
“What we’ve look at consistently is how we take the digital opportunity and the technology opportunity and allow it to go from stunts to real reach scability in terms of interactivity,” Cook said.
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