Meet Gus. He’s the owner of Toscanini’s in Cambridge, MA. This week, Gus became the proud owner of a Silver Apex Award in the Food and Beverage category, as mentioned here previously.
Today the LocaModa screen at Tosci’s (as it’s known locally) has 3,128 Foursquare check-ins from 1,077 people. Starbucks, a few minutes from Tosci (also on Mass Ave in Cambridge) has 1,570 Foursquare check-ins from 580 people. We consistently enable an increase of 30-60% more check-ins on LocaModa screens. That means something to Gus, because his screen effectively communicates with his customers in his cafe and beyond (we also have twitter feeds tagged #Tosci and photos that are emailed to [email protected] and text messages sent using @Tosci to our short code. All in all, an engaging customer experience that reduces wait time and fosters loyalty.
Hold that picture.
At this year’s DSE, I gave a talk with the long-winded title “The 10 Biggest Problems and Solutions for DOOH Networks Flirting with Social Media and Mobile Applications.” You can find my presentation here. In that talk, I mentioned Gus, and the problem that many place-based ad networks are so focused on their network and/or advertisers’ value propositions that they sometimes forget to focus on the venue challenges.
Let’s assume that a cafe like Gus’s has 200 visitors per day, each spending $5 i.e. $30,000 per month. It’s easy to see that even if advertising revenue via a place-based ad network screen is shared with the cafe, it’s highly unlikely to be a material percentage of the cafe’s revenue. We can show that even if we make some bold assumptions about potential ad revenue based on 200 people x a generous 15 impressions each and a $5 CPM = $450 per month to be shared between the network and venue.
The moral of the story for place-based ad networks? Love thy venue first. The cafe owner isn’t interested in the advertising piece of the equation, he or she is interesting in his customers. Reduce perceived wait time, improve the customer experience, increase loyalty (and related programs), extend marketing reach and engage the customers. Once a venue’s customers are engaged with the screen, then you can start to monetize that experience for advertisers.
Tags: advertising, Apex Award, awards, Content Award, curation, Digital Out-of-Home, digital signage, Digital Signage Expo, DOOH, DSE 2011, Facebook, foursquare, Interactive, Las Vegas, LBS, LocaModa, Location, location-based, mobile, moderation, place based, place-based social media, Place-Based Social Networks, Social, Social Media, Social Networks, Stephen Randall, toscanini, Toscaninis, Tosci, tosci's, twitter, user-generated content
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