I spent most of Monday at the DS Investors Conference and most of Wednesday at the DPAA 2011 Digital Media Summit.

What was notable at both events was that almost every speaker talked about leveraging the connection between DOOH screens and their mobile audience, multi-channel strategies and leveraging mobile and social media technologies.

What was different this week was that this buzz was not limited to the “interactive tent” - it was center stage. What used to be a lonely platform for way-too-early entrepreneurs and evangelists like me, is now well and truly an accepted part of our agenda.

I’m not convinced that every speaker at the conferences was “eating their own dog food” but I can’t gripe - obviously we still have some way to go, but at least the entire industry is talking about it.

There are various stages in the maturation of a digital market, and in my opinion, we’ve reached the end of the beginning.

Borrowed from an earlier Gartner paper, what I touched on in The DOOH Slope of Enlightenment suggests that digital markets move through various stages staring with a “Peak of Inflated Expectations” where the market experiences a fool’s gold rush and invariably early adopters pay the price for being early. The market then moves through a downward trend where it adjusts to a “Trough of Disillusionment” and finally it reaches a point where companies actually release products that exceed users’ expectations. At that point, the market can start to move up the “Slope of Enlightenment.”

As the web evolved from digital brochureware, so too are DOOH screens finally being forced to be more than slideware. Some are and many more will be more connected, more engaging and, as a result, more valuable.

Judging not only from the majority of speakers’ inclusion of all things mobile and social, but also the stream of Tweets from users at both events and even the inclusion of a Twitter screen at the DPAA event - I would say we are at the end of the beginning of DOOH. We are standing at the beginning of the Slope of Enlightenment.

Do you agree?

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Well, the start of Q4’11 has been really hectic.

Not only were we honored to be participating at the Robin Hood event with Black Eyed Peas in Central Park, but we were also chosen to be the interactive social platform behind a launch campaign for South Park’s new series which kicked off yesterday in New York’s Times Square.

Times Square visitors could create a South Park avatar of themselves at an interactive kiosk, and then see their avatar displayed live alongside real time tweets (hashtagged SOUTHPARK) on the famous MTV/Viacom screen in Times Square.

And of course, unless you were asleep, yesterday also marked the announcement of the much anticipated iPhone5 ahem iPhone4s.

Place-based social media is ALL ABOUT CAPTURING THE MOMENT AND LETTING THE AUDIENCE ENGAGE, so the last photo in the set here just about sums it up. A tweet proclaims “The iPhone4s killed Kenny”.

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The integration of place-based media with mobile and social technologies is consistently in the top five predictions for the future of our industry. Yet very few companies have wrestled with the realities of integrating these technologies at scale.

Even the simplest social media application can trip up inexperienced companies hoping to leverage user-generated content or streams publicly.

For example, a user might be delighted to check-in to a place using a location-based service such as Foursquare and receive “offers nearby” but the location owner will not be so happy!

Similarly, Tweets that can be displayed on a location’s screen should not have URLs that can’t be clicked on, multiple retweets of the same message or messages that are offensive.

Place-based versions of such apps have to benefit the location as well as the consumer - for example, only displaying appropriate offers for the specific location and displaying filtered and localized tweets.

Solving such problems for single locations is waaaay easier than solving the problem for 100’s or 1,000’s of venues, each with different engagement rules – but all expecting real time media and responsiveness.

At this years Digital Signage Expo, in Las Vegas, Feb 22-25th, LocaModa will be releasing LocaModa 4.0 which builds on our company’s experience delivering the world’s first place-based versions of Twitter, Facebook Places and Foursquare for global brands, place-based networks and advertising agencies. And as you might expect, it specifically addresses the above challenges for licensees with a few venues or a few thousand venues to manage.

LocaModa’s booth is 1032. We hope to see you there!

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Escaping multiple snow storms this week in Boston, I’ve joined James Davies, Chief Strategy Officer, Posterscope on a week long series of thought leadership talks in London with leading agencies about the opportunities and lessons around social media and OOH. James and I had jointly written a paper on the subject which you can download here.

I get pretty inspired when I meet clients and get insights about local issues/challenges/opportunities, and this trip is no exception. Happily, I’ve also been more than a little suprised by the fast pace, innovation, responsiveness and attitude that I have experienced here.

My big takeaway is that the DOOH market in USA is not just attracting global attention, it’s also encouraging global companies to participate and innovate in the market (LocaModa’s partnership with Fujifilm Imagetec is one example). Companies far and wide are inspired by what’s going on in USA and are doing something about it. In many cases, they can move faster - their markets have less baggage, less fragmentation and often (as is the case with Posterscope) already have excellent tools to simplify the DOOH media planning and buying process.

I’ve also seen some beautifully executed DOOH here - for example in major underground stations. My gut feel from just a week in my old stomping ground is that the UK DOOH market is primed and ready to move.

USA DOOH is leading by example - now we need to make sure we continue to innovate, execute and drive a global industry forward.

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I’m happy to see that Shelly Palmer is giving a keynote at next month’s DSE on “DOOH Disrupted: Paths To A Connected Future.”

Words like Mobile, Multi-channel, Cross-channel, Social, etc are high on our agendas and prominent in all our market forecasts. And of course, all these words and technologies are by-products of the connected world we live in. So I hope that Shelly emphasizes in his talk that connectedness can never be an afterthought. It’s strategic and critically important. Our screens, players, media, infrastructure and data cannot survive as islands. Our industry is clearly moving in the right direction - it wasn’t so long ago that most out-of-home screens were playing video tapes!

The opportunity is for more DOOH media (for example DOOH applications, messaging and adverts) to work across channels. This can only hasten industry growth in scale and value.

I gave a talk at last year’s Screen Media Expo in London titled The Future Is Now which I think is worth re-visiting. You can view the presentation here. At the end of that presentation, I suggested a ten question “connectivity test” as a fun way to provoke discussion (I’m sure some of those questions could be better framed today but hey it’s free!).

What’s your DOOH connectivity score?

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