The DOOH Audience Is mobile so it’s really important that as DOOH practitioners, we understand our audience’s mobile behavior before we get seduced into investing/designing in sexy mobile technologies. But with our ADD generation, often limited to 140 characters, the mobile UX is frequently an afterthought.

Apple, and before them Nokia, really understand (or understood in the case of Nokia) what mobility meant BEFORE designing mobile solutions.

When we humans are mobile, our experience is often focused on an activity that, if interrupted, stops our mobility in its tracks. We could be walking, driving, playing, shopping etc and if interrupted, that interruption better be for a good reason.

A mobile app (ignoring how it’s discovered) should ideally complement a dominant mobile activity. But if it has to interrupt mobile behavior, it has to offer a compelling enough reason for the user to break away from that activity.

As a designer of a mobile experience, if you don’t think about how, when and why an interrupt-driven message will and can be received, you will almost certainly fail.

Is your user standing in line, pushing a shopping cart, carrying a bag, driving, drinking, watching a concert? How much dwell time do they have to notice, act, react, interact? In many cases, the answer is 15-60 SECONDS (see this post on how UX maps to different types of locations and engagement models).

Now work out if your shiny new smartphone app, NFC app, QR code or text messaging CTA are worthy of interrupting your audience. Now sanity-check that your execution includes giving the user enough time AND benefit (e.g. “The 3Fs” Fun, Fame and Fortune, also covered in the above linked post) to engage.

I hope this interruption to your daily reading was worth while. If it was, please Tweet about it. It is wasn’t, I guess I’ve proven a point - because if it’s not even worth your while to click on a simple Twitter icon, how sobering is it to think about engaging your users?

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The photo above shows Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group with Carla Buzasi, Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post UK. They’re at Charing Cross Station, London, tweeting to a LocaModa-enabled screen, running a real-time place-based social media campaign for the launch of Huffington Post UK.

I didn’t realize until last week that traditional street hoardings in UK are not familiar things to folks on this side of the pond. The memory of a guy with ink-stained fingers shouting something completely unintelligible to commuters is all part of British daily life. So I was really happy that LocaModa was asked to develop a place-based social media version of a newspaper street hoarding for Huffington’s Post’s UK launch this week.

The creative, like its traditional counterpart, features a live bold headline which grabs attention, and a moderated real-time tweet, hashtagged #HuffPostUK which helps emphasize the new media chops of the brand, as well as suggest to the viewer that this “poster” isn’t what it might first appear to be.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to mention all the players involved in this campaign - but I would like to thank them all for the excellent team work, especially as much of the back-room work was unfolding during the July 4th weekend over here.

The campaign is running prominently in major train stations all over the UK. Another trip down memory lane for me as I used to commute to Waterloo Station every day when I was at Symbian and Paddington Station (where the bear comes from) is over the road from St Mary’s Hospital where I was born. Keeping it real.

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I rarely use this blog to blatantly plug LocaModa products, but I’m really excited about LocaModa Community Board, an application that we launched today. A link to the PR is at the end of this post, but I think there’s a more important strategic angle unfolding in the DOOH market that can’t be told in a product press release - so I wanted to blog about it here.

There are over 300 DOOH content management systems (CMSs).

That’s a problem that would get in the way of any market taking off.

Let’s be honest, brands, agencies and retailers really couldn’t care less about CMSs. And they certainly don’t want to have to wrestle with more than one. They want simple, non-proprietary, scaleable solutions. Ideally, a designer wants to build it once and know it can run everywhere.

We’ve been here before. The Internet took off with the invention of the browser which was simple, powerful and useful and provided a unified interface on top of proprietary operating systems.

I think a similar strategy has to unfold in DOOH to enable more frictionless distribution and greater scale. And I hope (for LocaModa’s strategic value) that it will happen via Community Board.

Community Board is also simple, powerful and useful and provides a unified interface on top of proprietary operating systems.

The value of community boards is in their connection to real people. A digital version of a community board takes a familiar metaphor and enables locations and brands to reach those communities. Packaging a DOOH application this way, makes it easier to understand by the entire value chain. It provides a utility that venue owners and brands can relate to. Brands can also be confident that their ad units (passive, active or interactive) will work in a consistent manner on all community boards, regardless of network capabilities. And community boards have a place and value in multiple verticals - health clubs, grocery stores, pharmacies, retail, offices, cafes, quick serve restaurants…

Very few companies are as focused on making DOOH applications and ad units work across multiple networks, multiple CMS, multiple channels - That’s what LocaModa has been resolutely focused on. As more and more DOOH networks seek mobile + social + local solutions in order to engage audiences and attract interactive media dollars (i.e. survive) they MUST adopt non-propriatary solutions. Simply put, even the largest networks cannot operate as islands.

LocaModa Community Board is launching nationally on six networks and two premier brands have already purchased media for Q3 and Q4. I’m excited for this application and LocaModa - but also because I can see how the DOOH market can grow like the web via such unifying applications.

Hey, an entrepreneur has to have a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) - mine is to enable The Web Outside. I think Community Board is a critical part of achieving that goal.

The official press release is here.

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Making social DOOH media work across different networks - each with different caching policies, content management systems and player configurations - is the stuff that LocaModans wrestle with every day. That’s challenging in and of itself, but we added the complexity of ensuring that future cross platform/cross channel apps are also easier to develop - without having to be a brain surgeon. So I’m happy that the big brained engineers at LocaModa have been busying themselves for a major release. Here are some details…

Key features:

· Messaging: Flexible and extensible message classification system - makes it easy for developers to add message types and/or message sources.

· Moderation: Enhanced moderation and filtering/curation options of content based on tags, words, phrases, profanity and users/accounts.

· Local Caching Support: Like the Energizer Bunny, we keep going and going! LocaModa apps now support both Network Outage Mode (Network/Internet failure while SWF is playing) and Offline Mode (No network/internet connection prior to/up to SWF launch time). LocaModa apps now have Network/Venue options for configuring offline storage of device info, configuration info, messages, and assets using a pragmatic approach with a garbage collection system to ensure minimal device overhead. Due to the different caching policies of every DOOH network, this feature has been pretty challenging - hats off to the team who have persevered to make this work across multiple networks, OSs and CMSs. This is a big deal in my humble opinion.

· Enhanced Application Configuration: Again, regardless of a network’s CMS, OS and their screen specs, networks and/or venues can configure LocaModa apps and aspects of their appearance easily. For example, we include a configurable banner component that allows the network or venue to determine: the banner location, background, and transparency, the text font and color, and the rotation schedule. The banner and text autosize to the screen. Networks and venues can also configure the font, color and hang time of brand and user generated messages. No big deal for any competent CMS these days, but offering this flexibility for an application running on top of multiple proprietary CMSs makes a huge difference for venue owners or agencies that don’t want to have to learn about multiple DS systems just to change their messaging.

· Standardized Ad Units: We’ve been running standardized ad units across multiple networks for some time now, but now there’s more magic to the “write once run anyway” manner in which the same ad unit can resize in LocaModa applications regardless of network/screen configurations. We’re also introducing new sponsored ad units in response to great feedback from our Community Board application that enhances advertising opportunities and engages the audience. All apps and ad units now have an enhanced suite of analytics (Proof of play anyone?) and remote debugging tools.

· And not to mention a LocaModa SDK! (I said not to mention that!)

Some of these features have already begun rolling out on our latest campaigns. Stay tuned for more info in the coming weeks.

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I’ve just returned from London where I gave a couple of keynotes at ScreenMediaExpo and a workshop for Imperative Group’s excellent ngage conference. One of my themes was to help guide decision makers to ask the right questions and expose some DOOH BS (or at least differentiate between DOOH hype and reality).

For anyone who couldn’t witness the exposure of all things frothy, here is one of my points….

Before you think about a technology-focused DOOH solution, think FEET FIRST.

Mobile is a behavior before it’s a technology.

If someone is walking, queueing, standing, sitting or driving, their ability to notice, react and engage with media will be different.

There was an excellent screen at the entrance of ScreenMediaExpo (made by the folks at SignageLive I believe) which displayed the show’s Events, Tweets and yes, even a QR code (to download the agenda). But that screen was designed for a close (less than 10ft) standing experience. NONE of that content would work if the screen was hanging more 20 ft from viewers in a high traffic area.

Many DOOH networks have loops with 10, 15 and 30 second spots. THAT ISN’T ENOUGH TIME TO INTERACT WITH A SCREEN UNLESS YOU’RE A GUN SLINGER!

In my keynotes, I wanted to prove this point, so before I advanced to the next slide, I got out my iPhone and started its stopwatch app. Then without saying anything, I displayed the next slide which had a QR code full screen, and the simple headline HOW FAST CAN YOU SCAN THIS QR CODE?

I said nothing. And waited.

10 seconds… 15 seconds… 20 seconds…

I then pointed out that typically an audience wouldn’t be so captive and facing a screen…

30 seconds… 40 seconds… 45 seconds…

A man started to attempt to scan the QR code - but he couldn’t from 20ft away.

60 seconds… 75 seconds… 90 seconds…

NO ONE MANAGED TO SCAN THE CODE!

Had they managed to, they would have got the message “If you managed to scan this QR Code in under 15 seconds, you made Stephen Randall look pretty stupid”.

So before falling in love with anything requiring interactivity and a screen, make sure you have enough time to succeed!

That’s why at LocaModa, we’ve designed what we call Passive, Active and Interactive apps - we don’t believe that one size fits all.

My slides from ScreenMediaExpo can be seen here.

If you go into this business Tech First instead of Feet First, you could trip up.

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