As the carpet began to be rolled up the aisles yesterday afternoon, the attendees of the CETW show slowly started to move towards the exit and the unforgiving taxi landscape of 11th avenue at 30 minutes to 5 PM. Spruced by a solid show, most exhibitors were reporting an excellent collection of leads and, as [...]
As the carpet began to be rolled up the aisles yesterday afternoon, the attendees of the CETW show slowly started to move towards the exit and the unforgiving taxi landscape of 11th avenue at 30 minutes to 5 PM. Spruced by a solid show, most exhibitors were reporting an excellent collection of leads and, as reported yesterday, many clients that were in advanced planning stages. Packs of people worked their way around the floor and there was some noticeable cross-over from the Adtech show going on in the adjacent trade show space.
In many ways a bump up from the show in San Francisco, it appears that the marketing efforts of JD Events to put on the show and attract the right attendees worked as planned. Still noticeably absent were the agency marketers, who tend to skitter away from more technology-focused events, though the educational track offered a wealth of understanding behind how to buy and target advertising on DOOH networks. In fact, numbers guru Patrick Quinn of PQ Media led a panel about precision targeting in DOOH advertising, with representatives from VUKUNET, AccentHealth, Verifone, and Hyperspace, a digital ad agency, in which he provided a sneak peak at the current numbers up to today and beyond in terms of overall advertising spending and the percentages spent on DOOH. Everything is still moving upward, according to Quinn, though cinema in North America will see little rise in overall ad spending this year, everything else in the greater umbrella of DOOH averaged out to about 17% growth. Not too shabby by itself but limp compared to the growth seen in mobile and social media spending. Whether these growth pockets lift DOOH or compete with it remains to be seen.
One of the most innovative announcements came from newly birthed ComQi, whose North American Managing Director Stu Armstrong provided a tech talk session in which he demonstrated their new platform with Shazam, the music tagging app that has rocketed to over 100 million downloads. By tagging the audio coming from a screen, the phone receives a prompt which leads the user to many different forms of communication and engagement, such as YouTube, Facebook, or directly to the website. It can also deliver coupons and share out information through social media, something that Armstrong pointed out can bring the excitement back to the retail experience. While this type of innovation might be viewed simply as another way to get to the same thing, i.e. mobile engagement and sales, it is certainly more flashy and dynamic than say a QR code or NFC, if only because it requires a certain level of audio, another point that Armstrong mentioned advertisers are requesting.
We took a number of interviews that will be appearing on the site over the coming weeks, and we are looking forward to the trip to ISE in Amsterdam to bring a bit more of a European perspective to our coverage of trade shows.
