Having spent many years and a lot of hard earned money hacking my way through the bush in the digital-out-of-home (DOOH) space, I had to chuckle when I came across an article this morning on DigitalBeat regarding Outcast and AdtekMedia (owner of PumpTopTV) joining forces to create a network of gas pump video displays.
The article states, “The two companies will have a combined monthly audience of 20 million viewers a month. That’s roughly equal to a top five primetime TV show.”
Let’s get real. I think what they’re really saying is that their screens see about 20 million viewers a month, not that 20 million viewers are actually watching, let alone taking action on an advertisement they saw on a gas pump display! The reality is that although the audience may be “captive” because they’re standing in front of the display while they fill their car with gas, what they’re seeing on the screen in many cases will have no real value or relevance to them. They may look once, but they wont be looking in the future.
The excerpt below from the PeC Traffic Report makes sense, and applies to marketing both online and off:
The ability to simply ignore advertising has its roots in human psychology. Habituation is the gradual reduction of psychological or behavioral response over time as a person is repeatedly shown a particular stimulus. In laymen’s terms, it means that because Madison Avenue advertising agencies have been bombarding people with so many ads for so long. those ads essentially become muted—they are like background noise that consumers just tune out.
Depending on who you ask, American consumers, as an example, are exposed to between 300 and 3,000 advertisements per day on average. In that hail of “Buy Now,” “Limited Time Offer,” and “New and Improved,” ads it is little wonder that humans have had to take psychological cover. Even the most modest estimates would translate into an ad every three minutes for every waking hour of the day.
Basically, the bad news for our friends at Outcast and AdtekMedia (and any other company involved in some hokey, interruptive, “captive audience” marketing play) is that people just ain’t watching. For more external validation of this, go to a WalMart and ask the employees and customers if they’re watching WalMart TV (or have ever watched!)
What would be really valuable to the marketplace is to publish comments from clients who’ve advertised on this network and seen some real ROI. Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love the idea of DOOH, but my experience has shown that people just aren’t watching these displays and just as important, that advertisers aren’t seeing a return on their marketing investment in this medium.
Until we learn how to connect with our target audience in a way that’s relevant and meaningful to them, they’ll continue to ignore the noise and focus on what’s important – tanking up and moving on.