Out of Home

With retailers forced to close around Manhattan, media companies have been plastering promotions where display windows once were. But in a new effort, MTV is looking to go beyond a standard billboard. Taking over the locale of a shuttered Circuit City at a heavily trafficked Fifth Avenue location, it has launched an interactive gambit designed to plug its new series "The Buried Life."

If you're one of those people who checks your hair while walking past shop windows, there's some bad news on the horizon. Normal shop fronts are being phased out by a new breed of wired windows that let consumers interact with them and threaten to make such vain pursuits a thing of the past.

Razorfish is behind a JC Penney touch screen experience aimed at back-to-school shoppers. The above demo shows how a mall visitor can interact with male or female models, as well as browse by styles or specific brands.

Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a wearable computing system that allows users to display and interact with the Web on any surface - including the human body. The video shows the system's main developer, Pranav Mistry, taking photographs with his hand, summoning up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, displaying information about a person he's just met on their tee-shirt, and calling someone by inputting a phone number onto the palm of his hand. Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web!

Checking in at an airline self-service kiosk has always been a bit of a game for me. I count the number of times I pause to figure out what or where to click next -- and how often I find the "Next" button on the right side. Things got more interesting since the FAA stopped requiring the "Did you pack your bag yourself?" questions. Now there are direct-marketing offers, which are still finding a natural integration into the kiosk experience.  

It looks like bus stops in Italy are about to get interactive. The new bus stop called the EyeStop will have completely clear walls embedded with video screens featuring information on where your bus stop is on its route, timetables, and directions to where you want to go. It also offers internet, and the option to check your e-mail. The first city to see the EyeStop will be Florence, Italy in October 2009.

Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly.

The US digital out-of-home (OOH) media industry - which includes video ad networks, digital billboards and ambient ad platforms - is on pace to grow 11.2%, to $2.43 billion in 2008 and now comprises 29.1% of overall out-of-home ad spending, according to the “Digital Out-of-Home Media Forecast 2008-2012” from PQ Media.

Check out how the marketer ran a multichannel campaign that mixed offline and online efforts to promote an online video contest. Their results kicked butt. Includes creative samples.