Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group
Minutes of the 13 January 2009 meeting, "Digital Experiences Beyond
the Monitor: Interactive Digital-Out-Of-Home Concepting and Process"

About 28 people attended tonight's meeting. Josh Zapin facilitated and
Jeremy Kohler recorded the minutes.

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MEETING SPONSORS

Microstaff (www.microstaff.com) provides refreshments, Copy Diva
(www.copydiva.com) provides the audio-visual equipment, NCAR
(www.ncar.ucar.edu) provides the facility, and ONEWARE
(www.oneware.com) sponsors these minutes.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS
Joel Sanders: Xiosoft in Broomfield is looking for two project
managers for web applications.

If you have suggestions for topics and/or speakers for any upcoming
meeting, please send them to Josh Zapin. Want to be a speaker
yourself? Let Josh know.

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INTRODUCTION (Josh Zapin)

Want to interact with a billboard in the middle of New York City's
Times Square? Or have a window display whistle at you as you walk by?
Or have a bus stop tell you when your bus is going to arrive.

While all this seems like science fiction, it is already happening today:
Volkswagen used a 3,685-square-foot interactive billboard in New
York's Times Square enabling pedestrians to vote yes or no to poll
questions that appear on the sign via SMS. An Obama Minute, a
grassroots group of Barack Obama fundraisers used software from a
startup called LocaModa to display text messages on a Jumbotron at
49th Street and Broadway in New York's Times Square. Estee Lauder Lab
Series for Men used a radio-frequency identification (RFID) solution
to display videos on digital signs above the product when customers
pick up different products.
Interacting beyond the computer monitor is a reality and is shaping
our spaces and day-to-day life. From advertising in well-trafficked
squares, to information displays in airports, digital experiences are
moving way beyond the computer screen.

A recent study confirmed its impact is increasing. The study
commissioned by Danoo, a digital out-of-home media company, and
Arbitron Media Research has found that consumers are highly engaged
with the new, digital billboards. These Web-connected LCD screens have
been found to have an 84 percent engagement rate with consumers.

While this sounds great, knowing which platforms to incorporate into a
campaign, and how to architect a solution to not just support, but
take advantage of them can be a complicated task. And this work is
still in its infancy.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Joesph Corr (jcorr@...) and Mathew Ray (mray@...)
are Senior Technical Lead and Associate Technical Director,
respectively, at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (CP+B), Creativity
magazine's 2008 Agency of the Year.

In a previous life, Joe was the Manager of Technology at IQ
Interactive, a founding SODA member. An Interactive Developer/Designer
with over 12 years of professional experience designing and developing
for the web, Joe has a background in Flash, Flex, AIR, Silverlight and
other interactive tools. Joe is currently finishing his MFA thesis
from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Interactive Design.

Mathew's most recently work is on the Microsoft Windows account and
the "I'm A PC" campaign. Previously at CP+B, he directed acclaimed
projects for Volkswagen and Dominos including vw.com and the BFD Pizza
Builder. In a previous life, He served as Director of Research and
Development for IQ Interactive in Atlanta and helped build a large
interactive team while producing award-winning work for the American
Cancer Society, Audi, Celebrity Cruise Lines, Cox Communications,
Genworth, IBM, the National Geographic Channel, Royal Caribbean, and UPS.

CP+B is a full-service integrated advertising agency with clients
including American Express, Burger King, Coke Zero, Dominos,
Microsoft, Old Navy, and Volkswagen. The agency and its work has been
profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
Business Week, Forbes, Fast Company, Time, Newsweek, Business 2.0,
Advertising Age, Creativity, and Archive. The agency currently has
over $1 billion in billings, with offices in Miami, Boulder, Toronto,
Los Angeles, and London.

LINKS:
Crispin Porter + Bogusky: www.cpbgroup.com
YouTube videos: allegorithm
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Mathew Ray (MR): How do you expand the digital experience beyond the
monitor. What's the next iteration of getting digital experiences out
into the world. Digital Out of Home (DOOH): any experience that's
beyond the traditional digital experience with a screen. Huge concept,
could be a lot of different things. HBO voyeur DOOH presentation
showing a cross-section of a building to see what's going inside,
using a projection. relatively low cost compared to digital screens.
Grafitti Research Lab: Art project displaying images outside.

Joesph Corr (JC): Neoproj does 3D projections with a series of
projectors onto 3D objects. Wrapping an entire building in a digital
display. It's not flat, and you can do it in lots of interesting
places. There's room for your concept to adapt to your place and vice
versa.

MR: At a trade show, you can project onto a car a distorted video
projection so that it looks like you're seeing the engine running
through the hood. And you can scale it all the way up to building size.

JC: This is space- and place-based, so it often doesn't persist for a
long time. It's like a spectacle for events, so the people who do this
well are not only technology experts but they're also event experts.

MR: I just went to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas
and found digital displays everywhere you look. This stuff ties in
with architecture and the sociology of spaces. But why do digital out
of home (DOOH)?

JC: Out-of-home is an older term that refers to print billboards. DOOH
involves a digital display. And then you have dynamic DOOH that's
influenced by people, weather, and other local interactions. Making
DOOH interactive makes it a lot more engaging.

MR: It's a powerful thing when people can control their environment.
Imagine you go into a clothing store and the mirror helps you try on
virtual clothes--that's way beyond the web cams and projectors that
you might have in your house.

SPECTACLE
MR: Creating an event is core to what we do in every project. It has
to be something worthy of being talked about, something that has PR
value, and something that sells itself.

JC: Once you get into spectacle, you get into "imagineering." Like
Disney.

MR: The technology isn't far from that used in multitouch screens,
which are open source and you can build one for around $200. This
stuff is getting cheaper. Part of what we do is use DOOH to make a
brand famous and memorable, make it stand out, make an impression.

JC: Our tech group is inside the creative department, and that lets us
pull off this stuff well. There are multiple parts, and each is one
spoke on the wheel. We work extremely quickly. Choosing location is
important. Understanding the psychology of space is important. You
need an architectural focus, and you need to know why people are there
and what they're doing so you can create experiences that people want
to interact with--otherwise you might end up just distracting or
annoyed people.

MR: In preproduction we go through ideas while the tech folks find out
what's feasible and what isn't. Then we gather requirements and move
onto production, scoping, what features we can have. We have to ensure
that we don't lose momentum during the whole deployment process--that
means keeping the concept interesting to the audience during the time
that it exists. We have lots of little pieces firing at the right time
to keep people's interest.

JC: In production, getting that vendor management is the most
important. We find that the duration of the project increases with the
number of vendors you have.

MR: What the People Want (Volkswagen). This took us six weeks to
execute. Volkswagen needed to rebrand themselves under one umbrella.
It's German parent company says it's the people's car, but U.S. didn't
have something like that--we had "Fahrvergnugen" and a bunch of other
things. So the U.S. Volkswagen also needs to be the people's car. How
do you make that happen? Start with "All around the world it's what
the people want." Put in on TV ads for teasing, then move it to the
corporate web site.
We made a flash site for this concept. Now we had an ecosystem that
would foster the DOOH concept. Starting with the web site, we began a
banner campaign to reinforce the DOOH experience. So the flash site
has people submitting questions and voting on them. Then you can run
contextual banner ads on other sites with the submitted
questions--that way we make your question famous: "Wow, that's my poll
question on someone else's site!" Then a mobile polling site allows
people to vote on questions displaying on a billboard while you're
standing in front of the billboard. All this led to the DOOH piece in
Times Square: the Super Sign. We had three screens: text, a video
ribbon, and a high-def screen for interactive content. The Super Sign
displays voting results in progress. It got a lot of press, and people
liked that they could see their work in such a visible place. Even The
View spent five minutes arguing about one of the poll questions, and
that was great PR for us. About 1 million people participated.

Audience question: What's the advertising budget and payoff? How does
it compare to other forms of advertising?

JC: Well, we're spoiled by online space because you get immediate
feedback on your efforts.
MR: This wasn't designed to sell product specifically, rather, it was
a rebranding campaign. There are other ways to get messages out for
different purposes. So we couldn't look at product sales, but the
million people voting helped us gauge success. The core idea of
spectacle is to generate buzz.

JC: I'M A PC: Microsoft strikes back at Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC"
ad campaign. During this we tried to constantly show the volume of
people participating. Are you a PC? if so, show us your PCness. One
spoke of this wheel included web ads. And like the Volkswagen poll, we
had a way to make you famous: if you participate by submitting a
testimonial, then you see yourself saying I'm a PC later on. The Times
Square signs were important for this. People upload their videos, they
get moderated, then they're ready to send out to lots of different
places, including Times Square. The idea is you see this in Times
Square, interact with a street team that operates under the sign, and
then perhaps get on the screen within an hour. The street team helped
give it a lot of awareness. You could even SMS the sign to pull your
face right up. Just using text messages, in this case, was a
remarkably simple way to get it done.

Audience question: How do you educate people on how to interact? How
do they know to text the sign?

JC: Education is difficult. We relied on participants to read their
e-mail instruction, plus the street teams helped a lot. Timing was
difficult and important to keep up momentum. We built an app for an
ultramobile PC to facilitate on the street team interaction. Street
team members wear t-shirts so you can spot them. What do people get
for this? They got a button with a URL and we would e-mail them later.

Audience question: How many SMS messages did you get?

MR: Not a lot because of bad timing. We launched that feature late in
the campaign, just a few days before it ended. So we missed the crest
for that particular feature. That's why timing is so important.

JC: We also did one at JFK airport where Microsoft has a lease at a
terminal walkway. The corridor has those conveyor-belt people movers
and digital displays on the walls that can be coordinated with the
room lighting. So how do we fill the room with an experience? How
about animations that match people's speed on the people movers--so
the images follow along with you. We had to rent IMAX cameras to get a
wide enough animation.

MR: The stuff we didn't do was having the screens react to people's
hand waving, etc.

JC: We also did a lot of "I'm a PC" billboards and signs and digital
displays scattered around. Some digital signs were cylindrical
displays which required interesting specs. Or the Liverpool Megawall.
In lieu of street teams, we put video pod booths around where people
could record their video testimonials. In shopping malls, etc. We even
put one right in front of an Apple store, which generated a lot of press.

MR: Our public works teams worked on-site to monitor how it was all
going.
JC: We remessaged contributors as new things were added to the
campaign. And make sure you go to the place where you're creating an
experience: it's critical to confirm the specifications.

JC: Another interesting tool is E paper, which is a pulse-powered
display. You just send it a pulse and then it shuts off and maintains
the image. There's WiMax, increased data speeds, gestural interfaces,
multitouch interfaces, microprojectors--lots of good technologies
coming for DOOH.

MR: Window films on store fronts are not too expensive and within
reach for creating DOOH. People are responding to this technology
already: some people are projecting stuff on top of someone else's
projection--sorta like hacking. And DOOH isn't limited to creating
spectacle. In stores, products are starting to interact with customers.

JC: Regarding the I'm a PC campaign, because of visibility we had to
be very careful: lots of fail-safes to prevent embarrassment. Imagine
the "blue screen of death" at Times Square!

JC: Neoproj makes the projection technology that we use. If you have
enough projectors to mask off areas, you can create the illusion of
projecting behind the 3D object. It's all about the calibration of all
these different projectors, lined up with millimeter accuracy. Your
space, like a building, gets laser mapped to make a 3D virtual model,
then the whole thing is texture mapped. Some projectors can adapt to
where you're standing and change the masking, etc. Mostly uses DV
quality footing. You need custom driver software and custom rendering,
which be extremely difficult. You also have to watch out for changes
to your environment. At shopping malls they project things onto floors
that you can walk though and interact with.

MR: At CES there as a floor projection--it acted like a giant keyboard
that you could play around with. For that kind of thing you basically
need infrared cameras, projectors, and infrared emitters. It's the
same technology as in multitouch screens.

JC: There's at least one shopping mall display that's projecting a
hologram into a space--that's right, interactive holograms are coming
now.

Audience question: What was your target audience for these campaigns?

MR: for Volkswagen, we knew there was a lot of traffic and news
coverage in the spaces we were targeting. So the New York sign was for
anyone willing to see that Volkswagen was reaching out to them. It's a
pretty wide swath of people we wanted to reach. But it's part of a
larger-scale system, not just reaching people in Times Square. It had
a viral life of its own. This was not a narrowly focused campaign.

JC: I'm a PC was also a branding campaign with a wide demographic.

MR: Basically the target audience is everybody.

JC: If we were trying to move products within a demographic, then it
would require more careful output. At JFK airport, we went to visit
the space to scope it out. It was clear that the people who made the
previous setup didn't scope it out because it was too active for folks
who had just finished a long plane ride. Seizure-inducing blinking
lights and stuff. So the place, the time is very important. Don't get
lost in the technology your using.

Audience question: Did people at JFK look at it?

M: We don't know, but there are face-recognition technologies that can
track that, or even cater the ads to the people who are there--that's
sounds pretty scary, but it's coming.

JC: Children's museums have that kind of interactive stuff now.

JC: DOOH can be crowd-based and gestural: like web cams that
understand the motion in the crowd. In one project, the crowd played a
cooperative video game by raising their hands in unison. Took only
three weeks to develop, and it was wii-based. There's also lots of
homebrewed stuff coming out. Anybody can get involved, and barrier to
entry is pretty low.

Audience question: How much time is there between creative concepting
and going live?

MR: It was 2.5 weeks for Volkswagen: making the sign and the SMS
gateway. Sign technology is the Wild West right now, it's all
custom-developed. Each one has different requirements. It's difficult
to get your head around the requirements and develop something fast
enough. But it's slowly becoming standardized. The signs you're using
often limit what you can do based on their specific technology.

Audience question: Do you think you could sell the ability to interact?

JC: The product that you buy might have a built-in "tag" that lets you
interact. Some people are putting RFID tags in clothing that you are
trying on. You can print RFIDs on paper now so it can be part of the
package itself.

MR: There are plenty of retail opportunities for this stuff beyond
advertising. RFID is a huge watershed. Your products can interact with
the virtual world if they have an RFID tag. So you could take out your
camera and a nearby display might recognize the camera and start
pulling pictures for you.

Audience question: What about privacy? Can you opt out of this stuff?

MR: Remember that your image is already being captured and processed
all over the place. Everytime you walk into a retail store, you're on
camera. They have your image, but it's still anonymous.

JC: But maybe you could have a do-not-call list for this stuff? Submit
your iris to the list? Who knows. It's too new for there to be any
standardized protections yet.

MR: This is clearly a disruptive technology that will force us to make
more decisions about privacy and identity. But now that we are at the
point of commercial viability, this will certainly become important.