Will VUKUNET become the carat that gets the Advertisers to DOOH?

NEC display systems announced VUKUNET at the Digital Signage Show in NYC last week.

It is an interesting attempt at addressing a core issue with 3^rd party advertising on DOOH Networks. The fragmentation of the industry (both networks and vendors) makes it difficult, if not impossible, to push out advertising broadly across a large number of networks.

One of the things I’ve been hearing is that the major advertising agencies are conspicuously absent in the digital signage arena. Specifically, they are investing less than 2% of their customer’s advertising budgets on DOOH Networks. In short, the advertisers don’t have digital signage on their radar as a viable platform and therefore are not designing for or recommending it to their customers.

The fragmentation of the market is two-fold. The networks are fragmented (i.e. every company has their own network) and the solutions are fragmented (i.e. non-standard solutions, all of the vendors do it differently, and a lot of niche offerings).

The net result is that is that digital signage, as a platform, is missing out on the push and momentum created by the big dogs of the advertising industry.

If an agency decides that it want to include DOOH Networks in it's arsenal for a place-based advertising campaign, they could be faced with having to talk to 1,000s of DOOH Network owners and navigating across 200+ digital signage vendors just to make sure the content gets to where it needs to go and displays properly. That is a non-starter.

Why does this really matter? Simply stated, many of the DOOH Network owners are designing their own content and it shows. The resulting signage stinks and breaks all of the rules of successful signage. The campaigns fail or are marginally successful and are getting the reputation of banner ads. We need the agencies involved.

Hopefully, NEC can help address this with VUKUNET by providing a means to simplify bringing together the right advertising campaigns with the right displays quickly and easily. If you own or operate a DOOH Network, then NEC will help map the genome of your network by gathering relevant info that is important to advertisers and make it easier for advertisers to leverage your DOOH Network. As the DOOH Network operator, you can access a network of advertisers that are appropriate for your network.

Think of VUKUNET as a matchmaker or dating service for Advertisers and DOOH Network operators. Check it out.

Also see the interview with NEC's Mike Zmuda & Pierre Richer conducted by my good friends at aka.tv.

* Editorial note: Another disconnect is in the naming conventions. You say DOOH Network, I say Digital Signage network, and the Advertising Agencies talk about place-based advertising. Can you say "translator needed"?

Thanks for reading.