Magazines tapping DOOH to help their business

June 4, 2009 by Dave Haynes

Interpublic’s LA-based Emerging Media Lab blog has a piece up about how magazines are picking up on the opportunity to extend content and possibly sales into digital out of home.

It chronicles how Conde Nast saw impressive lifts on sales in some airport stores and how Wallpaper magazine is extending photography onto Titan digital screens in the UK. It also goes into the deal healthy lifestyle publisher Alive is doing with Marketplace Station and Whole Foods Market.

The article calls this arrangement a lifeline, but that strikes me as a bit of a reach.

DOOH does not come without its challenges for the print industry. Traditionally the media planners and buyers who purchase print campaigns do not handle digital buys. And digital strategy, budgets, and assets are often managed by separate companies or divisions. As Digital Signage Insights points out, “the advertising sales reps from the print side must receive in depth training on digital signage and the myriad of opportunities it offers advertisers. To best sell the medium, these ad sales reps must understand the technology, operational framework, content strategies, and key advantages of digital signage. Just as they have had to learn the ins and outs of selling online advertising, so too will they need to entrench themselves in the world of digital out of home media.”

Digital out of home may not be able to rescue the print business single-handedly, but it does offer an exciting potential to extend readership through digital distribution.

I always though screens in newsstands were a perfect place for magazines to drive single-copy impulse buys, but I’ve also always been slapped down by people who said magazines won’t buy ad time. Maybe some good sales results will change minds, if that’s indeed true.