Big Data in OoH?

Recently I was reading about JCDecaux SmartScreens, basically an intelligent board or display backed with data.

When I think about advertising, I think about two key aspects, first of them is the reach, if I want to promote, to advertise, to publicize my product, the larger the audience I reach, the better, that's actually why indicators provided by Route in UK or Geomex in Spain are so important within the sector ... but, is this really enough? just renting the displays next to the most crowded spots (so, deadly expensive) will guarantee the best impact for the campaign?

The answer is probably, "not necessarily". Reaching larger crowds is positive, but not enough, here is where the second aspect comes to play, "relevancy". Hitting several thousands of people a day with my ads, when that people is not interested on my kind of product is a serious waste of money. Do I really just want to impact many people? or do I prefer to impact a smaller amount of people, but with prospect interest on my product?

So, for me, to take a proper decision I'd need to know not only the OTS figures or the traffic ones, but also an indicator on how relevant is my product to the people underneath those numbers, I need to correct those figures with that information. With the traditional tools, only way to measure this pseudo-interest is just survey based, with huge costs when we want to measure a high number of displays. As technology evolved, here comes big data to the "rescue?".

As in the JCDecaux story, the displays deployed in Tesco shops using information from the loyalty cards to display the ad/product more relavant to the people in the store, we can also looked at the EE example, leveraging on Telco data, we can really learn about the key interests of people in an area and in an specific time, in order to produce from a set of ads, the one that is more relevant to the current audience, as it already working in the online world, where browsers like google according to your navigation or queries can display you the most relevant ad, can we replicate outdoor what we do in online?

Clearly, this has a huge potential impact in the sector, but it also raises concerns & questions around privacy, how far can we get in that? what is the impact this can have for media owners or media agencies?

Datascope or the importance of visualization

We are living in the decade of data, not only me who think so,  Sandy Pentland stated that in the last Campus Party in London.

Cities bugged with sensors, commercial transactions, devices tracking cars, trains, buses, planes, security cameras, wifis, internet, social network, mobile apps, ... it's hard to enumerate all the different elements that are generating more and more data in our time.

Traditionally, just a little of this data was actually used in the decision making, but as technologies evolves it gets more and more feasible to learn more and more from data, and leverage it to answer traditional question from a more scientific perspective.

Companies need to start looking at data, because it can be one of the most important assets they have in order to success, the Analytics team in Telefonica R&D is striving to make a big traditional telco such as Telefonica a little more data-aware.

One of our key projects is Datascope, an internal data journal, where us and many other people working from different units or even third parties associated showroom and tell stories through data visualization, and how casting and eye over data, exploring, analysing it can make a huge difference when running a business.

If you want to know more about Datascope, please visit our home page (http://datascope.tid.es)