www.screenmediamag.com/06dec/the-hard-sell.html -
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Published on: 3/22/2007
Last Visited: 3/22/2007
The agency view Andy Evans, managing director of NetCommunities, a new-media content and advertising agency which aggregates advertising for several dozen Web portals and digital-signage firms, shares Birkenhead's take on the current state of the screen-media marketplace.
The problem with advertising on screen media, he says, is that the potential revenue streams from advertising are an unknown quantity for most firms in the marketplace."It's still very early days with this type of media.As a result, no-one really has an idea of what the revenue will be from a given service, let alone enough information to create a ratecard," he says.NetCommunities has advertising relationships with around 600 companies who use a mix of new media, including the Internet and digital signage, and Evans says he and his staff are in regular contact with around 100 of these clients."The interest in screen media is definitely there," he says."But what we're finding is that that there are distinct differences between the types of digital signage, such as in a shopping mall, where attention spans are measured in seconds, and airports, where the attention span may be ten minutes or more."As a result of this, Evans says, advertising revenue streams also differ widely.They can be quite substantial, he says - provided the agency you use understands the market you are operating in.
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And on the other side of the ad-sales transaction, it's also important for advertisers to choose the right agency to buy on their behalf, says Evans.Here, he believes specialist agencies are not necessarily the right solution.He argues that, if the client company buys its advertising through a specialist agency, it may find that the agency's knowledge outside its specific segment of the market is not that great."A general agency is just that, general.They will have the skills to span the Internet, digital signage and all forms of new media.As a result, they will be able to put together a campaign for you that aggregates together all the various media," he explains.