Window Washers for an Industry

Time to introduce a new adage to the information age: If you want to know how best to layout an office space, talk to the window washer.

Maybe not the first choice, but when you consider the volume and variety of floor plans a window washer sees over the course of a day, week or month, you start to realize there is a sea of potential insights you might not be considering in your own design.

And when you think about how much there is to consider – cube farm v. closed offices, common space v. work space, enough offices, enough meeting rooms, enough lighting, natural lighting, etc. – you realize there are a lot of opportunities for missteps.

The same holds true as it relates to layering new media within your digital strategy and media mix.  The continuing proliferation of screens and devices – both mobile and stationary – throughout the US has an ever increasing level of importance on consumers’ day-to-day lives.

As marketers, the challenge is to determine when, where, and with whom our message is most likely to resonate.  Included correctly, the properly placed mobile, social, video, streaming audio or digital out of home execution can have tremendous impact on the overall success of a campaign.  But leveraged incorrectly the results can be far from ideal.

With the introduction of each new screen and technology comes the corresponding behavioral shift by consumers.  Suddenly, smartphones are your daily weather forecast, digital OOH is your morning news fix, desktops are DVRs and tablets are primetime programming.

For someone else, mobile is the grocery list, a CD collection is now a monthly streaming audio service, the e-reader is a public library, and scrapbooking is done exclusively on a retina display.

The ability to recognize trends, apply insights and identify scale that can make digital campaigns a success is an on-going challenge when you consider how accessible entry into the digital space now is.

Consider that between Google Play and iTunes, there are currently over 950,000 apps in the marketplace; even more amazing is the fact their combined downloads will surpass 30 billion within the calendar year.

The US has over 180 Digital OOH networks littered throughout the US, offering everything from national networks in malls, movie theatres and health clubs, down to localized healthcare provider networks in Houston, convenience stores in Pittsburgh and gas stations in Louisiana.

In addition, you have connected TVs, social TV, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Netflix, HuluPlus, Google TV, Apple TV, Roku, and a host of applications that have led to the socialization and gamification of television.  Outside of pure-play vendors in the streaming audio space (of which there are many – both legal and otherwise), there are well over 1,200 sites across the US offering internet radio solutions.

Which leads me to my point: New technology with a side of scale is often the tastiest item on the menu for marketers, but the biggest challenge is being able to  separate the gristle from the meat.

That’s where Centro comes in – we have the benefit of exposure to thousands of consumer-targeted campaigns that include countless forms of new media across verticals.  In other words, we’re like the window washer for the advertising industry, except that instead of providing a unique perspective on floor plan decisions, we’re providing data-driven insights and guidance at scale that help agencies identify and build out digital recommendations that meet client objectives.

The other obvious benefit of being window washers for the industry? A clear outward view on the world that we live in.