Narrowcasting.
Your own screen, your own audience.

Narrowcasting or DOOH?

Both are digital screens, both show moving images. The difference is who owns the screen and who passes by.

The overlap is bigger than it looks. A screen in your shop window facing the street is your own screen, but it is read like a bus shelter: from a few metres, in passing. The rules of DOOH apply there.

Where it hangs.

Every place has a different audience, and that decides how long someone looks.

• Shop and showroom. At the entrance, the shelf or the till. People keep walking: one product, a few seconds.
• Shop window. Read from the pavement: big, short and legible in daylight.
• Hospitality. The menu board, which changes with the time of day. Here people do look for a while, because they have to choose.
• Waiting room and reception. People sit there for ten minutes or more. Information works, a short loop starts to irritate.
• Office and canteen. News, figures, a welcome for visitors. The same audience every day, so it has to change often.
• Lobby, sport and events. Sponsors, the programme and showing the way, often on several screens at once.

Made for the distance and the seconds.

Nobody sits down in front of a screen on the wall. You glance at it while you walk, wait or queue, usually without sound. So:

• One message per frame. What isn’t clear in three seconds doesn’t get read.
• Big letters, few words. We check every design from the distance the screen hangs at, not on a laptop.
• Motion with a reason. First catch the eye, then calm enough to read.
• Everything on screen. No sound, no button. If you want someone to do something, say where: at the till, at reception, or with a QR code that scans from a distance.
• A loop that fits the place. In a shop, someone sees a few seconds; in a waiting room, the whole loop, maybe three times.

Video or HTML.

Video (MP4) plays on every player and in every system, and is finished the moment it is exported. Good for a brand film, a product animation or a promotion that runs for a month.

HTML is a small web page on the screen, just like an HTML5 banner. It works with whatever is true at that moment: the time of day, the weather, a countdown, prices or stock from a feed, the figures from a sheet. At eleven the menu board switches from breakfast to lunch by itself. Most professional players play HTML, such as BrightSign (opens in a new window) and Xibo (opens in a new window), and the screens from Samsung (Tizen) and LG (webOS).

If the connection or the data drops out, there is a base version that holds up on its own. How a screen works with its location, the clock and the weather, you can see in the bus shelter on our DOOH page. In the station concourse, Haastmakers for Odido counted down the days that way, by itself.

Templates you fill in yourself.

If something changes every week, an offer, a price or a bit of news, we build a template in your house style. The animation, the type and the layout are fixed; your team fills in the text, the price or the image, in the system you already have or in a sheet the screen reads. Made for your brand, so it doesn’t look like the neighbours’.

The specs we ask for up front.

We ask for this before we start, so everything fits first time.

What you get from us.

We make the content, not the screens or the software. That way we work with whatever system you already have, and our advice doesn’t depend on a package we want to sell. No screens yet? Then we think along about what the content needs, before you choose a supplier.

• Design and animation in your house style, made for distance and seconds.
• Video and HTML, with live data where it adds something.
• Templates your team fills in itself.
• Your campaign on your own screens. If it already runs as banners, social video or DOOH, the version for your shop or lobby is a small step: the same master, a different size.
• Checked on screen, at the size and distance it runs at, and delivered the way your system wants it.

Questions about narrowcasting.