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'May you live in interesting times': An interview with new DPAA president Sue Danaher

The DPAA recently named Sue Danaher its new president, and DST catches up with her for an interview.

October 13, 2010 by Christopher Hall — w, t

It's an exciting time to be involved in the digital place-based, or digital out-of-home, advertising industry, says new Digital Place-based Advertising Association president Sue Danaher.

"It's really coming together; there is a tremendous amount of growth and momentum," she said in a recent interview.

Danaher was named to head up the Digital Place-based Advertising Association (DPAA) last month, and Digital Signage Today recently caught up with the longtime veteran of the advertising and media industries.

In the announcement of her appointment Danaher said her goal "is to help the industry unlock its value proposition for advertisers and to make it easy for clients and their agencies to evaluate, plan and buy the medium."

That goal comes as an outgrowth of her – and the agency's – primary goal, she says.

"I would just back up one step to say that my interest really is to grow the industry, and so that is why our focus is to make it easier to plan and buy — because we really want to grow the advertising revenue in the sector," she said. "That might seem self-evident, but some people seem to forget that."

So what does the industry need to do to make it easier to plan and buy? Several things, she says, and probably the first thing is something the association began a few years ago, when it was known as OVAB, the Out-of-home Video Advertising Bureau. (The agency was formed in 2007, and changed its name earlier this year.)

Danaher had a seat on the agency board back then — she was on the board from 2007 through 2008 while she was president of former DPAA member Reactrix Systems Inc. (Prior to her tenure at Reactrix, Danaher spent more than 25 years in the media business, starting on the agency side at Y&R and Benton & Bowles and continuing in the ad sales ranks at USA Network, Turner Broadcasting and MTV Networks.)

Back in those early days, the bureau recognized that in order to sell digital place-based media to advertisers and their agencies the industry needed to size its audience and needed to provide audience measurement, she says.

"In order to do that we had to establish some standards or some guidelines for the industry to follow, and we established those about two years ago very successfully, and I can say that now in hindsight because the majority of our members are conforming to those guidelines," she said. "And I would say that the recent growth that we've seen in the sector I think can be directly attributed to successful adoption of those guidelines."

Danaher also hinted at a forthcoming announcement from the DPAA, which came out last week: an announcement that growth rates for the sector are accelerating, with a double-digit revenue gain in the first half of this year.

Using information collected by Miller Kaplan Arase, the DPAA announced that advertising revenue for the digital place-based advertising sector has grown 25 percent during the first half of 2010. That double-digit growth rate built on last year's growth rate of only 1 percent — which was still a success for digital place-based advertising, Danaher says, since it came at a time when most major media formats suffered steep declines in ad revenue.

The DPAA also says that it's worth noting that the 25 percent ad revenue spike took place without benefiting from the short-term infusion of political advertising dollars which other media enjoy, and that it's further evidence of strong momentum in the digital place-based market. Overall, advertising revenue in the digital place-based sector is estimated to be in excess of $1 billion today, the DPAA says.

"It paints a very positive picture for the sector, which is really exciting," she said. "So the work that we’ve done in the research realm has been very positive, but it continues."

More recently, the DPAA has taken that initial step several steps further, Danaher says, by successfully lobbying many of the syndicated research companies to include digital place-based media in their research questions.

The Nielsen Co. currently publishes The Fourth Screen Audience Report quarterly, giving advertisers a single report that covers multiple digital place-based networks and sizes their audiences. Arbitron measures the sector annually with its Digital Place-based Video Study. And just in the last several weeks, Danaher says, both MRI and the Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Survey published information on the sector. Simmons will soon follow in the spring, and Scarborough is including DPM in its upcoming study, Danaher says.

"So when you look at that, that's all happened in the last six months, so we've arrived on the research front," she said. "And what that means is that the people who make decisions about how to spend their advertising dollars, the media folks at the ad agencies, are now going to have the tools to help them understand the impact that digital place-based media has within the consumer experience — and with that data they'll be able to plan, evaluate and buy the sector, so that’s a huge accomplishment on the part of the industry."

Going forward, Danaher says the DPAA has several big announcements it plans to make at its upcoming Digital Media Summit, scheduled for Oct. 27.

The DPAA will be coming to the marketplace with creative guidelines, to complement its earlier foray into audience research guidelines, she says.

"We will now be establishing some common nomenclature, as well as some creative standards or guidelines that will make it much easier to buy the medium," she said.

In addition to the new creative guidelines, the DPAA also will be announcing a still-unnamed search and discovery tool that will be available to agencies and their clients at no charge to enable them to search for media players in the digital place-based space, she says.

"The industry started to coalesce about three years ago, in instituting OVAB; the first thing up was audience measurement; and now we're tackling creative, as well as helping with the entry point for planners and buyers for discovery of our offerings," she said.

The DPAA also will be presenting "interesting" case studies that it hopes will inspire agencies and clients alike to see the ways they can use the medium, Danaher says.

And Danaher also was quick to point out that, as a non-profit advocate for the industry, the DPAA's search and discovery tool should not be mistaken for any kind of challenge or competition to the aggregation or search platforms provided by for-profit companies.

"It is a means to take a look at the different networks out there from a compostion standpoint … and a means by which we can develop leads for our members, so that a buyer will be able to submit an RFP at the push of a button," she said. "But other than that, the DPAA has no business in the business of transactions, so it truly is a search and discovery tool and not a pricing tool by any stretch."

Speaking of those pricing tools and aggregation platforms, though, Danaher says the abundance of networks and network aggregators is a good sign for the industry.

"This medium is really emerging, and in the last two years there's been the development of a lot of these platforms, and I think the marketplace will sort it out," she said. "The good news from my perspective is that clearly there's demand for these networks, or we wouldn't see that sort of activity in the marketplace."

Again in the DPAA announcement of Danaher's appointment, she's quoted as saying that the digital place-based media sector is reminiscent of the cable business back in the mid-1980s, given its early phase of adoption and the hurdles that need to be overcome for widespread adoption.

Before the advent of widespread cable TV, she says, most in the advertising community only had three big suppliers, in the form of the big three networks, along with one or two syndicators of significance — and then suddenly they had a bewildering array of cable players coming at them.

"On a personal level, I came from the very early days of the cable business, back when we were describing what a satellite was and how messages got delivered," she said. "I was along for that ride for 20-plus years and watched the industry develop, and I would say that where we are today is not dissimilar from where we were in the mid-80s of helping the advertising community understand what was going on in the cable universe, helping create order out of what seemed to be chaotic."

And digital out-of-home has a leg up on where cable was at that point, when it was only available in a small portion of the country, she says, because at least the advertisers understand the digital place-based delivery system and actually see it in the marketplace.

"We're able to offer advertisers another way to connect with consumers while they're on the go, out and about where they work, live, play, dine, socialize, work out, and we think much closer to the point of purchase, which is an advantage for many advertisers in many categories," she said.

"So we think we can help advertisers deliver a message throughout the day closer to the point of purchase, and that's a tremendous opportunity for advertisers, and so we’ll be telling that story … That's our story, and we're sticking to it, and it's not dissimilar to the story we told in the cable universe."

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