Tech nuances to stimulate DOOH worldwide: Franklin Olive, Outdoorlink

The future of OOH is reclining quite prominently on the digital medium. With innovations for DOOH springing up quite regularly, it is safe to say that the future of OOH is in good hands. US-based Outdoorlink, Inc. is taking this control over DOOH to a new level, by giving an option to the media owners to have complete control of their digital displays. Monitoring the billboards has been made easy with various features including real time alerts, alarm notifications, web-based interfaces and the like.

Smartlink, their new cellular M2M controller is designed to control and monitor billboard lighting through cell, laptop or tablet. With billboard lighting being remotely controlled and performance and management reports being readily available, the media owners will have a greater control over their media, resulting in better results for them and for the advertising brands.

With such innovations being laid in front of the OOH industry worldwide, the question was how ready is the industry, in both the developed and the developing countries, to invest in it.

The 56th FEPE Congress held in early June in Budapest, Hungary was a platform for the companies of the world to showcase their advances within the DOOH industry. Somewhere in between the industry celebrating its past success and pondering over its future path, products like Smartlink take a strong stand to cater to the latter requirement.

Franklin Olive, Vice President and General Manager, Outdoorlink, Inc. communicated his ideas about the DOOH industry, Smartlink and the company in itself, in an interview to Outdoor Asia's Preethika Kotian. Franklin is responsible for the daily operations of the company which include future product development and implementation, engineering, sales management, product forecasting and production, inventory management and reconciliation, customer support and the general oversight of all employees.

Edited excerpts of the interview:

Digital OOH is seen to be the future of OOH. Will adding a remote controlled monitoring feature for billboards add to the relevance of DOOH in the coming days?

SmartLink was designed to remotely control the illumination and remotely monitor the electrical issues on static billboard locations.  Also, SmartLink can be used on digital billboards to remotely re-boot the digital components if necessary. 

Are there any more innovations that could be added on to this theme?

SmartLink has an additional feature under development; SmartLink CIC that allows the user to remotely take an image of the advertising display in real time.  The image is transferred through cell technology and loaded into the users SmartLink account which can be accessed through the website or App.  Also, SmartLink can integrate with the outdoor advertising companies charting system which streamlines operations. 

Are media owners interested to invest in remote-controlled billboards?

There are over 65,000 SmartLink units deployed throughout the world.  Most units are deployed in the US. We have active units in the UK, Canada, Mexico and China.  We too recently attended the FEPE show in Budapest and had interest from other countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, India, Hungary, Luxembourg, Ukraine, and Croatia.  Being designed by a former outdoor billboard owner, the SmartLink was truly designed and customised for this industry by someone who spent his life in the outdoor advertising industry.

Will this technology be concentrated in Europe alone or have you looked into making it international?

We plan to launch internationally.  We have found that the issues that haunted outdoor billboard companies in the US are also prevalent around the world - remote control of illumination and notification of electrical issues.  SmartLink can solve these issues!

Do you find this kind of technology to be feasible in the OOH market in India, presently and in the future?

We think the SmartLink solution can benefit outdoor advertising countries worldwide.  We have engineered three models to cover the three main types of utility power voltages across the world; 120v, 220v and 3 phase. We met two outdoor companies from India at the FEPE show who showed interest in the SmartLink product.