Whatever you’re doing right now, if you are within ten miles of Manhattan – stop. Put down that pen. Oops. Um, put down that iThing.
Go directly to 8th Avenue and head down the subway entrance at 57th, 58th or 59th Streets. At the bottom of the steps, walk in the downtown direction, opposite the turnstiles.
Feast your eyes – and ears and hands – on a digital out-of-home masterpiece that takes up an entire block in the underground passage of the Columbus Circle subway station.
We’ve cheered the DOOH industry before, one of marketing’s best kept secrets. Purina has taken it to heart.
To a dog lover’s heart, that is. Along the passageway’s west wall is a floor-to-ceiling interactive experience for Purina’s Beneful brand of dog food. (An unfortunate name, sounding too much like the product that helps adults poop – dogs do not appear to need help pooping.)
The ins and outs of the display are described in rich detail here. It wouldn’t look out of place at Disney World. And you’ll see from the linked article it even includes the requisite social media integration, where you can take a picture of you and your “virtual dog” and SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS !!!
Hats off to everyone involved in this one, especially the people responsible for securing the location. It’s an area seemingly under never-to-be-finished reconstruction. (ING did an excellent campaign in the same spot during last year’s New York City Marathon.)
The location has “captive audience” written all over it – a confined area, with no escape, nothing else to look at, and never too much pedestrian traffic that would block your view.
Maybe this will be the “tipping point” for DOOH. When advertisers see how much better this is than a display ad on some pet site, how much more engaging it is than a pre-roll video on The Weather Channel website, how many more smiles it puts on people’s faces than a YouTube upload.
Not sure what the CPM is on this, but we’ll wager it’s worth about 100 times whatever the IPO insiders are charging for a crappy display square on Facebook.
The Beneful campaign should prove, once and for all, that digital out-of-home advertising is no dog.