Jul 28, 2010

Posted by: Melanie Gomez

By Corky Kaericher, Senior Web Developer @ rVue

Greetings, rVue friends and fans!

If you've been paying attention to Internet trends over the past couple of years than you are probably familiar with the social network phenomenon that has brought millions of people together on highly interactive web sites where they can share news and information about themselves with each other, either publicly or in private groups. With all these people engaging across personal and business social networks, it seems logical that the next trend worth noting would be the similar exchange of engaging data and information between disparate social and business network systems themselves. What a concept, systems sharing information automatically with other systems, so that busy people don't even have to take the time to do so manually anymore. As we all know, anything that automates a tedious manual task, or simplifies something complex or which simply saves us some time is a boon in the business world!

Such system to system interactions or combination's of internet resources and data are known as mashups. An internet mashup is the result of taking two or more separate web applications or internet resources from one or more different companies and combining them in such a way as to allow a real time exchange of data and a flow of information between the systems in order to create a new, hybrid resource. Mashups aim to either improve on usability or just to simplify access to parent resources in new and useful ways, combining selected benefits from each parent to create something new and exciting that would not have been possible with just half of the mashup if left standing on it's own. Just a like a social network where people are the source of the exchanged information, mashups are akin to a social exchange between web connected applications, resources or platforms.

The DOOH industry is just coming of age online and many involved companies have begun to move their business models into the online world using internet technologies in more and more innovative and exciting ways. So how can internet mashups apply to us and benefit the DOOH ecosystem?  Many smart companies have given this great thought and are already underway creating some exciting new mashups. One example of this type of integration is actually near and dear to my heart, as it's the very work I myself am involved in which comprises an effort to connect media planning tools directly into the back-end technologies and systems of digital advertising player software companies via Application Programming Interface (API) integrations. This level of direct and programmatically automated platform interactivity between companies inside our industry will enable a kind of speed and efficiency in delivering digital campaigns and collecting the ensuing analytical data that has never been seen before in the DOOH advertising niche or that was even possible in our industry to date.

Doing all this transparently will ultimately automatically simplify the entire campaign execution to a just a few strokes on your keyboard to set up the details and click of your mouse on the "submit" button to launch the process. From there, many of the time consuming manual processes such as media file encoding or file delivery will simply just "happen" or will be minimized to the absolute basic necessities of human interventions, approvals and authorizations, with the rest of the ugly technical stuff happening behind the scenes almost auto-magically! This isn't just a neat, geeky idea; it is an imperative and game changing one. DOOH needs to be easier to do, if you'll pardon the rhyme, and mashups between industry companies will be the first step in making that easy future come sooner.

Here's to hoping the DOOH days of summer will get easier!

Corky K.