Out of Home Ramping Up

American Public Media’s Marketplace ran an interesting piece yesterday about the launch of NBC Everywhere, NBC’s foray into the expansive and growing out-of-home media market.

According to the piece, there are some 500,000 out-of-home display monitors delivering content and advertising into the aisles of large retailers, the seats of movie theaters and the gas pumps at gas stations. The piece points out that this out-of-home market might reach $2.5B by 2010. The New York Times also covered the story here.

So does this matter to local? These emerging networks are IP based and as a consequence can push highly relevant content and ad messages to the targeted audience. The piece is certainly worth a listen and offers those in “local” yet another platform to consider. Besides, back in November, NBC changed the name of its affiliate network to NBC Local Media — hint, hint.

NBC is not the only network to play in this expanding space. Last year CBS bought Sign Story Digital Media and quickly renamed it CBS Outernet. This week CBS signed a partnership arrangement with RippleTV. In the press release, they talk about how “this agreement represents a powerful marriage between CBS’ national reach and Ripple’s ability to target consumers at the community level.”

We expect even more activity in this space in 2008 as these networks demonstrate their ability to reach the ever-elusive American consumer.