The campaign uses near field communication (NFC) technology, and although the number of phones currently available with onboard NFC technology is limited, this technology is going to hit the mainstream over the coming months and years as both phone manufacturers and high street banks get behind it as the core technology to help deliver contactless payment. Once this takes off, which it inevitably will, we will see this technology built into every phone.

The outdoor media industry has been talking about the power that smartphone interactions could bring to the channel for some time, but up until now there has been a lack of solid case studies and best practice to demonstrate this to the people that matter – marketers and media buyers – and convince them that this is an area they want to be putting their money into. With so many more media channels and owners being brought into the fray, marketers are struggling to keep up with developments, and equally the media owners themselves are struggling to get their message across to those marketers effectively. And this is what makes this campaign even more important.

While actually a very small activity – with five JCDecaux six-sheets around Holborn and Tottenham Court Road equipped with the pre-programmed NFC chip – what is as impressive as the technology is that the technology provider, Proxama, has created it to directly demonstrate what is possible to both media agencies and advertisers. It has even gone as far as to send out free NFC-enabled handsets to a number of media agencies. This is exactly what media owners need to do to get buy-in for new channels and technologies, and I wholeheartedly applaud them for this move.

Through its technology, Proxama is also able to report data on how many mobiles have gone onto the website, which poster location has triggered their visit and how many have started playing the video. So it’s taking a media channel that has until now been criticised for its lack of measurability, and given it not only hard metrics, but also a layer of interactivity that could leave other traditional channels wanting. Once NFC becomes widely adopted within phones, the opportunities for advertisers to build this technology into their outdoor campaigns and offer people the option to interact with their brands on their mobiles is enormous.

This is a really exciting innovation for advertisers, and it’s great to see outdoor leading the field in this way. It may be a small opportunity now, but as NFC rolls out to more phones this is set to become a very real and powerful form of interaction for brands. And, best of all, the technology is already in place, with 130,000 sites around the country having the capability to handle NFC interaction already built into them, according to Proxama. So it’s not going to require massive investment to get campaigns up and running.

The ability for consumers to interact with outdoor advertising in this way represents a huge step for outdoor media as people are willingly choosing to receive branded content and information, which represents an enormously powerful proposition for advertisers. On top of this, adding interactivity and reporting to a channel that already has such a dramatic effect on consumers – a recent study by CBS Outdoor showed that 35% of consumers are more likely to respond to brands advertised on out of home media than to brands that were not – puts it in a strong position to steal budget from the likes of TV. These are, without doubt, exciting times for outdoor!

Pete Davis is managing director of GetMeMedia.