-By Gregory Solman

LOS ANGELES Office Media Network is expanding the marketing opportunities of the Wall Street Journal Office Network to include more live demonstration tie-ins, said Jim Harris, CEO.
 
The two-year-old network of 630 office buildings in 14 major cities stems from an investor partnership and exclusivity agreement with New Corp.'s Dow Jones and features advertising-sponsored WSJ content.
 
As the network prepares to expand into Miami this quarter, OMN has amassed 800,000 daily viewers, Harris said.

An Arbitron/Edison Media Research study conducted last fall concluded that 97 percent of office workers were spending an average of three-and-a-half minutes per day reading the news. That's the captive audience OMN has been chasing and, in many cases, luring to its screens.
 
"A lot of out-of-home networks are very broad," said Harris. "We deliver a hard-to-reach and valuable target: businesspeople at work, with a proclivity to spend, and at a time they're not being reached by other media."
 
Most importantly, advertising has steadily risen "several hundred percent" since the first screen came online at 1055 6th Ave., New York, Harris said. So far, the network has mostly attracted what he called "Journal-type advertising -- Microsoft, Oracle, Cadillac," as well as a host of travel and business hotels and financial services firms, he said.

But based on the success of a recent effort by Omnicom's GMR Marketing of Milwaukee for client Samsung, Harris hopes to integrate the out-of-home network with event marketing in the form of advertised on-site product demonstrations in the lobbies of the buildings themselves.
 
An upcoming campaign for Blackberry will be followed by one such demonstration event, co-hosted by OMN and Starcom Mediavest, where advertising for the brand will be used to spur lobby meetings and product demos.
 
"When I was CMO [for Able Networks], I liked integrating events and advertising," Harris said. "I've seen it work -- which is why I believe in it."