Clear Channel’s Socialite deployment has obviously attracted a lot of interest as we have already been fielding a number of questions about it.
The software driving the Socialite Panel – interesting that the Clear Channel people we speak to, call it a panel and not a poster – something that we believe is likely to do with not aggravating anyone who may have traditional ‘poster’ rights anywhere (VMG have started to do the same thing we notice also) – is software from Inspired themselves.
Clear Channel will create a schedule file and attach a creative. Inspired then collect the schedule and content AND each machine pulls down what it needs (that machine being Inspired’s ITBOX that sits in each location).
The ITBOX then distributes to the socialite panel.
It looks like a very neat tie up – almost 50 / 50 as to who does what. Clear Channel of course do the timebase selling, schedule creation and content collation whereas Inspired gets the data where it needs to be and provides the play out reporting after.
It looks all automated to us and Clear Channel tell us also that the system is linked to their standard invoicing systems as well.