Close to 800 Bank Machine sites have been added to the atmAd network, increasing atmAd’s gross monthly audience reach to 55 million and bringing on board a wealth of retail-located ATMs including SPAR, Martin McColls and Budgens, strengthening atmAd’s already strong high street and CTN offering.

National coverage of commuters has also been greatly enhanced by the inclusion of ATM screens located at forecourt and motorway service stations, including BP, Murco and Welcome Break sites.

Commenting on the growth of the network, Ana Stewart, Managing Director of atmAd told us “We’re delighted to add Bank Machine’s ATMs to our growing national network of digital screens. Not only do these screens increase our coverage of high street and commuter audiences, but Bank Machine’s status as one of the UK’s premier independent ATM operators enables us to carry advertising from a wider range of advertisers, including financial companies.”

atmAd anticipate that the additional 800 screens will be up and running with media in early Q4 2010, offering the same 40 seconds of dwell time combined with dynamic on screen video content and full accountability, as their existing 6,500 screen network.

Ron Delnevo, Managing Director of Bank Machine for UK and Europe was quoted as saying “We have watched with interest the growing wealth of advertisers using atmAd’s national ATM screen network and very much look forward to being able to offer our ATM screens to brands looking to reach customers who not only have money in their hands, but are close to the point of purchase.”

September will see us in Amsterdam and Paris and possibly Munich if we can find an excuse to get over for Oktoberfest – invitations please

In October, Singapore is now off of our radar screens as the event we were going to go to has seemingly moved to November (and now conflicts with #CETW) but that month will still see two trips to NYC and one to Munich.

In November its Frankfurt and NYC and to end the year we think (in fact we very much hope) that there is a rather special event happening in LA which we will all be invited to.

• ISE DOOH Business Conference. 1st – 2nd February, 2010
• ISE2010 Amsterdam, 2nd – 4th February 2010. We take our DailyDOOH Blogger Lounge to foreign shores for the first time, so yes we will actually be on the show floor. For Digital Signage / DOOH folks this event just gets better and better. Expect to see Adrian, Andrew, Chris, Russ and Alex there.
• DSE, Las Vegas, 23rd – 25th February 2010. Expect to see Adrian, Andrew, Gail Chiasson and Manolo Almagro on the show floor, in the press lounge or in the new Blogger Lounge.
• CARTES in Asia, 16th – 18th March, ostensibly a digital security and smart technology event in Hong Kong, Manolo Almagro will be attending on our behalf and reporting back on how how smart tech is going to impact DOOH in the future.
• Marketing Point de Vente, Paris. March 30th, 31st March and 1st April 2010 at Pavilion 4 at the Porte de Versailles.
• NAB Show, Las Vegas, 12th- 15th April 2010. A nice overlap for us with KioskCom (see below). We will catch parts of this show whilst in Vegas.
• KioskCom Self Service Expo / The Digital SIgnage Show, Las Vegas, 14th- 15th April 2010. We have a Blogger Zone. Adrian is also chairing “Say What? Peeking Inside the Minds of Leading DOOH Electronic Media” at the event.
• OVAB Europe Supper Club. London. May 4th 2010, i.e. the evening before Screenmedia expo Europe – invite only for network owners.
• DOOH Expo / Screen Media Expo Europe, 5th – 6th May 2010. A much bigger DailyDOOH Blogger Lounge this year. The usual gang will be out in force on the show floor.
• InfoComm 2010, Las Vegas, 5th – 11th June 2010. Back for the 3rd year in a row to cover this important event.
• Whilst we don’t rate IBC as a digital signage event it’s big of course in the broadcast world. It’s likely we will be there in Amsterdam as we have some client meetings around the event. It takes place from 10 to 14 September
• viscom Paris will take place from 21 to 23 September
• Adrian is chairing the Digital Signage Investor Conference which is being held 5th – 6th October 2010, New York City. Let’s hope we can make it as good as last year!
• OVAB Europe Supper Club, Munich. Invite only for network owners and likely to be the evening before or during #DOOHBizKonf (see below).
• 4th Munich Digital Signage Conference, 19-20 October 2010, Munich #DOOHBizKonf in association with OVAB Europe
• Düsseldorf/Frankfurt. viscom will take place from 4th to 6th November in Frankfurt (instead of from 28th to 30th October as originally planned).
• Digital Signage World Asia 2010 was to be held in Singapore 26 – 28 October 2010. Looks like it has now moved to 9th – 10th November which of course clashes with us being in New York for #CETW, 10th and 11th November (see below) so we won’t be attending. Manolo however should still be speaking at this event
• #CETW – New York 2010. Customer Engagement Technology World, the event formerly known as both KioskCom and The Digital Signage Show, is being held at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center, New York, NY November 10-11, 2010

You can see our 2009 Travelogue archive here for those of you who are interested.

Judging by the ridiculous cost of hotel rooms during #ibc2010 I think we have made a wise choice. Rates seem to have racked up well over three times usual prices. Good business for hotels I guess!

The video is part of Consumer Watchdog‘s ‘Don’t Track Me’ campaign, which is urging the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would create a list of consumers who do not want Internet companies tracking their online activities – similar to the ‘do not call’ list that bans unsolicited telemarketing calls.

An article on PCmag.com quotes Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, as saying, “We’re satirizing Schmidt in the most highly-trafficked public square in the nation to make the public aware of how out of touch Schmidt and Google are when it comes to our privacy rights.”

The organizaiton noted “Google’s unauthorized collection of unencrypted data traveling over Wi-Fi networks, its Buzz social-networking service, and recent policy proposal with Verizon regarding net neutrality as evidence that Google has ‘lost its way’.”

An unnamed Google spokesperson pointed out to PCmag.com that Google provides tools for users to control their privacy online, like Google Dashboard, Ads Preference Manager, Chrome incognito mode and ‘off the record’ Gmail chat. (See google.com/privacy. Ed.)

The Times Square ad, projected on a 540 sq. ft. screen, is a 15-second animated short featuring a bobble-headed Schmidt as an evil ice cream man. “He’s collecting YOUR personal information,” a message flashes on the screen. It then urges viewers to ‘tell Google to stop tracking your every move’ by texting ‘EVIL’ on their mobile phones to 69866.

A longer, 1:34 minute version of the video on YouTube shows Schmidt offering children free ice cream and then ordering a Google employee concealed in the van to take “full body scans” of those who accept.

“I already know your favorite flavors,” the cartoon Schmidt says. “If there’s anything you don’t want anyone to know, well, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” He then tells the kids about their parents’ questionable Web activities and takes out ‘Google Wi-Spy glasses’ before being chased away by angry parents.

The video ends by asking viewers to ask Congress for a ‘do not track me’ list.

This is an invite only event the evening before #DOOHBizKonf

In the video above (a nice industrial espionage shot I am sure you will agree) you can see the three vendors vying for the business.

These we believe are Infinitus (running Scala), Samsung and Merim (which is using a Navori solution).

Back in March, many readers scoffed (publicly – read the comments) when we wrote “Infinitus makes large-sized LCD based outdoor digital signage display solutions and is the first provider to offer Scala-enabled, all-weather, outside Full HD LCD screens” but looks like that was a damn sensible move on part of Scala now doesn’t it?

Infinitus / Scala we believe are in line to win this business.

The spot launched Sept. 3/10 across the Screenvision Network on more than 15,000 screens across nearly 2,400 theatres throughout the U.S..

The 30-second ad is airing throughout September on Screenvision’s Premium Pod placement immediately preceding the movie trailers. Penetration covers all 50 states and 93% of DMAs nationwide. Screenvision currently represents 10 of the top 15 movie exhibitors. The Premium Pod audience total average recall is 55%.

The penguins are popular characters originating in DreamWorks Animations’ blockbuster features Madagascar and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

“By partnering with Screenvision, Intel (of Santa Clara, California) is using the power of cinema to reach consumers in a creative, innovative and extremely entertaining way,” says Mike Chico, Screenvision’s executive vice-president of sales, marketing and research. “Intel has created a spot starring the penguins of Madagascar that not only introduces moviegoers to its product but give them a true visual experience that can only be truly appreciated in a movie theatre.”

The Intel Core i5 processor, the product featured in the spot, delivers unprecedented integration and smart performance, including Intel Turbo Boost Technology1 for laptops, desktops and embedded devices. The Madagascar penguins are after these features in the whimsical in-cinema ad.

“It’s still early days and there’s no single ‘right’ approach to location-based advertising,” says Neil Strother, practice director. “This remains a very fragmented market that is full of experimentation.”

Nonetheless, the report notes that options are becoming more clearly defined. Location-based ads are enabled by three sets of technologies: GPS, Wi-Fi, and Cell-ID (location determined relative to mobile phone transmitters.) The most successful campaigns use a mix of some or all of these, depending on the product or service, region, consumers, and location accuracy required.

New location-based services are springing up, catering to mobile shoppers. Some are ‘check-in’ services such as Loopt, Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook with its Places, for consumers who are willing to ‘self-identify’. Others, such as Shopkick, use an iPhone app to reward shoppers just for visiting certain stores.

Some people may not want to be tracked, says Strother, “but it’s really about the value-exchange. If you care about getting discounts or being rewarded for shopping, is the value-exchange high enough so that you’ll accept having your whereabouts known to these companies in return for the benefits?”

Strother lays out a step-by-step guide for the would-be location-based retail advertiser in the report. The main points:

• Establish your marketing goals, as with any other marketing campaign;
• Analyze your customers’ mobile and location habits and develop your location approach;
• Choose location partner(s) and determine the best technologies for your brand;
• Execute your geo-targeted campaign, measure the results, and refine.

Both YCD and C-nario have good video wall capabilites (C-nario also have lots of solid examples and have recently won lots of airport video wall installations) and you’d often tend to think of both of them first if you were looking at a large display wall.

The YCD Multimedia solution deployed here is likely to use a number of powerful PC’s, all most probably with multi-headed graphics cards meaning that one PC could drive 4 (or more) screens.

The problem with that approach is two-fold, even with Minicom’s hardware putting all the computers safely in a back room, you have to run an awful lot of VGA / DVI cable to all the monitors, but more importantly you also have to co-ordinate all of those rendering computers – at least you have to co-ordinate them if you want to think of the whole cinema as one ‘canvas’.

Think on this: you either have 300 individual HD screens (some playing the same content, some running content across screens and from one screen to another) or you think of the whole as a canvas containing **590 million pixels!

Controlling subsets of 12 to 18 million pixels individually doesn’t really reflect the shape of what they’re actually controlling. It requires a change in mind set as to how a solution such as this is implemented and how content for it is designed and built.

For the menu boards and strips of screens at Cinema City, LCD panels can work well but there are more compelling solutions for the large displays, whether that is high resolution indoor LED, ultra narrow bezel panels, or tiled display systems like Christie’s MicroTiles or Prsym’s LPD.

From Intel’s point of view as well (they feature prominently in the case study video) we think that rather than fewer high spec media player PCs with multiple outputs to drive panels, a more distributed solution using a smaller player unit driving each screen would fit their vision better AND of course would mean one Intel processor per screen!

One such system that comes to mind is Hiperwall, which uses concepts from the IT and cluster (distributed) computing world. It uses a standard ethernet network and CAT5 cabling to distribute the content and video across the canvas area. It can handle jaw dropping content resolutions, and scale it in real time over the screen area. Because there is one smaller player device per screen, the cabling for video distribution is much simplified, with the backbone being commodity CAT5 rather than at video level (ie DVI or VGA).

We have personally seen Hiperwall installations; one example was 12 x 46″ monitors with a relatively small PC (dual core Atom with NVIDIA ION graphics chipset) running each screen.

There are, of course, many methods of approaching a project like this, but overall it shows that a well thought out and integrated use of content and screen technology in a large scheme makes for a high impact and truly impressive customer experience!

**300 HD screens is 300x1920x1024 pixels = 590 million pixels

Described as “La création est une déformation, une sublimation positive d’un élément banal” which we think means something like “Creation is a transformation of something banal into an art form” ?