High Impact – Highly Targeted Outdoor Advertising
In today’s cluttered world it is becoming more and more difficult for marketers to get their messages to standout. Here’s an idea and new product with potential for the Out of Home Advertising Industry. Sacramento, California based Smart Sign Media is a technology-based outdoor marketing & advertising firm specializing in electronically networked digital video signs. They have provided displays for the Las Vegas Convention Center, New York's Times Square and numerous others. They offer a product called “Smar Trak RMS” that enables outdoor advertisers to capture, real-time demographic information on motorists passing their signs. The sensors installed in their digital video advertising panels monitor the passive signals emitted by the FM radios and when the data is commingled with a separate Media Audit database, it provides detailed an instantaneous demographic and purchasing info.
Recently the company signed into a partnership with Simon Brand Ventures to provide outdoor digital signage to many of Simon Malls' 300 shopping centers across the United States. The deal will provide exterior signs strategically situated at major thoroughfares adjacent to the malls. The video and LED panels include the RMS technology and will adjust advertising messages to specific consumer demographics. In the near-term future Smart Sign states that the network will also enable consumers to interact with advertisers to receive promotional offers and coupons via mobile phones.Digg Story
NFL SELECTS OWN NETWORK FOR LAST PRIME-TIME TV PACKAGERumors of a Thursday package have been circulating since the announcement of the new NFL packages with ESPN and NBC. Although it is a big move for the National Football League to pass up the rights fees for the eight game package it desperately needs to build up I own fledgling NFL Network. The 2-year-old cable network is seen in 40 million homes, but that will likely increase with more carriage deals, given the NFL's enormous popularity.
The inaugural game of the package is scheduled for Thanksgiving night (Nov. 23) as part of a new Thanksgiving Day tripleheader. “After discussing this new package of games with many potential partners, we decided it would be best presented on our own, high-quality NFL Network, which has developed so rapidly that the time had come to add live regular season games to the programming,” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said in a statement. “In the end, we wanted these games on our Network, which is devoted 24/7 to the sport of football, and not on a multi-sport network.”
Comcast's Outdoor Life Network, which was hoping to add the NFL to its newly acquired National Hockey League deal, was said to be a strong suitor for the package, which insiders say could have commanded $400 million - $500 million dollars. Fox and TNT were among the other networks believed to have been bidding for the Thursday-Saturday package. Links: MediaWeek Jan 28, ’06 – NFL Hands off Thurs/Sat Late Game Season to its own Network, AdAge.com Jan 29, ’06 – NFL Selects Own Network for last Prime-Time TV Package, B&C - NFL Network to Air Eight-Game Package SM Past Musings – The End of an Era for ABC Let me know you enjoyed the post by Digg it
In the late '80's Cable ad sales veterans built a business bringing smaller businesses to embrace TV advertising. They did their best to eliminate the barriers that daunted most small business owners and kept them from utilizing TV as an effective advertising medium. As their ad business matured through the development of market wide interconnects and industry consolidation the operations eventually become much like what you would find at the typical TV broadcast station. Today both 
groups compete for a share of same dollars from the “big” advertisers and the cable operators have lost their roots (for the most part) with the small retail advertisers. Enter Spot Runner, a start-up is aiming to change that. They have developed a unique self-serve, web-based ad-buying system for TV. Think AdWords, but for TV ads.Headquartered in Los Angeles, Spot Runner, Inc. is a privately held, Internet-based ad agency that makes it easy and affordable for local businesses to advertise on TV. Its revolutionary approach gives local businesses the ability to advertise on cable and local TV by making commercial production, media planning and media buying services fast, easy and affordable. The entire process is automated online, making it cost effective for even the smallest of businesses to use.The service works like this: The local business owner goes to the Spot Runner site, picks a business category and then chooses from among thousands of generic, pre-taped video ads. Each ad comes with pre-written voice-over text that can be customized. Once the business has picked an ad, it tells Spot Runner how much it wants to spend on air time and which media markets it wants the ad to run in. Spot Runner comes back with a media plan. It then completes the production work of the customized ad, buys the air-time and gets the video into the hands of all the pertinent networks. Later, it sends the advertiser a report of where all the ads ran and when. Visit Spot Runner online at http://www.spotrunner.com/. More on this topic – Link: MediaPost Jan 13, ’06 – New Agency Sells TV Ads via the Internet Digg Story
The iTunes Music Store is now starting to add television shows before they have made their network television premieres. The first two shows to do this are from Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. It looks like downloadable television shows have a great future ahead as they result in more profits for networks than traditional advertising.
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In today’s cluttered world it is becoming more and more difficult for marketers to get their messages to standout. Here’s an idea and new product with potential for the Out of Home Advertising Industry. Sacramento, California based Smart Sign Media is a technology-based outdoor marketing & advertising firm specializing in electronically networked digital video signs. They have provided displays for the Las Vegas Convention Center, New York's Times Square and numerous others. They offer a product called “Smar Trak RMS” that enables outdoor advertisers to capture, real-time demographic information on motorists passing their signs. The sensors installed in their digital video advertising panels monitor the passive signals emitted by the FM radios and when the data is commingled with a separate Media Audit database, it provides detailed an instantaneous demographic and purchasing info.
