The latest in our running series of closer looks at Android-driven digital signage solution providers is UK-based TargetR.

Some 30 companies have introduced products based on the open-source Android operating system that is very widely used for smart devices like handsets and tablets, all of them using CPUs based on ARM reference designs. Most smartphones and tablets use ARM.

It is likely that much of the industry will shift to ARM-based devices using Android or Linux in the next 1-3 years because ARM devices now rival the processing power of lower cost x86 personal computing devices, but at a fraction of the cost and, in most cases, size.

TargetR

TargetR is based on the JADS software platform, but according to CIO Stuart James “is a complete ground up rewrite which started in the September 2011 headed by Dr Michael Gardiner (CTO).”

The company was formed and incorporated last fall. The main difference of TargetR, says James, “is to allow for cross account targeting of advertisements from content owners to channel owners, with a approval system as well as built in marketplace.”

“TargetR is currently being re-sold worldwide by a variety of partners who rebrand it as there own solution (we support customised APK as well Enterprise server deployments). We have a variety of large manufacturers and existing digital signage companies now in the midst of migrating to TargetR, and will be stirring up the industry in relation to pricing and functionality.”

“Our cloud pricing  for our fully hosted TargetR Cloud is located at http://cloud.targetr.net/signup/ . Our Enterprise pricing is very competitive (license only) and is geared for large deployments and includes TargetR Server component starting at €800 per month for 200 screens + €1000 setup.”

I haven’t seen the platform, but the TargetR feature list suggests this is a pretty serious, rich platform. Some of the Android platforms popping up can be quite reasonably questioned in terms of capabilities and stability, but others appear to pack a genuine punch.

On the other hand, TargetR says it is running a really old version of Android (1.6), whereas many others are on versions of Android 4. TargetR says its lightweight design means it runs on very low spec hardware, and Android as far back as that v1.6.

TargetR For Android

Can’t say I know him, but he Lynch is the vice president for mobile and self-service transaction company Reevex, which I also know diddly about other than they do software and are in Marietta, GA. Getting out of the digital signage box is NOT at all a bad thing, I think, for the DSA.

Lynch assumes the role from Jared Miller, vice president, travel & gaming solution management for NCR Corp., who will now serve as immediate past president. (I thought he was with United Airlines, but apparently changed gigs in the past year).

Other elected officers include:

• Executive Vice President – Marketing: Paul Flanigan, vice president, Pro-Motion Technology Group
• Treasurer: Janet L. Webster, president, Creative Solutions Consulting
• Secretary: Margot Myers, director, global marketing & communications, Platt Retail Institute

DSA also has councils for digital signage, mobile and self-service kiosks, and each council elected the following representatives:

• Executive Vice President – Digital Signage: Craig K. Martin, owner, Reality Interactive
• Vice President – Digital Signage: Jennifer Nye, channel manager – wholesale, Kohler Co.
• Executive Vice President – Mobile: Steve Gurley, president & CEO, Pyrim Technologies
• Executive Vice President – Self-Service Kiosk: Ron Bowers, senior vice president, Frank Mayer & Associates
• Vice President – Self-Service Kiosk: Craig Keefner, media manager, Connected Technology Solutions

“Having been active in the digital screenmedia industry for over 10 years, I have witnessed the transformation of disconnected technologies into an industry that is transforming our world,” says Lynch.

First, there was Vistar Media, which Sixteen:Nine profiled recently. Now there is word, via Digiday, of another firm spraying this ad territory.

Xaxis says it has inventory across more than 100,000 digital out-of-home screens available through its audience buying platform. That’s a lot or a little, depending on how you look at the world. What’s interesting here is that this is an extension of a very large programmatic buying play, and not a start-up.

Xaxis is the WPP Group M trading desk, WPP being one of the monster ad agency holding groups.  Xaxis is actually leveraging Vistar’s technology, says Vistar’s Jeremy Ozen.

Reports Digiday:

The plan for the new out-of-home product is to take the same combination of targeting data and technology that’s proved effective for advertisers online and to apply it to inventory on digital screens found in shopping malls, bars, and taxi cabs. There are no cookies when it comes to out-of-home screens, of course, so buying decisions are made based on demographic information and other data integrated from third-parties.

“Like with Internet ads, we build targeting segments for out-of-home locations based on data,” said Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser. “In this case we’re more focussed on what geographies are more indicative of certain behaviors. In New York City’s Tribeca people might be more inclined to buy luxury cars or furniture, for example, while in the suburbs an ad for diapers or strollers might be more appropriate.”

Much of that third-party data comes from the same providers that Xaxis has already forged close relationships with in the online arena. Many of those partners started out selling online data, but are now pushing out into the real world. The same firms helping target online ads are now helping with out-of-home ones, too. Their research might suggest screens located in bars are a good place to target automotive ads to business professionals after 6 pm, for example.

“It’s about working with data partners to find high-indexing geographies and venues for certain demographics or behaviors,” said Xaxis product development chief Mike Finnegan.

Meanwhile those same partners can often provide cookie information for auto intenders as well, with the intention of reaching the same users across multiple channels. When ad buyers come to Xaxis saying they want to reach a certain demographic it’s hope is to offer them the ability to do so not not just online, but through out-of-home ads also. The company already launched a product for radio inventory earlier this year.

To date, the majority of online media traded through programmatic technology has been impressions media owners couldn’t sell directly using their human-powered sales forces. It’s a similar situation when it comes to out-of-home. Companies operating digital screens have their own sales teams but they’re often small, and they mostly target traditional buyers or local, small-scale advertisers. As a result, 70 percent of their inventory goes unsold, Finnegan estimated.

That’s the problem Xaxis promises to solve on the supply side, by opening up their inventory to a wider pool of potential buyers, but also layering on additional data to make the opportunity more appealing.

Interesting. There’s also the pure play start-up DoMedia, which has a relationship with Starcom and Telmar. Plus there’s Vukunet. And then there’s AdStruc, which also has a relationship with Telmar.

Held at the King Street West bar where we used to do mixers (but I got too stinkin’ busy to organize), the event is meant for networking. There will be drinks and appetizers and some microphone time by DSF board members and people who live for microphones.

]]> http://www.sixteen-nine.net/2013/05/22/details-set-dsfs-toronto-mixer-june/feed/ 0 http://www.sixteen-nine.net/2013/05/22/doohgood-moore-oks-f5-survivors/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=doohgood-moore-oks-f5-survivors http://www.sixteen-nine.net/2013/05/22/doohgood-moore-oks-f5-survivors/#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 05:05:26 +0000 Dave Haynes http://www.sixteen-nine.net/?p=14617

Even on the other side of the world the Moore, OK F5 tornado is big news, and a couple of emails came in to me here suggesting DOOHgood needs to get ramped up for driving donations to the American Red Cross.

As a network operator in the US – retail, ad, corporate or whatever – you can help in two ways.

You can run a video in your schedule that reinforces the need for donations for the many, many victims. A generic video from 2012 in support of the American Red Cross is available for immediate deployment on your network here. This Tornado Relief video does not specifically name any location or time period and uses general, royalty free images.

You can create your own video and use DOOHGood to get it distributed to other networks. We had a stack of videos created by different companies when the tsunami hit north Japan. Please help by creating PSA content at 720p/1080p at 15 or 30 seconds for inclusion on DOOH networks. Submit files via the upload link below.

Here’s the 12th entry  in this running series of closer looks at digital signage solution providers who have started working with the Android operating system and low-cost, ultra-small ARM processors.

Almost 30 companies have introduced products based on the open-source Android operating system that is very widely used for smart devices like handsets and tablets, all of them using CPUs based on ARM reference designs. Most smartphones and tablets use ARM.

It is likely that much of the industry will shift to ARM-based devices using Android or Linux in the next 1-3 years because ARM devices now rival the processing power of lower cost x86 personal computing devices, but at a fraction of the cost and, in most cases, size.

Hello

The Dutch company Novus Solutions has a series of Android-driven products under the Hello platform, including a little, low-cost UPP media player stick.

The Hello app is positioned as friendly and easy, and the platform provides a series of pre-installed themes to use, as well as a theme editor to tweak or build your own.

The platform has a tagging and grouping system, and runs off a web-based user experience. It crosses platforms and can be installed on anything from a display screen, using the UPP stick, to tablets, smartphones or Google TVs.

Activation is done using a software key generated by the device to the HELLO system.

The company has a bundled display-software package, for at least a couple of series, with Philips in Europe.

Hello For Android

American Dairy Queen Corporation, as the company is more officially known, has signed on with Dayton, Ohio-based Stratacache to ‘power digital feature panels across 300 Dairy Queen and DQ Grill & Chill restaurant locations.”

Stratacache says it has more than 50,000 digital menu boards globally now. Clients include McDonald’s.

The Digital Screenmedia Association has named the winners of its DSA Industry Excellence Awards, which celebrates the best digital signage, mobile and self-service kiosk projects across a variety of verticals.The awards were presented this week during a dinner related to the association’s Digital Screenmedia Symposium in Dallas.

The 2013 winners are:

The deal announced a few weeks ago that saw Vistar Media raise $1.5 million to help fund the first real automated buy and sell platform for Digital OOH reminded me I wanted to do a broader piece on the company.

Vistar co-founder Jeremy Ozen and I have been going back and forth on an email interview that explains what the company is about and how it differs from earlier failed or struggling efforts to make buying and selling the medium a one by one by one thing.

Q – Let’s start with an overview of Vistar. How was the company founded and why? Who runs things? Where are you based? That sort of stuff. 

Michael Provenzano, Jeremy Ozen and Mark Chadwick founded Vistar Media in September 2011. Michael and Mark previously had worked together at Invite Media, where Michael was a co-founder and Mark was the Chief Architect. The founding team started Vistar Media in order to bring programmatic technology – and ultimately more demand – to the Digital Out of Home media segment. Vistar Media’s engineering team is based in Philadelphia and our business/sales team is based in NYC.

Q – There are a pile of phrases and acronyms associated with ad buying exchanges. Are you an RTB, DSP or a new one I need to learn?

A little history here. Brian O’Kelley, one of the architects of the platform that became Right Media (which was ultimately purchased by Yahoo in 2007) started AppNexus soon afterward. AppNexus provided the first exchange to facilitate real time purchasing of display ads at scale. The value of RTB was that buyers could bid on specific impressions as they became available. Demand Side Platforms, one of which was Invite Media, arose to enable agencies to bid on this inventory in real time. Think of Demand Side Platforms as Scottrade or E-trade – platforms that enable simplified buying. Think of exchanges as NASDAQ – the markets where the transactions actually occur.

Programmatic buying has grown to bring similar methods of buying to other digital media formats. Radio has started to implement some forms of programmatic, TV to a limited extent, and Digital Out of Home. RTB – Real Time Bidding – is a subset of programmatic, in which bids are made many times within microseconds on particular impressions.

Q – As a media owner, how do I plug in?

Media Owners integrate – or plug in with our system – via their content management systems (CMS). Vistar Media integrates with the CMS of every media owner (Park Media, Coolsign, Dynasign etc.) we do business with. In some instances media owners have a proprietary CMS. Our integration will enable their CMS to request individual spots from Vistar as they present themselves. If there are valid campaigns live in the exchange, Vistar will respond to the CMS with an ad to play and a tracking URL, which enables both media owners and buyers to track the campaign’s specific spending. Except for allocating inventory in the CMS to the request from Vistar, the entire process is hands off and automated.

Q – As a media planner, how do I use it?

This depends on the type of media planner you are. TV-oriented buyers normally would let our team set up and execute campaigns on their behalf. Agency trading desks (e.g. Cadreon, Xaxis, Vivaki) would use the dashboard as a self service client. The way it is used depends on the goals of the client.

Q – You have done a deal that integrates with SpaFax and, by extension, WPP. Does that limit your ability to work with the other big media holding companies?

Integration is not an accurate description. Spafax has licensed third party data to inform the way they buy DOOH. Their methodology requires programmatic technology to execute at scale.

We work with agencies and different trading desks under all of the holding companies. Spafax is just one of our clients. Our other clients have their own methodology of applying data to target audiences across DOOH. At Invite Media our first big client was Vivaki, but Invite is used across agency holding companies. It’s no different here.

Q – Do you see Vistar as a separate destination portal or underlying, enabling tech for agency systems?

We provide a business-to-business interface for buyers of digital out of home media, as well as the enabling technology for those media owners to sell a lot more of their inventory.

Q – What’s the primary attraction of this model?

Programmatic technology enables buying at scale, transparency, accountability, and the application of data for targeting and reporting. The sum of these benefits is the ability to prove effectiveness and ROI of the medium which has been lacking to date.

Q – What are the primary objections? I assume price erosion and commoditization of media is a concern.

Generally speaking our media partners are optimistic about the value programmatic technology can bring to the DOOH media segment overall. Opening up inventory leads to concerns around channel conflict, but this is something we work very closely with our partners to manage. I think most industry observers would agree that it has worked very well in online display environments for both buyers and sellers.

This is a very important point for us. Relationships with our media partners are the heart of our business. We pick the term “Partners” with a purpose — we are working together to educate the market and progress the industry as a whole.

Q – Do media operators see this as a way to unload remnant time or the primary way to sell going forward?

While our media partners request ads only for the unsold portion of their inventory, we do not see this as a remnant monetization tool. We are collectively trying to expand the opportunity set of buyers that can buy DOOH. As an example, we have run campaigns for mobile ad networks who use DOOH as an extension to the geo-targeting they are doing on mobile. Mobile buyers are not all of a sudden interested in DOOH because of price — it is the ability to seamlessly extend their existing buy that has enabled this opportunity.

The traditional sales effort by our media partners’ direct sales teams will 100% continue in the way it has historically. Our platform is just viewed as the gateway to budgets that previously ignored DOOH — be that broadcast, online video/digital branding, or mobile. If we succeed in our mission, then the opportunity set of sales channels for our media partners will have expanded tremendously.

Q – How does this differ from some earlier attempts at aggregating and selling Digital OOH media, like rVue and SeeSaw and Adcentricity?

There are two, very important, differences:

1) Technology — Vistar Media has spent years building ad serving technology customized to the nuances of DOOH. Building these pipes and working hand in hand with media owners was a massive investment of time, energy, and money. Our partnerships with trading desks/mobile ad networks/online video marketplaces and the subsequent demand we are working to generate from these sources are impossible to access without technology such as ours.

2) Data/ROI — DOOH suffers from a supply/demand imbalance because it can’t answer two simple questions: how do I know this media works? And, how do I judge its effectiveness? So, simply aggregating DOOH through a single portal and making it easy to buy doesn’t solve the problem. In other words, if I wasn’t interested when it was hard to buy because I can’t judge the ROI, making it easier to buy doesn’t change the story. rVue, SeeSaw, and Adcentricity were all focused on aggregation. We are going well beyond that.

Our focus is on increasing underlying demand for the media by showing it works. “Works” is a relative term so that conversation depends on the type of buyer/client. However, the underlying programmatic platform is the stepping stone to solving the core issue. It is the first of its kind, and provides major differentiation.

Q – How do you deal with all the formats and lack (still) of standards?

We use a transcoding technology that allows us to ingest a single video file and transcode it to the specifications of each media partner. Previously, ad trafficking across DOOH was indeed painfully tedious. But we’ve solved for that through the integrations and encoding process. Ironing out these issues is what enables us to focus on the substantial issues.

A little pre-dinner wander around the Clearwater shopping mall in Johannesburg Monday (here on a gig) walked me up to a bank of the future digital install that was both impressive and dumb. I had no idea it was there.

First, the impressive …

The ABSA bank (part of the Barclay’s group) has installed a long and wide video wall that runs to the back of the branch and around a corner. There are 33 55-inch displays running a full 23 meters, or roughly 70 feet. Part of a bank of the future test, the branch’s video wall does an animation of the city landscape and familiar visuals like the Nelson Mandela Bridge, Gold Reef City, Soweto’s Cooling Towers, and Absa’s business campus. Some of the office complexes here are pretty amazing in terms of design.

Now the not so good …

There is a big 3 by 3 video wall that has laser scanning to make it interactive. So you walk up to it and navigate like you would a touch screen. Unfortunately, the resolution for the content doesn’t match up with the aggregate pixels of the 3 by 4 metre wall, so it is soft and a little hard to read. Then there’s the simple matter that walking up to a wall-sized screen to navigate something like a kiosk makes very little sense.

The branch also has a 55 inch portrait screen in the promotions area (there was a car there), 6 touch screen stations for customer-staff sessions, 6 46 inch touchscreens for product education, and 2 55′s behind the teller counter showing foreign exchange rates and, probably, rugby. There is always a rugby match on some nerby TV here.

Then there are two clusters, called forests, of staggered height tablets showing new product information, updates and “did you know” stuff.

The branch was closed when I was looking so I did not get a good luck at what all was inside. It was, however, impressive except for the video wall, which badly needed a rethink and better, tuned creative.

The project was done by a company called Global Access.

ABSA is the company that put up the world’s largest LED board in Johannesburg, so there is clearly someone up high who likes this sort of thing.