Friday, January 18, 2008

CBS Outernet joins forces with Ripple TV for digital signage content placement

AdWeek is reporting that CBS Outernet (formerly known as SignStorey), have partnered with Ripple TV, giving them access to, "more than 1,500 U.S. locations, including retailers such as Borders, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Jack In The Box and Tully's."

While it does look peculiar coming on the heels of all this news about NBC's digital signage upfront, given that CBS dropped over $70 million to acquire SignStorey just a few months ago I think it's safe to say they've been thinking of ways to best grow their investment. And the deal apparently extends beyond Ripple's reach as well:
"CBS has also formed an alliance with Automotive Broadcasting Network. ABN places car-related content through a private network in over 20,000 dealerships.

"CBS has agreed to let ABN use clips from The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, Entertainment Tonight, 60 Minutes and The Early Show."
So what will ABC do next week? :) Actually, a much more interesting question (to me, at least), is what will SeeSaw Networks do? Both of these recent deals have put the big broadcast networks in the driver's seat, and indeed we've seen now that they're more than willing to partner with other existing networks themselves. This could leave SeeSaw in an awkward position since their value-add is being able to make those deals happen seamlessly, but that's apparently a service offering that at least NBC and CBS haven't seemed to need.

Only somewhat related, these articles that feature companies like CBS and NBC seem to draw a lot more traffic than normal. To you newcomers, welcome! If you're just getting your feet wet in the digital signage market, I suggest you check out this digital signage primer to answer some basic questions about the industry.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Bill,

On top of the announcement between CBS Outernet and Ripple TV, they also released information about a partnership with SeeSaw Networks.

"The agreement adds more than 2,000 Ripple screens in venues including Borders, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Jack in the Box and Tully’s to SeeSaw’s out of home advertising inventory, totaling millions of weekly impressions (Business Wire)."

It's interesting that these announcements would come out at the same time. It appears that Ripple is going to use CBS for major media representation, and leverage its relationship with SeeSaw to sell its remaining inventory.

Bill Gerba said...

Hi David,

Thanks for catching that! CBS has certainly done their homework. I think their multi-tiered approach to selling their inventory holds a lot of promise.