The morning press - digital signage news for March 3

So I've finally caught up on my email, chat transcripts and plain 'ol snail mail having been out last week. There definitely have been some news-worthy events lately, and while lots of them have already gotten coverage, I thought I'd add to the unholy din just a bit :)

• Tesco disconnects their in-store TV network: The much-ballyhooed network is being shut off according to insiders.  While the PR takes the "green" angle saying that they don't want to spew more carbon into the atmosphere just to run some flat panels, we suspect it has a lot more to do with the impossibly optimistic numbers that Dunnhumby promised to hit, did actually manage for a while, and then lost control of.
  
  While some have taken to speculating that Tesco's network's demise is a harbinger of things to come for our industry, as numerous news outlets remind us, while Dunnhumby did a great deal of work on optimizing their content, the screen placement in each store still left much to be desired, once again pointing to long-term efficacy problems.
  
  As I've noted to any number of people who've asked for my opinion on the matter, Tesco, much like Walmart, doesn't bother with anything that isn't profitable, and they're quick to cut costs wherever possible when marketing programs underperform.  While Tesco TV (or whatever they wound up calling it) was a high-profile deployment in our industry, to Tesco it was probably just one more initiative that needed to be cost-justified, wasn't, and was subsequently dismantled.

• SeeSaw was selected as a DOOH ad buying "standard", and CBS and a number of agencies signed up (or had already done so) to show their support and... you know... actually buy and place ads. Aiming to become the "Google of the burgeoning digital out-of-home media marketplace," as Mediapost puts it, SeeSaw is taking an all-software approach to integrating the diverse media silos of today's ad planners, agencies and screen networks.  While this approach will allow them to scale quickly and cheaply, one wonders how much buy-in they're going to get outside of cutting-edge players.  I still have to imagine that many buyers -- even sophisticated ones -- are going to need some hand-holding for the next year or two.

• Bill Collins, Tracy Locke and Reflect Systems put together a great whitepaper for implementing digital signage at retail.  Click here to get it (PDF).

Tags: digital signage, digital signage news

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