The morning press - digital signage news for January 27

Here are some of the more interesting industry new items from the past few days:

• This dumb press release says Network Digital Signage Will Save the Big Three and the Super Bowl.  I'm not sure if they've noticed that our industry, at best, is inching over the $1B mark.  I think that's about as much as GM all by itself lost before breakfast this morning.

• Personalized Ads Attract Big Spenders, Frequent Shoppers, according to ChoiceStream. Now, they were studying online advertising, and not our out-of-home stuff, but from a psychological perspective one would imagine similar results in our medium. Unfortunately, advertising special offers -- particularly those adjusting the price or any kind of financing options -- and not allowing any visitor to take advantage of them is illegal in the US.

• Hotels.com is playing with Digital OOH, starting with a :30 spot as well as a custom :120 spot to run on three IdeaCast platforms: Airline TV, Health Club TV and Six Flags TV. Their goal will be to reach their core audience of travelers, "at key aperture moments when a travel message is much more relevant." I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds neat.

• Marketing Execs Struggle to Show ROI, says The Conference Board. "They shouldn't be marketing execs, then," says I.

• Retailer Daily has a nice summary piece titled "In-Store Video Networks Catch Shoppers at Crucial Moment" up on their site. There isn't a lot of new news for those of you already following the industry. But for the few retail execs that somehow haven't yet heard about digital signage, it's a good look at why our medium is becoming so important.

• Roku Announces New BrightSign Digital Signage Product Line, which seems weird to me. After all, they make the set-top boxes that Netflix uses, and have some great technology for the consumer space. How much extra money can they possibly expect to make from digital signage?

• Schering-Plough plans to place the industry’s largest paid buy, estimated to be close to $10 million, which is set to run during the second quarter on as many as a dozen different digital signage networks.

• Nielsen Suspends PRISM Data System, which is a bit of a let down after all of the hype and buzz that the in-store media measurement program had generated over the past few years. I'm going to be looking at this in a bit more detail (as well as the Schering-Plough thing above) a little later at the WireSpring Digital Signage Blog.

• Here's an article about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Using a Digital Signage Network to Communicate with Department Personnel and Inmates. Presumably not at the same time. Unless working at the Sheriff's Department really sucks.

• SeeSaw Adds Eight Network Affiliates, bringing their total to a lot. The new networks add inventory across 700 new venues and 3.5 million weekly impressions to SeeSaw's growing portfolio of digital out-of-home inventory. Combined, SeeSaw's convenience network delivers 10 million weekly impressions across more than 2,500 locations.

• We've also heard that s3mer, inc. introduces cross-platform digital signage software, realizes that the only business model worse than digital signage is free digital signage (thanks for that one, Jeremy), and decides to charge a hefty monthly fee per player instead.
  

Tags: digital signage, digital signage news

Looking for more digital signage info? Check out WireSpring's Kiosk and Digital Signage blog for in-depth industry analysis and even more news about the digital signage industry. While you're there, feel free to read up on our digital signage software and services