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Birmingham City Council tenders for outdoor ads
Source: www.thedrum.co.uk (11 January 2010)
Birmingham City Council is in the process of a tender as it looks to appoint commercial partners to help exploit its corporate assets to generate revenue to support its corporate activities.
The council is set to award contracts which could last up to ten years, each with a possible three-year extension.
The appointments will be made across six Lots.
The first Lot, Outdoor advertising across Birmingham will see the successful applicant aid the council to establish a series of gateways and sites where it can advertising. The sites will be in locations which will deliver high rates of public interaction and ensure premium revenue generation as the city looks to position itself as one of the most important places to advertise in the UK.
The contracts new find new advertising sites will last for between four and ten year, while new 96 sheet, 48 sheet and other large format sites will last between two and six years.
The contract for temporary site searches will last between one and three years.
New finite-duration temporary sites: 1 – 3 years approximately.
It is anticipate that revenue generation from this lot may be between £100,000 and £3million.
Lot Two will see the appointment suppliers to handle advertising across the city’s highways and bidders shall be tasked to plan and implement new advertising strategies to redefine roadside advertising in the UK and to propose a range of new opportunities to deliver revenue and offer the best financial rewards for any European city.
These contracts are expected to run from between five and 10 years and is anticipated to generate between £250,000 and £1million in revenue for the council.
Lot Three will cover digital advertising across the city as the council looks to develop technologies and its use of information screens to enhance its reputation in the digital field and deploy new, emerging technology to carry advertising.
This contract will last between three and 10 years, during which time Birmingham will look to have strengthened its credentials as a leader in digital technology and will look to generate between £150,000 and £1million as a result.
The Fourth Lot will look to appoint suppliers to oversee advertising within council buildings and facilities including car parks, leisure centres, libraries and staff uniforms.
A consortia approach may be taken in this appointment which may last between three-to-five years, due to the scale of the project which is anticipated to net revenues of up to £500,000.
Lot Five will cover sales and sales management services for the Council’s magazines & publications including other printed materials for up to three years as it looks to make around £500,000.
Finally, Lot Six will oversee advertising on the Councils fleet of over three hundred vehicles for up to thee years for which is hopes to make over £50,000.
Invitations to tender were expected to be received before December of last year with decisions and appointments expected to be made in the coming weeks.
Experimental Clocks Tell Straphangers if the Wait May Soon Be Over
Heading downtown on the subway the other day, Nerissa Campbell bounded to the edge of an A train platform and assumed the standard straphanger’s stance: neck craned, back hunched, eyes peering down a dark tunnel. Where on earth was that train?
The answer was hanging just a few feet above her head. A digital L.E.D. display, newly installed on the station ceiling, was counting down the minutes until the next express train would arrive — a basic bit of travelers’ guidance that has, until now, remained a rarity in New York.
Electronic arrival-time clocks, a convenience long enjoyed by users of mass transit in London, Paris and Washington, are starting to trickle into New York City’s labyrinthine transportation network, part of a recent push to bring 21st-century technology to a system that runs very much as it did on its first day more than a century ago.
Officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority say the clocks will revolutionize the way New Yorkers get around, soothing the usual anxieties that come with waiting for a bus or train that might never arrive.
Three experiments are now active in the city, including a multimillion-dollar subway tracking system in the South Bronx and GPS-based bus timers along 34th Street that cost the city nothing because a potential vendor picked up the tab.
Each has been promoted as a potential breakthrough for a problem that decades of planning and millions in investments have still not solved.
But a recent tour of stations and bus shelters equipped with the clocks found riders reacting to the new technology with shrugs as well as smiles. And while the clocks are mostly accurate, they all have their quirks.
Ms. Campbell, a jazz singer from Upper Manhattan, had been told by a digital sign at 145th Street that she would have to wait about six minutes for her A train. Eight minutes later, she was skeptical. “It lied!” she said, laughing. “They shouldn’t spend money if they’re not going to get it quite right.”
The clock in question was part of a pilot program that began last month in four stations along the A and C lines. It uses existing track signals to approximate a train’s location, generating estimated arrival times that can be off by more than two minutes.
Still, some trains arrive right on time, and the pilot cost only about $20,000 to install: spare change in the debt-laden world of mass transit in New York City.
“Trains coming more often would be better,” said Lindsey Timko, 23, a filmmaker waiting on the same platform, “but knowing when they’re going to come is a good thing.”
Many riders did not even notice the clocks, saying they never even thought to look up. At the entrance to the 145th Street station, most riders dug into pocketbooks and hurried through the turnstiles, seemingly oblivious to a countdown clock hanging from the ceiling.
On the platform, even those who were aware of the new feature defaulted to the usual method of staring into the tunnel — suggesting that the unconscious rituals of traveling in New York do not easily give way.
“It doesn’t change the way I commute,” said Bianca Ansari, a student at the Alvin Aileydance studio, after a clock was pointed out to her at 145th Street. “We probably don’t trust them. As a New Yorker, you know that nothing works.”
That is an attitude that Jay H. Walder, the chairman of the transportation authority, is trying to change. Mr. Walder, who gained prominence as a planner for the London transit system, has made the widespread implementation of countdown clocks a top priority since taking over the troubled transit agency last fall.
“We all know the experience that we have, every one of us, getting down into the subway and not knowing what’s happening. Literally, looking longingly down the tracks to see if we can see a white light,” Mr. Walder said in an interview. “We can take some of the angst out of the subway and bus experience.”
Knowing how many minutes until the next train will arrive seems like a simple task, but it has stymied New York’s transportation planners for decades.
The city’s subway tracks are equipped with signals that follow trains through the system. That is why trains do not run into one another, or sometimes speed up or slow down to conform to schedules.
But it is hard to harness the information from those signals, and harder still to convert it into an approximate arrival time that can be displayed for passengers. Signals are not routed to a central processing center, so controllers cannot see an entire route at once, and GPS and wireless signals do not travel well underground.
Only a single subway line, the L train, has a complete system of working countdown clocks, and that required installing from scratch an entirely new computerized set of signals. Such a task can disrupt train service for years, not an immediate option in a city so dependent on its public transportation.
But in the last six months, the transportation authority has tried out several new approaches.
Besides the A and C line pilot, eight stations in the South Bronx along the No. 6 line have been equipped with screens that display waiting times for the next four trains heading into the station. An automated voice makes periodic announcements — “The next Brooklyn-bound train will arrive in three minutes”— and the system can differentiate between trains heading to Parkchester or to Pelham Bay Park.
The system, which cost $213 million to implement, works by rerouting signals to a central control center in Midtown that can generate an approximate waiting time using a computer algorithm. That information is then sent back to a communications room at each local station, where it is transmitted to an electronic sign. The signs and a revamped public address system cost an additional $171 million to install. An unscientific survey found that most of the trains arrived almost exactly on time. A few trains mysteriously dropped off the display, and the clocks occasionally jumped around. (For instance, an eight-minute wait suddenly became four.) But when the signs flashed “0 min,” signaling an arrival, a train was almost always entering the station.
“Since it got put up, I find myself really relying on it,” a passenger named Keisha Malcolm said as she waited for train at East 149th Street. “Before you had to wait and see.”
“I was surprised to see them, especially here in the Bronx,” said Mercedes Guzman, who commutes to work from the station. She finds the signs helpful, although she says the automated announcements, which sometimes occur every 30 seconds, are annoying. “The thing I don’t care for is the man talking,” she said.
The authorities are hoping to expand this system within a year to the rest of the numbered subway lines, except for the No. 7. That would bring clocks into four of the system’s busiest stations. But the lettered lines will not receive the clocks until at least 2014.
Bus riders got their own clocks last summer at bus shelters along 34th Street in Midtown, serving the M16 and M34 crosstown lines. These clocks use GPS devices to track bus locations, part of a year-long pilot provided to the city at no cost by Clever Devices, which runs a similar system in Chicago.
A recent survey found the clocks were mostly accurate to within 30 seconds, although many of the passengers chose to peer down the street anyway.
“This is New York City, nothing runs on time,” Leonora Berisaj said as she waited for an M34 bus that took 10 minutes to arrive. “It’s not about the clock,” she added. “It’s about the bus.”
Digital Signage: The Forgotten Display Market
We don’t think much about the public display market, which includes digital signage. But according to Chris Connery, Vice President, PC and Large Format Commercial Displays for Display Search, 4.1 million large-size flat panel displays (26 inches and above) have been deployed since 2007, with 52 percent LCDs and 48 percent plasma. It’s a complicated market, one that involves a lot of integration and often special software.
Speaking at the DisplaySearch U.S. Flat Panel Display conference yesterday, he noted the public display market has grown from 400,000 units in 2005 to 1.7 million in 2009, and is expected to grow to 7.4 million by 2015. This makes it one of the fastest growing parts of the display business, if still much smaller than the TV market. As in other markets, the pricing has dropped, to an average of just under $1000
Jose Avalos, Digital Signage Director for Intel said that he expects even faster growth in digital signage: about 8 million media players by 2015, each running about two screens. He talked about how Intel was addressing different parts of the market through its different processors, and making a big look at embedded processors for better managing the signage.
Pierre Richer, Chief Operating Officer of NEC, talked about the challenges that advertisers face with what he called “digital place-based media.” He said advertisers want the kind of information they are getting from Google Analytics, and how hard that was. He suggested point-of-sale integration and having the sign drive specific actions, such as getting more information, getting coupons, or even placing orders. Alternatively, you could have cameras measuring the number of people who actually view the sign. But to do any of this requires a more sophisticated infrastructure, enabling a fully integrated media campaign. Richer called for the industry to make this happen, saying it will help the digital signage medium better compete with other media.
Alan High, President of Clear Channel Malls said the “digital out of home” advertising market has grown from zero to $250 million over the past four years. He said this was 7 to 8 percent of the total industry sales, even though digital billboards are only 1 percent of the inventory.
He talked about the issues in digital signage ranging from placement to financial models. He said the content of the sign needs to be different depending on the “dwell time” – how long people have to look at the sign, ranging from highway billboards which are all advertising to places like gas stations which show some headlines and some ads; to places where people spend a lot of time, such as malls, where content becomes more important. He said there was a big disconnect between the capabilities that could technically be delivered (such as different ads at different times) and what the advertising industry is ready to accept.
Jennifer Davis, Vice President of Marketing of Planar, a maker of specialty displays, showed some examples of very interesting digital signs, including tiled LCD video wall systems. She said narrow-bezel displays were important, but not enough – it also needs software, mounts, manageability, etc.
One point she said was to remember that digital signage is a business, not a technology. I’ve heard that phrase at many tech conferences, and it’s always a signal that the technology is starting to become ready for bigger markets.
Forum: Studies prove digital signs’ safety
Source: www.record-eagle.com
Scenic Michigan never seems to let facts get in the way of its radical crusade to ban billboards. Here are facts about digital billboards.
Over the past few years, some Michigan billboard companies have converted a small number of conventional signs to modern, digital billboards. About 50 of Michigan’s roughly 12,000 billboards are now digital, which amounts to less than one per county.
Digital signs broadcast up-to-the-minute information to motorists, making them invaluable tools for the state’s most important job providers and industries. They have become popular advertising tools for tourism businesses, public universities, auto dealers, small local businesses, and many more. They are widely used by the Michigan Lottery Bureau to promote games that fund public schools.
In addition, the FBI, state police, local police departments, and Crime Stopper organizations across the state are using digital billboards to help find missing or abducted children through AMBER alerts and to help apprehend fugitives.
To date, more than 25 statewide AMBER Alerts have been posted on digital billboards in Michigan. Over the past few years, Michigan’s billboard companies have voluntarily posted 110 suspects on billboards for local nonprofit crime-fighting organizations, helping the programs apprehend about 75 percent of the suspects.
The State of Michigan also embraces digital sign technology, building a number of digital billboard-like structures along major freeways. These lighted signs that closely resemble billboards (a metal post with a rectangular sign affixed to the top) sit much closer to the road and display messages telling motorists to drive safely. Given the state’s use of digital signs to broadcast safe driving messages, Scenic Michigan’s claims that digital billboards pose a safety concern for motorists is as unfortunate as it is unfounded.
Scenic Michigan wants the state Legislature to pass House Bill 5580 to ban future digital billboards until yet another study is done examining the safety of the signs.
The Scenic Michigan Forum column shamefully failed to mention that four independent scientific studies have already found no correlation between digital billboards and driving safety. Two studies (2007 and 2009) by Tantala Associates found digital billboards have no statistical relationship with traffic accidents on interstates. In its 2009 study, Tantala examined accident data for local roads in Rochester, Minn., concluding digital billboards are not related to accidents.
Tantala’s findings affirmed 2007 research by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI). The VTTI human factors study used cameras to measure driver distraction — eye glance patterns, speed maintenance and lane keeping — and concluded digital billboards are “safety-neutral.”
For reasons rational people find hard to comprehend, Scenic Michigan — unlike the vast majority of Michigan residents — wants to ban billboards. HB 5580 is a law in search of a problem that only exists for Scenic Michigan. It will also kill Michigan jobs and harm Michigan employers at a time when the state budget is in crisis and our unemployment rate remains worst in the nation. That makes it bad legislation.
Editor’s note: The Tantala Associates and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute studies cited above were commissioned by FOARE, the Foundation for Outdoor Advertising Research and Education. The 501(c)(3) charitable foundation says it “supports research and provides an educational forum and structure to assess new and emerging issues related to the outdoor advertising industry.”
About the author: Tom Carroll is president of the Outdoor Advertising Association of Michigan and Vice President of the Central Region for CBS Outdoor.
About the forum: The forum is a periodic column of opinion written by Record-Eagle readers in their areas of interest or expertise. Submissions of 500 words or less may be made by e-mailing letters@record-eagle.com. Please include biographical information and a photo.
Outdoor advertising in bars (UK)
Source: www.ledtelevisionstore.com
The outdoor advertising industry in the UK (The Outdoor Advertising Association of Great Britain) has confirmed that the Internet and outdoor advertising are the only two major growing channels in the advertising industry, especially at the expense of advertising revenue in magazines and newspapers. The rise and rise in the open to spend is mainly due to some clever players who are new audiences segmented by life-style venues to thank, with impressive precision in the alignment of the demos. It has enabled further momentum with the introduction of an innovation after another.
Find more information on outdoor advertising here. The Bar & Pub Audience Central of British society and lifestyles, bars, pubs and clubs play a variety of roles, depending on the type of venue, its location and facilities. In recent years there has been a massive change in the market with a definite shift from traditional to branded pub chains oriented audience targeting a broad range of lifestyle needs, focused on key demographic groups. Larger towns, theme nights, all events and concerts have led to a huge increase in the number of visitors to bars in the United Kingdom. The managing director of Luminar, the largest operator of licensed venues in the UK, says: “It was an absolute revolution in drinking habits, we changed hundreds of unprincipled drunkard into thriving social centers.”
Effectiveness of the environment for advertisers Bars and pubs are the number one choice as a meeting point for friends, couples and gentlemen, if they have the latest trends and current events. For this reason, many advertisers pubs, bars and clubs as the perfect outdoor environment to educate, not just potential customers about their brands, but also identifies a real topic of conversation among these trendsetters and opinion leaders. There are several powerful channels to reach to those audiences in the pub environment, including toilet posters, sampling, promotional activity and coasters distributed nationwide. Research has proven that an audience in a “socialization” mentality is very sensitive to the toilet posters and other sampling opportunities. MBA Independent researchers have reported that advertising generates cash prompted a massive recall %78, on average, between the main target groups. For example, asked, in a recent integrated outdoor advertising campaign, T-Mobile’s popularity reached 80% among young core audience, while 67% say that they would very likely use the T-Mobile in the future .
AdMedia’s joint chief executive, Philip Vecht, commented: “Our national network of some of the largest and most popular style of pubs, bars and clubs can advertisers effectively a large lucrative young audience who have to be very receptive to advertising messages goal. Advertisers can control the environment to to generate the creation of highly effective campaigns, the massive awareness levels under increasingly difficult to reach an audience. “Increased spending by youth-oriented brands The efficacy of bars attract a lucrative youth-oriented audience has led to a flood of advertising spending in bar media from a wide range of categories, including telecommunications, movies, entertainment, driving, personal care & cosmetics, beverages and games. O2, Warner Bros, Channel 4, T-Mobile, Ford, Nivea, WKD and Xbox have recognized the effectiveness of the media bar on the achievement of this notoriously difficult to reach, audience. T-Mobile Case studies The bar promotional activities has been specially created for the start of their current wage ‘U-Fix “and used the more than a dozen existing and entirely new format to a fully integrated, T-Mobile event on a network of style bars and clubs on a national level create more than 800 venues. The range of media – including washroom posters – presented by Mediacom and Posterscope use of the mark was a total commitment to their target audience of 18-24 year olds. A video about the campaign can be viewed on YouTube Activity included: – WC-posters (including talking posters) – Door and mirror stickers – T-shirts worn by bartenders – Bar top branding – Drink Coasters – Branded Lollipops – Interactive DJ’s & 10000 Price – Branded matchbooks – Free Shots – 2 million mark scratch cards Lynx Case Study A multi-element support for Lynx Click in conjunction with a major national TV campaign, in nightclubs across the UK. – Washroom Posters – Mirror Sticker – Door Stickers – Drink Coasters – Branded pint glasses – Branded matchbooks – Branded Bar Runner – Branded T-shirtsConclusion Asked to raise awareness of the T-Mobile’s outdoor advertising campaign reached 88% among the core audience, with 67% saying that they would be very likely to use the T-Mobile in the future. 80% of respondents were not aware of the T-Mobile U-Fix before entering the bar area, although the campaign was run nationally on television two weeks ago. … Media Innovation – provide creative solutions, high Talking posters provide an excellent opportunity to reach the target audience attention, a topic of conversation enabling and creative use of audio from a TV or radio campaign to reinforce the brand message into an innovative and effective way. Will T-Mobile, Paramount Pictures, UIP, 20th Century Fox. Direct-response media pads with washroom posters: posters on the floor of the toilet positioned to tear down this great business card slips massively present a unique and effective tool for any advertiser with a direct response mechanism, or simply to inform and remind consumers about the the product. To raise the beer mats and coasters, produced in any shape and size, the visibility of the brand in the bar environment – the creation of a genuine interaction with the audience with a call to action, and such games. Coasters are an advertising medium, used by Nokia, Nestle, 02, T-Mobile, Ladbrokes and UIP. Other advertising opportunities in the bars are: Brand pint glasses, shot glasses, wine glasses, matchbooks, bar runners, mirrors, stickers, urinal stickers, door stickers, branded ashtrays, DJ interaction, scratch cards, T-shirts, branded lollipops and Competitions Source: * High Street Pubs and Bars Report; ** Sports Review 2005; *** MBA Independent researcher, researched **** Only AdMedia locations.