Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
In December 2008 in our post ‘Will Amscreen Win BPTV? we told you “We believe that there are only two vendors left in the race to win BPTV … One of the contenders we can definitely confirm is Amscreen – a rumour we talked about back in August when the company first came into being” so it should be no surprise that, unerringly accurate soothsayers that we are, today we see an official announcement confirming this.
Development Director Lee McQueen, winner of TV series The Apprentice, Sir Alan Sugar, CEO Simon Sugar
Anyway, this is of course another nice win for Amscreen albeit this is perhaps the first global and biggest brand they have ever landed.
It’s an exclusive 5 year contract with Amscreen product being installed in 335 BP owned forecourts from spring 2009.
One of the measures of success of this operation we believe will actually be selling the concept to the other 800 BP Dealer partners – it’s like getting both franchise AND corporate buy-in with McDonalds in the US deployment we discussed yesterday.
Whilst 355 forecourts will be impressive, getting closer to a 1,000 by bringing in folks who are NOT ordered to take it but have to be convinced that it’s in their benefit to take it will make all the difference and could really put Amscreen firmly on the map and perhaps even help enormously to having the 20,000 screens we think they might have by the end of 2009.
Richard Harding, UK Convenience Retail Director, for BP told us “We are excited to announce the roll-out of the Amscreen network in our stores. Amscreen’s products enable us to present relevant, useful and timely information in a highly engaging format. We see this as a great opportunity to improve the safety and efficiency of customers’ journeys for example by providing traffic updates whilst also sharing news of our great promotions, products and services”
Screens will carry customer information such as live traffic updates, advertising for BP products and services as well as advertising from national and regional advertisers who would be eager of course to reach the 7 million motorists who use BP forecourts in the UK each week.
Finally for the California-based Cisco drones frothing at the mouth and those others who commented and emailed about our recent post Cisco To Pull Plug On Digital Signage? we’d point out that this win for a relative newcomer in the industry is EXACTLY why Cisco’s efforts in this space are doomed.
Cisco were never EVER in the running for this business and that’s with a big, major industry player with a global brand (BP) that they (Cisco) obviously already have very big customer relationships with.
Who would have thought that a few years ago you could quite legitimately say that Amstrad beats Cisco in such a major account as this.
April 24th, 2009 at 00:06 @046
I think your hate for Cisco clouds your judgement.
It makes your stories appear like you go out of your way to say something negative about the company…
I always thought your material was solid however I would be interested to see what your thoughts would be if the company was still Tivela and not Cisco.
Lets not crucify Cisco just because they are a big company traditionally not focused on this niche technology.
I think the DMS solution works pretty well and is continuing to evolve quite well.
Just my 2 cents 🙂
April 24th, 2009 at 12:12 @550
Why on earth would you think that we ‘hate’ Cisco? We don’t hate anyone. We report as we see it based on our knowledge, experience, what we see and hear and often n what we are told. Cisco should be winning the BP accounts of this world – they would in networking. Beaten by an Amstrad like organisation in an account such as this says it all.
April 24th, 2009 at 13:31 @605
I think it is OK for Adrian to comment like this. It is OK to be a straight talking person in his role and maybe he is right – maybe not. I would suggest Adrian to comment on his top 10 list. How many are funded by external funding and I know many of them are selling very little currently, and I believe that many of them will have severe problems surviving without extra funding. Everyone knows it is difficult to get funding currently, so I believe that many of many are in a risk for a Bankruptcy. Now it is started with Cisco I hope he can create a risk report for the competitors to Cisco. This would make the discussion much more fair – it could be named “Who are in the risk of dropping out – who can die “