Advertising 101 (sorry Advertiser 4.1)
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
You would think that screen or media networks would be incredibly interested in products that help them manage 3rd party content, media sales and the such like but (especially as there isn’t as much of that going on as we would all like) we have never sensed (or heard) that it was top of mind or particularly important to network owners.
In TV land products like DONOVAN are still around (that schedule and manage) and there are a number of good asset management / media sales add ons to signage solutions such as Scala for example. Dynamax bizarrely has one of the nicest feature sets in terms of media sales functionality with its PointofViewNG products with the ability (which we haven’t seen elsewhere) to have ‘repel’ and ‘attract’ labels to media content for example.
Should you be lucky enough to have lots of brands on your network and you wanted for example, to keep several of them apart, you could weight various ‘repel’ and ‘attract’ values such that a GlaxoSmithKline owned Lucozade advert never appeared next to / or following a PepsiCo. Gatorade advert.
If you had potential brand conflicts that didn’t work either or might embarrass; perhaps adverts for Greenpeace alongside adverts for performance car manufacturers or gas / petroleum brands you could keep them ‘apart’ by using this type of feature as well.
Anyway, we see that C-nario has introduced a product called ADVERTISER™ 4.1 for those they describe as ‘Media Selling Companies”.
Advertiser™ 4.1 we are told enables media selling companies to “implement professional sales-driven media campaigns in the digital signage networks environment”.
Rami Bahar, C-nario’s VP of Sales is quoted as saying “C-nario has developed a deep understanding of advertising-selling companies’ needs and workflows, and translated it into a groundbreaking comprehensive platform”
The press release talks of multiple authorisation levels, a coordinated approval process, high levels of reporting, proof-of-play, purchase order integration, smart scheduling, unlimited playlists and web-based asset management.
It makes no mention of ‘repel’ or ‘attract’ so we figure they haven’t got to that part yet.
Also one of the key things with any asset management system these days is to have an attribute driven approach to the content. Basically that’s the ability to tag / mark content (and somehow make the content itself slightly more intelligent) with an attribute or a number of attributes.
If you had say (and this is a real life example that we have seen in action and used before) a commercial for Smirnoff Vodka, you might want to ‘tag’ it with an attribute that effectively says ‘please do not play this content under any circumstances before 19:00 in the evening’. – it saves an awful lot of scheduling effort by handling content in this way.
We don’t see any notice of this sort of approach in the C-nario press release either.
C-nario will be presenting at Digital Signage Expo 2008, Booth #743
postscript: The press release announces other ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘compelling’ stuff as you would expect from a ‘global leader’ 😉
February 26th, 2008 at 15:15 @677
Adrian is a 100% correct in his explanation of the importance of ‘repel’ and ‘attract’ and other metadata and appearance rules (like the ability to tag/ mark content) in digital signage platforms for screen or media networks, which is why C-nario has had these features incorporated in our Advertiser platform since 2003. Because these are fundamental to C-nario’s Advertiser and not new features, we did not get into these details in our recent release announcing the launch of our new version, Advertiser 4.1, and its new features. Instead, we focused on the more advanced elements like as-planned playlists view, content approval processes, control over number of exposures, real time management for hundreds of screens, etc.
We invite you to visit us at DSE, booth #743 to see a live demonstration of Advertiser 4.1 with all its new features and capabilities.