Ooooh! What A Day That Was!
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Well, if we can misquote the wonderful David Byrne let’s sing together; “Ooooh what a week that was” … on Monday the industry saw Danoo acquire Ideacast (we have a review up next week of what we think this means from Bill Collins)
MId-week saw heavy debate on the merits or not of Amscreen’s rollout at BP service station forecourts after some stinging criticism (which we stand by and will substantiate in the near future) by yours truly. DIgicom and Amscreen didn’t sit idly by and our phone rang hot and we published their ‘open letter’ retort on Thursday. Dozens of you published your comments, watched our video of the screen in action and many, many more emailed in their views.
Wednesday also saw the collapse in the UK of AdWalker, who not surprisingly finally went into liquidation.
Late on Thursday Dynamax told us that they were closing their US sales office and liquidating Dynamax LLC – retreating from the shores of the US as a cost cutting exercise, although still strongly committed to the US marketplace.
Midday on Friday saw shares in Vision Media Group (International) plc. suspended due to what was described as a “difficult working capital cash flow” situation – this has to be a hammer blow to Clear Channel in the UK who, if they don’t step into help (and it’s unlikely that they will) may see their digital mall strategy disappear. CCUK’s digital strategy of partnering with folks, or maybe just their choice of partners, has hit them hard and is surely now in tatters – their Socialiate panel has even struggled to see the light of day thanks to shenanigans in the pub business sector between Inspired Gaming Group (UK) / Danoptra.
If that wasn’t enough, on Friday it gave us no joy to have to report that US digital signage software vendor TELentice was in trouble and unlikely to survive without a further injection of cash.
On the plus side (don’t held your breath there are not too many positives this week) the UK retail industry seems to have finally woken up and started to understand digital and the impact it can have on their sector. abc media’s retail media planning portal, PlanMyMedia.com was justly recognised for its excellence and innovation at the Grocer Awards.
Lastly though, something we haven’t reported elsewhere (just yet) but on Tuesday we got to see the best piece of software designed for the OOH industry that we have seen to date, namely Ayuda Media Systems BMS product. It’s already in use in the US by the likes of Lamar, Van Wagner, EYE corporation and a few others.
If you are a traditional outdoor media owner (or even a large digital screen network) you need take a serious look at this product to manage your billboards and posters.
Forget digital signage for a second (this product works with almost any digital signage software) the way this system handles Proof of Performance and the mini web-sites that get automatically created when any campaign goes live is awesome and ought to be standard fair for the industry,
July 11th, 2009 at 15:59 @707
Quotes from a David Byrne album that nobody bought and which has been deleted for most of the intervening twenty-eight years until it recently surfaced on iTunes.
What an eclectic chap you are, Mr. Cotterill.