Jeff Storey To Buy Reactrix?
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Each day that passes brings Reactrix, already in receivership, closer to the point of no return. As you will recall when we first wrote about their demise back in October, the Redwood City, California based company had retained business consultants Sherwood Partners to “manage the restructuring process and find buyers for the company’s media and technology assets”.
The last we heard is that there are two companies (if you can call them that) both claiming to have secured ‘a deal’ to buy the Reactrix Intellectual Property (IP) BUT they both seem to be shopping around for capital to actually try and pull off the deal (yeah, like that is seriously going to work in the current climate).
For sure, players like Clear Channel and Neo Advertising are looking at the mall networks but this whole episode is still a super massive disaster and does the image of our industry no good whatsoever.
Neither Clear Channel or Neo of course are dumb enough to dive into a mall deal until there is a certainty with what is happening elsewhere and neither of the buyers for the IP have the capital to close the deal unless they have a confirmed media partner!
One possible bidder we are told is Jeff Storey.
We have also heard that the Mall owners, who of course are the real victims in all of this are extremely ‘pissed off’ and many if not all are considering options including removing and trashing the Reactrix systems which are already in-place.
Reactrix may have been the first of the gang to die but they are certainly taking far too long to get themselves buried.
December 6th, 2008 at 15:34 @690
The mall owners should be “pissed off” as they were promised a lot of things by Reactrix. The bottom line is Mike Ribero left the company in a great big mess and that is the reason it can’t be rescued. Once again, the Reactrix CEO Mike Ribero is to blame.
December 6th, 2008 at 17:22 @765
I worked at Rx and what you say is true. The books are a mess, the IP is a mess, the strategy is a mess and truth of it all is the ugly mess was made by Mike Ribero. He blames the capital markets on Reactrix going under but Ribero should look in a mirror because he is and was the reason Reactrix can’t even get out of receivership and find an interested buyer…
December 7th, 2008 at 18:53 @829
Adrian:
I agree that the collapse of Reactrix is a blow to our industry.
Those of us who have been banging around the Digital Signage space for a while may remember the raft of advertising-based big-screen Digital Sigange networks launched in shopping malls in the USA during the 1999-2001 period. All of them disappeared, if memory serves me, by the end of 2002.
Those incluced Skytron, Interlinq and a host of others whose names I have forgotten. The content formula which they used always seemed to include a preponderance of movie trailers (provided free by the movie studios) and music videos (which were likely provided free by the big music labels).
These networks assumed that people wanted to watch the trailers and videos while they ate their burgers in the food court. This assumption was wrong, so all of them disappeared, leaving the malls operators — as is the case today — burned and a bit jaded about our new medium.
From what I see, here in North America the one mall network that seems to be developing a good content formula and business model is AdSpace Networks. For them, the proof of AdSpace’s success or failure will be to see if they survive through to the end of this current retail decline. If they do, we’ll have a winner (and I hope they do survive). If they don’t, some other group will have to emerge in the next few years to develop a success content model and business model for Digital OOH in the common areas of shopping malls.
Best regards,
Bill Collins, Principal
DecisionPoint Media Insights
http://www.decisionpointmedia.com
DecisionPoint Media Insights is a research consultancy that designs and produces custom consumer research on digital media networks that are deployed at retail and out of home.