KEY POINTS:
Good advertising pursuing the impulse buyer is like a berley trail for attracting fish, according to ad industry veteran John McCarthy, who is using a mix of digital signs and technology to jazz up in-store advertising.
He and former advertising executive and IT entrepreneur Craig Meek have teamed up to form the New Zealand arm of OpenEye Displays.
The pair want to replace conventional in-store signs with digital ads displayed on LCD and plasma screens run by scheduling software and wireless networks.
"At the end of the day if the advertising is not attention-grabbing it's like watching a bad movie," said McCarthy.
OpenEye assembles ads made up of still images, text, mpeg and AVI video files and Flash animations, digitises them and puts them on a computer server.
The ads are sent to the retail store over a fast internet connection then fed through a wi-fi base station and out to plasma screens around the store that are fitted with mini computers and wireless receivers.
Its first big installation was at Regency Duty Free's store at Auckland Airport.
McCarthy said plasma screens were common in airport retail zones and shopping malls, but they were usually hard-wired to videos, DVDs or Powerpoint presentations.
With OpenEye, advertising messages could be changed remotely in an instant. The Inspire software enabled ad scheduling so that retailers could target specific customers at specific times.
"If there are a lot of Asian flights between 9am and 11am, they can pump out ads in Chinese and Korean. They'll know if 500 Aussies are about to fly home.
"You could schedule a whole month based on arrivals and departures," he said. In the case of Regency, a mini PC is fitted to the back of each Sony plasma screen. Datacom installed the equipment.
Regency has a sliding track in the roof of its Auckland Airport store so that the screens can be constantly re-positioned. OpenEye has used compression software to reduce a two-minute video clip from 74MB to 13MB. The screens query the server regularly via the wireless network for new content.
Retailers face a significant investment in PC-equipped plasma screens that can cost $10,000 or more each.
A management fee ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month is charged by OpenEye on top of what it charges for putting the ads together.
McCarthy said retailers could claw back some of that investment by selling ad cycles on the screens to suppliers.
OpenEye has negotiated the Australasian licence for Inspire, software designed by Seattle-based Mercury Online. OpenEye also has a US arm based in New Jersey.
The Inspire software allows for schedules to be changed remotely via the internet.
In theory that means display advertising for hundreds of stores scattered across the world could be controlled from one office in New Zealand.
OpenEye now plans to go after retailers, banks and theatres here and in Australia.
Regency, which is part of the Nuance retail group, is looking at putting the screens in other stores.
While OpenEye puts the adverts together for customers, the proprietor is able to change the screen messages by logging on to the server via a web browser.
Meek has become involved in a number of tech investments this year since he left Virtual Spectator, the sports graphics company he helped to found.
He has also formed his own visual display company, iVista.
McCarthy co-founded advertising agency McCarthy Moon, which went into receivership last year after a meteoric rise in the ad world.
