It’s fun when the posts just come right to you. Seems to happen to me a lot when I am driving, although this was a first for me.
I needed gas on my commute home. So I stopped at a 76 station just off the freeway, sidled up to the one armed bandit, and got out to start the painful transaction.
I stood up and looked straight into the face of a gorgeous, sexy, high resolution flat panel screen embedded atop the gas pump. If you have read any of my posts here you will realize how fun this was for me. I love marketing, and examining and evaluating marketing angles. Much of my writing imagines technologies to bring information to us more ubiquitously, which of course opens the door for a whole new level of penetration in marketing and advertising. In particular read my posts on Microsoft Surface, WiMAX, synch, and even my very first post on this site referenced a half mirror half LCD that can be toggled from LCD to mirror mode (coincidentally I read about one of these in a custom designed home today).
So it was rewarding and fascinating for me to watch this screen while I got my gas (and of course perhaps get lost in it and pump more gas than I really wanted to or could afford)… distraction is a marketing technique, make no mistake.
But then it got cool. Local traffic on a dynamic map courtesy of yahoo flashed up… all the while the business news channel was embedded on the left third of the flat panel. This was not a static low res display on a programmed loop… this was live information. And of course you can have your advertisements on the screens, for the right price.
That starts to get fun… what a fantastic advertising angle for local open homes. As the Director of Technology for CCAR, I manage our HomesOpenToday.com (HOT) website (sorry, shameless plug). My mind was already whirling with the possibilities of that sort of hyperlocalized advertising… a new layer of functionality for the HOT website was roughed out by the time I got home. Contact the vendor, work with them to establish some preferential pricing for my members in return for a stream of recurring ads each week as members opt into syndicating their open house publication from that definitive content source to the 76 (and soon others to be sure) gas station nearby blanketing the time of their open house.
Like I said, sometimes the posts are really easy to come by. This was a new and fun experience for me, however. Wathing tv at a gas station standing outside your car isn’t something I want to do every day, but it beats just plain old standing outside your car at a gas station by a long shot, at least in my book.
Add this little wrinkle to your marketing and advertising repertoire.