Buoyed by overwhelmingly positive customer response after a two-month ATM advertising pilot conducted late last year at Bristol Airport near London, Nationwide Building Society is expanding its advertising program to over 200 locations this summer.

Nationwide is the UK's ninth-largest retail banking, saving and lending organization by asset size, with a network of 1,500 ATMs, 430 of which are in non-bank locations.

The first 23 advertising test sites, at London Underground stations, will be rolled out this month. Other sites, at 63 BP gas stations and 117 ASDA convenience stores, will be added later this summer.

A 30-second full-motion video ad for myOyster.com, an online employee recruitment firm, will run continuously on the attract screen until a user inserts a bank card. Shorter, animated ads will appear during the "please wait" portion of the transaction and again on the "thank you" screen.

 Unlike the original test, receipts also will carry a promotional message, including the company's URL. Interest in receipt-based advertising grew after 66 percent of ATM users questioned by Nationwide after the pilot said they would find the issuing of coupons "useful."

All of the sites are at high-volume locations, particularly those at the subway stations, which are frequented by many of London's 12 million residents. "We'll get a quarter of a million hits on those in eight weeks – that's just one-on-one transactions, not allowing for ambient impressions," said Julian Haslan, marketing director at I-Design, the firm that designed the ads and recruited myOyster.com.

The demographics of many Underground riders match up nicely with the typical myOyster.com client, Haslan added.

Nationwide is the first UK ATM deployer to dabble in advertising, though Haslan believes that others will follow soon.

"Over the past two to three years, a gradual appreciation has developed for what it can do," he said. "We have to construct a business model that will return enough revenue to (ATM deployers) to make it interesting."

Banks in the UK may be quicker to adopt third-party advertising than their American counterparts, since they have opted for the time being not to collect surcharges or foreign fees from ATM users.

"Any banks who still think that the only way to make their ATM network economically viable is to charge people for withdrawing their own cash might consider advertising as a possible alternative," said Francis Walsh, Nationwide's technology director.

I-Design is aiming its program at big banks with high-volume, high-technology machines, in hopes of commanding higher rates from advertisers. About half of Nationwide's ATMs, for example, are NCR Personas models. I-Design is currently basing its rates on the transaction volumes of machines.

"We're looking at increasing the technology as we move forward to make the space more valuable (to advertisers)," Haslan said. "The cash machines running this campaign are multimedia power houses capable of displaying TV quality video and graphics and should be considered as digital new media." 

I-Design believes ATM advertising's CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) should carry a price in line with digital media such as the Internet. Most media buyers, however, tend to put ATMs in the less pricey outdoor or out-of-home category, which includes such low-tech delivery systems as billboards.

Coordinating advertising campaigns via remote management software such as I-Design's newly-developed I-WARE also will make the medium more valuable, Haslan said.

In surveys conducted after Nationwide's original pilot, 69 percent of users said they were "delighted" or "satisfied" with the inclusion of advertising in their ATM transactions, 64 percent thought it was acceptable to have non-bank advertising on ATMs, and 10 percent said they were more likely to visit Thomas Cook, the featured advertiser, as a result of the ads.

During the test, Nationwide also promoted its own travel insurance program.

Nationwide's Walsh said, "Cash machines are an exciting new medium for advertisers, enabling them to target consumers in a new way. Unlike any other form of advertising, consumers keep their eye on the screen the whole time."