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Two little words -- critical mass -- have amounted to one big problem for the ATM advertising industry.

No single deployer, not even a large financial institution like Wells Fargo, can consistently deliver enough ATMs in enough geographic areas to satisfy advertisers. Because they often have very specific demographic needs, an advertiser may want 450 ATMs each in San Francisco, Houston, Chicago and New York City, for example.

An application service provider called RBuzz Inc. thinks it has an answer to the problem. Billing itself as a expert in "global advercasting," RBuzz is building a network of not only ATMs, but other media like interactive kiosks, digital billboards and monitors like those found at airports.

The idea is to present advertisers with a bevy of alternatives that can reach the consumer from the time he departs for the office until he heads home after a full day of work and play. So he might view one advertising message on a digital billboard while riding public transit, another while getting lunch money at an ATM near his office, and yet another at a kiosk while waiting in line for tickets in a cinema lobby.

"In essence, we want to be like a TV station that runs on everything that isn't a TV," said Mike Szimanski, RBuzz's new vice president of global advertising, sales and communications.

Szimanski believes advertisers are more likely to sign on the dotted line if offered a choice of multiple media. With RBuzz's "device agnostic" approach, he said he can plug a media buyer's requirements into the company's database and generate perhaps a half-dozen media options. As interest builds, certain media may gain enough fans to stand on their own.

"By diversifying, we're making it easier to gain critical mass. ATMs will benefit by coming along on this ride," he said.

Szimanski's name may be familiar to those in the ATM industry. Last year he coordinated a high-profile advertising campaign for Compaq Computer Corporation that ran on more than 1,700 ATMs in six national markets.

RBuzz, which has offices in Toronto, London, Sydney, Perth, Singapore and Tampa, Fla., recently acquired Szimanski's Baltimore-based business, ATM Advertising, Inc., and moved its North American headquarters to Baltimore. Upon completion of the acquisition, ATM Advertising, Inc. will operate as a subsidiary of Rbuzz, responsible for global advertising sales.
ATM Advertising Inc.'s entire staff will remain.

RBuzz considered locating in New York City and building an office from scratch, but opted to take advantage of ATM Advertising Inc.'s existing staff instead. "We can take everything we've learned over the past 20 months and translate it to the RBuzz business model," Szimanski said.

Both Szimanski and Chantal Vaillancourt, president of RBuzz (USA) Inc., hinted that future acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic partnerships are in the works.

RBuzz is creating an infrastructure that incorporates several communications protocols and will make it possible to remotely download ad campaigns to all of the different devices in an aggregated network.

"We're building a media switch architecture that will allow us to take all of these different devices and offer one attractive and exciting solution," Vaillancourt said.

Technical hurdles notwithstanding, perhaps RBuzz's biggest challenge will be glamorizing the "out-of-home" media category, which includes low tech media like highway billboards and posters at bus stations in addition to more modern devices like ATMs and kiosks. "We want to breathe a whole new life into the category," Vaillancourt said.

And, she added, "We can leverage the attributes of the various databases with their different demographic attributes."

ATMs are an important piece of the out-of-home advertising puzzle, she stressed. "You have that captive audience where the consumer really has nothing to do but stand there thinking about where to spend his or her money."