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Banks on board
CashPoint ATM Advertising is offering big banks a deal it hopes they can't refuse. The Seattle company will help banks upgrade their ATM networks if the banks agree to add their machines to the CashPoint network.
October 18, 2000
CashPoint ATM Advertising's sales force, working out of offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City, is calling on some of the nation's largest banks in hopes of adding their ATMs to its inventory. Forming partnerships with big banks is "a very important component" of CashPoint's strategy, said J.J. Manning, the company's CEO.
So important, in fact, that CashPoint is willing to provide some of the capital to help banks upgrade their ATM networks. That expensive step is necessary to create what Manning calls a "robust ATM environment" of machines capable of delivering full-motion video and audio, among other advertising-friendly features. Many of today's bank-owned machines are older legacy models that lack the necessary functionality.
CashPoint is "not currently targeting the ISO community," Manning said. "There are a number of companies out there executing strategies that will work with ISOs. Ours just happens to be focused on financial institutions."
The Seattle-based company reportedly has deals with three major financial institutions, with plans to roll out more than 1,000 ATM locations by the end of the first quarter of 2001.
One of several companies that has announced its intent to establish a national ATM advertising network, CashPoint is more cash-rich than most of the others, after raising $10 million-plus in two rounds of venture financing.
The company used much of the money to build a technical infrastructure for its network, which Manning said incorporates content management, transport and application. The company's proprietary content management system, called CashPoint Select, allows advertisers to connect to its Web site, view available ATM inventories and book a campaign online if they wish.
Advertisers indicate criteria such as dates of campaign, days of week and times of day a campaign will run and machine locations (by state, region or DMA). They also select their desired screen format (ranging from a still screen to full-motion video and audio) and coupon format (dynamic or preprinted).
Thanks to CashPoint's cooperative marketing relationship with a company called Claritas, advertisers can also indicate the desired target audience for their campaign. Claritas created the PRIZM system, which is based on the philosophy that "you are where you live." It categorizes every U.S. neighborhood in terms of 62 distinct lifestyle types called clusters – most of which have evocative names such as "Young Literati," "Boomers & Babies" and "Heartlanders."
Using clusters, an advertiser can determine some of his consumer's key likes and dislikes. "Young Literati," for example, are more likely to take vitamins, watch Bravo and read "GQ."
Manning said that PRIZM-based advertising is a natural at the ATM, with its ability to identify a customer at the swipe of a card. And PRIZM sidesteps privacy concerns because it relies on a very public piece of information, the zip code.
"We're able to create a product that is highly desirable for the advertising industry yet that doesn't invade the privacy of the consumer," he said.
Without PRIZM or something akin to it, ATMs are nothing special, Manning said. "Without targeting, you have a general delivery vehicle, and there are quite a number of general delivery advertising products out there already."
CashPoint's bank partners can utilize their own data to send targeted ads to their customers, offering home owners an improvement loan or parents of teenagers a college loan, for example. While banks must agree to run some third-party advertising on their machines to work with CashPoint, Manning anticipates that all banks will want to use the network to cross-sell their own products.
Banks can utilize the CashPoint site to manage their own ATM portfolios, scheduling ads on their own machines in much the same way third-party advertisers book campaigns on the entire network.
CashPoint also will create a "virtual private network" with its bank partners, providing an Ethernet connection from their ATMs to CashPoint's central server. "Very little is required at the ATM itself or at the mainframe to implement this system," Manning said, although a network interface card must be added to the machine so that it can communicate with the server.
While the server itself is vendor independent, ATM manufacturers or other programmers must write the interface that resides at the machine. Diebold is the first manufacturer to do so, but Manning predicts that others will follow.
Perhaps CashPoint's most prominent client to date has been San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank, which has established a reputation as an ATM advertising innovator. Wells uses CashPoint Select for content management, although the bank has created its own internal delivery network.
Calling Wells a "great partner in seeing the future," Manning said, "Their vision with their ATMs allows us to realize our dreams in terms of what we want to deliver to the advertising community."
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