News

In the beginning

ATM Advertising has a brief but interesting history, dating to the first ads printed on receipts at the earliest versions of the ATM. Here's the story from a few pioneers.

January 16, 2002

In the beginning, there were static screen ads and preprinted coupons.

And the banks using them, the earliest deployers of ATM advertising, were proud of breaking new ground. "We thought we were pretty hot stuff," said Joe Gable, a former vice president at CoreStates Financial Corp. and now a senior industry consultant for the Gasper Corporation.

Gable recalled that in the early '80s CoreStates worked with ATM manufacturers Diebold Inc. and NCR Corp. to develop software to support advertising messages on ATM screens. CoreStates also had to convince the MAC network to implement the screens.

"Conceptually everybody bought into it, but it was a big challenge technology-wise," Gable said.

CoreStates promoted its own products, often in seasonal campaigns, Gable said. "You know, 'It's tax time. Get a loan today.' "

One of CoreState's most successful campaigns, in 1985, promoted the Philadelphia Zoo. Signage at ATMs and advertisements in newspapers encouraged people to visit one of the bank's ATMs, where they could get a preprinted coupon that offered a discount on zoo admission.

"It was a win-win for everybody," Gable said, noting that both zoo attendance and transaction volume at the bank's ATMs picked up. Later the bank promoted the Philadelphia Art Museum and other local attractions in similar campaigns.

From 1986 until about 1990, Gable said signage at some of the new ATMs the bank was adding to its network advised ATM users to take their receipts to various local stores to receive small discounts off purchases. Store clerks checked the receipt when it was turned in to ensure it carried the terminal number of one of the newest machines, Gable said.

The bank paid the stores a small fee for each receipt that was turned in. The payoff for CoreStates was increased transaction volumes.

Bob Drennan, principal of the Drennan Group consulting firm, said that in the early days, the CoreStates example notwithstanding, "Many banks talked about advertising, but few actually did it."

To promote ATM usage, he said banks would sometimes dispense preprinted coupons at ATMs offering a free Big Mac at a local McDonald's or a similar deal.

Drennan was a sales rep for Docutel, one of the earliest ATM manufacturers. Some models of the machine required cash to be dispensed in envelopes, an unwieldy and labor-intensive chore for banks. "We sold the bejeebers out of (the envelope space)," Drennan said, "trying to put some kind of a positive spin on what was a negative thing."

Receipt-based coupons became more common when thermal printers became standard equipment on most ATMs in the 1990s, giving banks much more flexibility with their promotional campaigns. At about the same time, ATM manufacturers added more memory to their machines, which created the opportunity for more sophisticated on-screen ads.

One of the most groundbreaking moments in ATM advertising came when a team at Plano, Texas-based EDS began putting together a business plan for its ATM network. Don Jarecki, former business manager of retail ATMs for EDS, said, "We knew we had a captive audience (at the ATM), so we started saying 'What else can we do there?' "

Early on, the decision to try advertising at the ATM was influenced by programs in which receipt-based coupons were distributed in grocery store checkout lanes, Jarecki said. He began investigating what types of ATM advertising programs were being offered and found them sorely lacking.

"The few companies that were out there at the time doing ATM receipts were pretty schmaltzy," said Jarecki, now vice president of network development for CashPoint, a Seattle-based ATM advertising firm. "Their programs weren't even worth the time to implement."

EDS had thousands of prime locations across the country including, most notably, 7-Eleven stores. The company also deployed Diebold 1064i machines with what was state-of-the-art technology at the time: color screens, BTP processors and 16 megabytes of memory.

In early 1997, Jarecki said, "A light shone through the clouds and hit me. I thought, 'Why can't we play commercials on the ATM just like on TV?'"

After working with Diebold to modify its software to allow for the introduction of MPEG video, EDS launched a full-motion video pilot in the spring of 1997. Such high-profile national advertisers as Nissan, the Arts and Entertainment Network and Columbia Tri-Star Pictures were among the first to sign on. "Because ATM advertising was new and different, it was easy to get appointments with people like the movie studios," Jarecki said.

The full-motion video ads garnered an "incredible amount of publicity" in media outlets like CNN and the New York Times, Jarecki said, again largely due to the novelty.

The first locations were in San Diego, followed by Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York. All together, 950 machines routinely delivered more than two million transactions a month, Jarecki said.

EDS conducted consumer research that helped them define what worked at the ATM. For instance, Jarecki said, ATM users hated a 30-second spot that ran in a "picture within a picture" format during the actual transaction, finding it too distracting. But they enjoyed a 15-second ad that appeared on the "please wait" screen.

Research also uncovered items of interest to potential advertisers. One such statistic, often quoted by those in the ATM industry, showed 48 percent of moviegoers had visited an ATM within two hours of seeing a film. Nearly half of those ATM users hadn't made a decision about which movie to see.

That particular statistic may have prompted Fox Searchlight to agree to show video clips of two of its films, "The Full Monty" and "The Ice Storm," at 165 ATMs in San Diego.

EDS used a unique form of "sneakernet" to get the ad content to the ATMs, creating CDs for armored car personnel to load when they replenished the machines in the case of static ads, or for Diebold service technicians in the case of full-motion video.

Later, Jarecki said, some of the machines used VSAT. Those that beamed the images down via satellite could download a 15-second MPEG video in 15 seconds, he said.

EDS created a media kit and a rate card for its program. The company sold the advertising as a package, including a 10-by-17 sign on the ATM along with the screen ads and receipts.

While some of the first ads were sold on a per-ATM basis, Jarecki said they moved to a CPM, or cost-per-thousand, rate because it was a more familiar format for advertising agencies. EDS settled upon a $50 CPM for full-motion video and $30 CPM for static screen ads. According to Jarecki, EDS earned $650,000 in ATM advertising revenue over an 18-month period.

EDS intended to expand the program to another 1,000 ATMs, but the plan was scotched when the company decided to sell its ATM network to American Express in 1999. "It killed me," said Jarecki, who left EDS for CashPoint shortly afterward.

One of the single largest ATM advertising buys to date was a two-month campaign for Compaq that ran on 1,700 machines in six different metro markets in late 1999. Mike Szimanski, president of Baltimore-based ATM Advertising, Inc., coordinated it.

The campaign, which also featured such unusual types of advertising as a plane flying over Wall Street with a Compaq banner, garnered two advertising industry awards.

During Szimanski's first six to nine months in the ATM advertising business, he spent his time educating media buyers and others at ad agencies rather than making sales. He said this period helped him understand what agencies seemed to want.

Based on his agency research, he was among the first to advocate working with several different ATM deployers, combining their multiple networks to create a single, larger network to offer to advertisers. This approach has become one of the most commonly used.

It was necessary, he said, because deployers wouldn't take the initiative themselves. "I knew no bank would ever pick up the phone to consummate a deal with another bank. They didn't have enough incentive to unilaterally cooperate on this," he said. "I viewed that isolationism as an opportunity."

There have been relatively few deals on a large scale since the Compaq campaign. Szimanski believes the ATM industry will eventually see more of them, however.

"I think if the industry continues to move forward and try new things, keeping in mind the needs of both the advertiser and the consumer, something will click," he said.

Included In This Story

---

Diebold Nixdorf

As a global technology leader and innovative services provider, Diebold Nixdorf delivers the solutions that enable financial institutions to improve efficiencies, protect assets and better serve consumers.

Request Info

Learn More