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When it comes to ATM advertising, deployers are concluding that motion may be one of the best ways to incite emotion in both advertisers and ATM users. Several financial institutions have gotten promising feedback from recent full-motion video advertising projects.

January 7, 2002

When it comes to ATM advertising, deployers are concluding that motion may be one of the best ways to incite emotion in both advertisers and ATM users. Several financial institutions have gotten promising feedback from recent full-motion video advertising projects.

A whopping 94 percent of consumers who viewed third-party advertising at Fleet Financial ATMs during a full-motion video pilot May 22 through June 30 categorized their experience as "excellent" or "good."

Static screen ads for Theatre.com's ticket service for Broadway plays ran during the "please wait" portion of transactions on 27 machines in five midtown Manhattan locations. A full-motion video loop promoting the same service ran during the attract sequence on 14 of those ATMs.

Nandita Bakhshi, the bank's senior vice president self service/ATM banking, said Fleet wanted to work out any technical issues, as well as test both customer and vendor acceptance of FMV ads. To accomplish that, Fleet hired a third-party research firm to conduct on-site interviews, followed by a series of phone interviews.

 "We had a pretty comprehensive set of questions to determine who used the ATM, how they reacted to the advertising and what impact, if any, it had on transactions," Bakhshi said.

Of the aforementioned 94 percent who rated the experience positively, 17 percent thought the transaction seemed shorter, supporting anecdotal industry evidence that time seems to pass faster for ATM users if they're being entertained. None of the consumers thought the transaction seemed longer.

Seventy-four percent of respondents questioned at the ATM recalled the ad was for Theatre.com, with 90 percent of them able to summon up the name of a specific show that was being promoted. In phone interviews conducted a full two months after the ads ran, 32 percent still could name Theatre.com as the advertiser.

Bakhshi said the consumer recall was an especially compelling part of the pilot. "This medium today is much more powerful than a newspaper ad or maybe even a TV ad."

It's hard to deny the power of ATM advertising with such strong data, she added. "We thought intuitively that this made sense, but we had no idea the customer would react so positively. Now we can go to additional advertisers and say 'this medium works' and be able to back it up with facts."

Of special concern to Fleet and other financial institutions is how third-party advertising affects consumers' perception of their bank brand. In the Fleet pilot, 41 percent of those queried at the ATM thought the advertising reflected positively on Fleet's image. And 33 percent responding to the later phone interviews agreed that the ads reflected positively on Fleet's image.

Transaction volumes spiked during the pilot. Overall transactions were up 11 percent compared to other Fleet ATMs in the same geographic area. Perhaps more significant, in light of banks' interest in promoting their own products at the ATM, was an 8 percent increase in foreign transactions.

Theatre.com's data backed up Fleet's results. By directing those who viewed ATM ads to a unique URL, Theatre.com learned that five percent of the ATM users visited their Web site. This is a particularly powerful statistic for potential advertisers in light of Fleet's overall monthly volume of 22 to 25 million transactions at 3,400 ATMs, Bakhshi said.

Upgrades on the way

Fleet experienced only one small technical glitch at the beginning of the pilot. The initial file was so large it caused a slight stall in the video loop. Once that was adjusted, Bakhshi said, there were "no issues at all."

The MPEG video was stored on the hard drive at each machine. It included instructions for consumers to insert their cards to begin a transaction so that "people weren't standing there confused," Bakhshi said. The video loop stopped as soon as a card was inserted. 

Fleet upgraded its NCR machines running FMV with Pentium 200 processors and 32 megabytes of memory. As new units routinely replace legacy ATMs and others receive upgrades, "we'll bring (the network) closer to where we want to be," Bakhshi said, adding that about 85 percent of Fleet's network is "capable of doing most things we want to do in 2001."

One of the biggest upgrades slated for 2001 is the installation of an automated software distribution system, which will help Fleet provide more customization by market and geography. "We haven't gone very far along that path yet," Bakhshi said. Downloading ad files from a remote location will facilitate the bank's intended "three pronged approach" of Fleet ads, third-party ads and public service announcements, she added.

One key to making ATM advertising work, Bakhshi believes, is carefully selecting advertisers. Theatre.com was a nearly perfect fit for the midtown Manhattan area, she said, and also well suited to the FMV format. "With Broadway plays, you definitely wanted to have something with sound and motion."

Wells Fargo Bank earned mentions in USA Today, Newsweek and other national media outlets when it began running FMV ads – movie trailers for the film "Gladiator" -- on its ATMs last May. The publicity was no accident, said John Nicholson, Wells Fargo's vice president of marketing.

"We made a very conscious decision to showcase the technology with something very unusual and un-bank like," he said. "We could have showed an ad for mortgage or home equity, but we wanted to give people the idea that this was something new and different."

Format familiarity

One of the main advantages of FMV, Nicholson said, is its widespread acceptance by traditional advertising agencies. While agencies most often put the ATM in the same category as a billboard or other "out of home" media in terms of placement, they tend to see it as comparable to television in terms of production values.

Most agencies already have ads formatted in MPEG video for TV. It's fairly simple to take existing 30-second TV ads and shave 15 seconds or so to make the length appropriate for ATM transactions, Nicholson said. However a .flic file, the most common format for static ATM ads, is a mystery to many agencies.

"The agencies are telling us to make it as simple as possible and remove all of the hurdles. An MPEG file is very straightforward to them, while a .flic file is more arcane," he said. "They don't want to start from scratch with a new format. Full-motion video removes that issue for them."

Shelly Chandler, PNC Bank's marketing manager of self-service banking, agreed with Nicholson. "They want to understand (ATM advertising) in the context of the rest of their media mix. It's especially important for media buyers, who are really on the line to deliver results."

Static ads "seem like an intermediate step to where the industry is going," Chandler added. "Why not just take it as far as you can to get the best benefit?"

PNC Bank is running FMV ads for such products as soft drinks and snack foods on 52 of its machines at 26 Wawa stores in the Philadelphia metro area. The c-stores each have two ATMs because of their unusually high transaction volumes, in excess of 8,000 a month.

The FMV program began in October and has no set end date, Chandler said. "The idea is to get it working and make sure everybody is happy with it, then decide if we want to add more advertising."

Another attractive element of FMV is sound, Chandler said. "The consumer is so used to watching TV that the ads might appear strange to them without sound." One caveat: Chandler said it's important to keep the volume muted so it doesn't annoy passersby or store personnel.

In addition to third-party ads, PNC is running ads for Wawa products on its machines. Dennis Pollock, Wawa's manager of advertising, said his company is interested in reaching the "captive audience" at its ATMs, some of whom "maybe haven't heard our ads on the radio or seen us on TV."

Because of well-documented transaction volumes, Wawa knows just how many ATM users see its ads every month. In contrast, many people throw away direct-mail ads without reading them or use TV commercials as an opportunity to visit the kitchen for a snack.

"With transaction volumes, you can absolutely guarantee that you've had a certain number of people seeing an ad for a certain length of time. You can count impressions and calculate costs based on real specifics, which you can't get in too many other forms of media," Chandler said.

Talking to the server

Unlike Fleet, PNC remotely downloads its ad files with the assistance of ATM advertising agency Satmark Media Group. Chandler said remote downloads will allow Wawa and other advertisers to target day times, promoting coffee in the morning and sandwiches at lunch, for example.

Remote downloading is a key part of ATM advertising's economic model, she added. "There's not enough revenue to make sneakernet (the practice of visiting each site to load a video file) work."

Another issue with sneakernet, Nicholson said, is the inability to control an advertising campaign's beginning and end dates. "If you're advertising roses for Valentine's Day, you don't want that ad to still be up on the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th of February."

At the same time, Chandler said, remote downloading has presented some telecommunications challenges. To resolve those issues, financial transaction data and advertising data is being downloaded from Satmark's central server via separate phone lines.

Chandler said replacing or upgrading outdated legacy equipment is "the number-one challenge" for PNC, Fleet and other financial institutions trying to launch advertising programs. For the initial Wawa locations, PNC installed new Diebold 1064ix ATMs, but the bank may opt for upgrades at other sites.

The equipment challenge is even greater for financial institutions than for independent deployers, Chandler said. FIs have several advantages over ISOs when it comes to attracting advertisers, including more machines in high-volume sites -- but ISOs often have newer machines with such advertising-friendly attributes as color screens.

 "There will be cooperation between Wawa, PNC and Satmark, and we'll all figure out a way to roll (ATM advertising) out to more locations," Chandler predicted.

Chandler said that the three companies also will likely do some type of research to test consumer reaction to the ads. In the meantime, she said, anecdotal evidence seems to show that they like them. When Chandler visited a site where the FMV ads had been running for a week, one frequent ATM user told her that she'd like to see some new ads.

More consumer research needs to be done to attract advertisers, Nicholson said. The problem is the gap between what media planners want to see and what advertisers are willing to share.

 "The agency wants to know who ran an ad, when it ran and the redemption rate. But advertisers may not want to provide sales results, for instance," he said.

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