I’d like you to take a flying leap with me for ten minutes. Concerto in its current form can’t make the vision I’m about to describe happen. But we can build the software. So come on, let’s sit back together and imagine the possibilities. Think of this as a case study for the future: a hypothetical scenario of how a future version of the Concerto software could be used to add value to a space that is far removed from a college campus.
Enter the Subway Station.
It’s a busy Friday afternoon in a heavily populated city. People are walking down the main thoroughfares, entering shops, tipping street performers, and talking on mobile phones. But beneath the busy street is the City Subway, a public mode of transit that has become increasingly popular as the streets became more congested with cars and pedestrians. The high-speed subway goes from one end of the city to the other. And at every single station, there are bright digital signs. Flat panel enclosures hang from above the tracks announcing train arrivals. Digital signage is pervasive and greatly improved by the city’s recent switch from a closed proprietary system to Concerto. Concerto – or at least a future branch of the codebase – is the ultimate communications tool, connecting consumers with products and services while generating impressive profits for the city.
The Right Messages for the Right Places
Concerto, by design, allows people and organizations with messages to either reach the entire area serviced by the City Subway system or target messages to specific Subway stations. Concerto gives the Subway Authority (SA) the ability to customize the look and feel of Concerto displays to give each station a unique and memorable style of its own. But more importantly, Concerto integrates advertising messages with important Subway bulletins in a way that is both intelligent and flexible. For the screens hanging above each train track, the station information (train arrivals, schedules, and important alerts about delays and downtime) is always present in a right sidebar. Yet most of the screen is taken up by graphic ads that promote businesses, services, and organizations in the area surrounding the station.
Suddenly, a train arrives, and the graphics area is replaced by a large, graphic message that announces the train’s arrival for all Subway passengers looking to board. Within twenty seconds, the train is gone and the advertisements are back on all of the screens. And what types of ads are displayed on the hanging screens while passengers are waiting for trains to arrive? Well, let’s jump to the Grand Boulevard station in Downtown. During the eight minutes he waited for his train to arrive, passenger Daniel was able to see 40 different ads from restaurants and boutiques in a nearby shopping center, a distant commercial plaza, and the other streets in the Downtown district. Each message was up on the screens for about 12 seconds. He discovered a new Japanese noodle bar that just opened up down the street from his work at America Bank, and he was also reminded to follow through with that donation to the Boys and Girls Club.
A Simple Gateway for Advertisers
Lynda works for a well-known ad agency in the city. When it comes to promoting a popular chain of coffee shops to the city populace, the Concerto Ad Panel (CAP) is her best friend. CAP really does it all: it collects flyers from Lynda’s computer in just a few clicks, tracks the number of appearances of her coffee shop ads across the city, and helps her manage her ad campaigns to get the most bang for her client’s buck. And yes, she pays for time on Concerto through CAP. All she needs to do is log into the Panel with her vendor account (given to her by the city), pick out a couple Subway stations where her message should go, select times of the day when the messages should be displayed, and upload a flyer to a category that best matches her intent (“Casual Eateries” works just fine). From there, a person working in the Subway Authority’s Ads office looks over the ad and approves it for Concerto right away.
There’s a new Christmas cookies sale that Lynda wants to announce to the entire city. So she decides to spend a little more of her client’s ad budget to pay for a citywide ad that will run for two weeks. She just fills out a simple form, uploads the message, and sends it off for verification. Within the hour, her message is ready to be shown thousands of times each day on every screen in every Subway station.
She can view daily, weekly, and monthly analytics to track how often her new message is being displayed across the network and in specific stations. CAP gives her a bunch of detailed yet easy-to-read charts that remind her of Google Analytics (software she uses for Internet advertising already).
The Subway Authority also recently added eye tracking cameras (connected to Concerto’s Hardware Devices Layer, which enables integration with web cams, button panels, and lots of other interesting hardware devices) to all of the hanging screens. These eye trackers reveal how often people’s eyes are actually looking at Lynda’s advertisements when they play. So she can get accurate statistics to give her an even greater amount of proof that her advertisements are being seen by the public.
Everyone Gets Involved
Commercial concerns aren’t alone in their use of Concerto. The city uses it to keep passengers aware of street cleaning hours, while local not-for-profits put messages up at reduced rates. Plus, Concerto’s Dynamic Text engine automatically searches the City Tribune (the only major print newspaper left in the city) and Google News for noteworthy national and city news tidbits, which are run on certain screens every once in a while to keep passengers informed. The Subway Authority’s small yet capable Ads office maintains the system and sets policies for using Concerto.
A Robust Management Interface
CAP also includes powerful controls for the Subway Authority to manage the network each day. Power settings can be remotely controlled from SA HQ, meaning that if a station needs to close for a period of time, all the screens within a particular station may be powered off at the same time with a couple mouse clicks in the Panel. CAP allows them to manage the entire system from a mile-high view and hone in on specific locations and screens, which can be customized in design in many different ways. Screens may be grouped together and managed together for simplicity’s sake. Concerto’s unique and powerful method of balancing feeds with different weights also works well here – the SA’s screen moderators can rank different feeds according to the interests of their passengers. If those interests change, a couple weight changes can quickly change Concerto’s behavior.
Convergent Cohesion
The City Subway Concerto network transcends devices to become truly pervasive. Because Concerto software is on the Web, it can easily appear on every device with a display and a connection to the Internet. In the Concerto world, the size, shape, resolution, operating system, and aspect ratio are all just screen parameters, useful for pumping the best possible picture out to the public. But they aren’t barriers.
In addition to the hanging monitors beside each train track, larger wallscreens run full-screen Concerto messages (along with useful, interactive web applications, such as a multi-touch enabled Subway map). Whereas the hanging screens can be run off of one single multiplexed computer, these wall screens are controlled by inexpensive machines that allow them to have layouts and mixes of content completely independent of what’s on those hanging displays. Yet they all access the same pool of messages, meaning that an advertising agency in a nearby suburb only needs to upload each one of their messages just once for it to potentially be shown all across the greater metropolitan area.
Furthermore, Concerto can also be integrated with websites and mobile applications for iPhone, Blackberry, and other platforms. So the SA’s cross-platform SubwayTravel app can also draw from this same database to direct riders to places of interest they may wish to include in their fun day of activities around the metropolitan area. There are many other web applications and social networks useful in getting the word out there – Facebook, Yelp!, and others. But Concerto fits into this ecosystem as the in-person broadcast medium for everything important on the Web.
Low Switching Costs, Large Rewards
Since moving from a supremely expensive commercial solution, the city has realized enormous gains from Concerto. The costs associated with switching over the 32 City Subway stations were relatively low, since the stations already had digital displays hanging over the train tracks. Metro Rail was already nearly equipped for Concerto. Over the course of several weeks, inexpensive display computers were added to each station. The Subway Authority purchased a powerful Concerto Content Server to power the whole network over the Internet.
And now, due to Concerto, the City Subway is generating impressive advertising revenues. These revenues come from local businesses and organizations, and they help to offset the costs associated with station upgrades and other municipal programs. Now, instead of fare or tax increases, the city is equipped with an extremely potent form of revenue generation that greatly improves citywide communications. Concerto has become a true asset for them.
NOTE: A WTG blog entry “The Right Messages for the Right Places” posted in August, 2009, described a hypothetical deployment of a digital signage system based on Concerto. The article used the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority, the LA MTA, as a fictional backdrop. It has come to our attention that some readers may have misinterpreted the article as a factual account of a real use of Concerto. This was never our intent. Concerto is not used by the LA MTA in any way, and we apologize for anyone who found our blog misleading in this regard.
