Fruit Sell-It
Cashing In at the ATM
Promos at the Pump
Grabbing Vertical Commuters

Our fruit no longer provides just potassium, fiber, vitamin C and countless other nutrients–it also provides an advertising space ripe for the plucking thanks to the efforts of Irv Weinhaus, president of the Tarzana, Calif.-based Fruit Label Co.

In 1997, Weinhaus noticed a friend peeling off one of those produce stickers from an apple and thought, Would it be that much more annoying to see an advertisement on the sticker as well?

Boldly pushing past the positive answer that the question evokes, within weeks Weinhaus had signed Universal Home Studios to promote Jim Carrey's Liar, Liar on 12 million Granny Smith and Fuji apples. Fruit Label pulled in US$2 million in revenues in 1999 and expects sales to climb 30 percent in 2000, thanks partly to a tremendous deal with Ask.com, which spent an estimated US$525,000 to buy space on 175 million bananas, apples and oranges to promote its Web site.

Advertisers know that when you take money out of an ATM machine, you're already in a spending frame of mind. They'd just prefer that you lavish them with your loot instead of someone else.

And with you a captive audience while you wait for your twenties, they're starting to take the idea of advertising on ATMs more seriously. "ATM [advertising] has the ability to hit people when they're out there with disposable income in hand and ready to buy," said Dick Diemer, president of RIO Network, in Media Life Magazine.

As technology has improved, marketers have developed an increasing number of ways to fill that "empty" thirty seconds of your life: They can play a video while your transaction is being processed; they can have the machine play an advertising jingle; they can even have the machine issue coupons with your bank statement.

Pricing right now is either a couple hundred dollars per machine per month or two to seven cents per transaction.

Here's how new advertising methods are born:

1. Gas stations introduce credit card and pay-at-the-pump services that allow customers to fill up and get back on the road more quickly.

2. Customers, ever eager to shave thirty seconds off an unpleasant task, adopt these services.

3. Sales on impulse items such as milk, bread, coffee and newspapers drop.

4. In response to station owners' cries of decreased income, marketers dream up new ways of getting customers back into the minimarts.

Unfortunately, these ads must be suffered by everyone, not just those who fill up in a hurry. In addition to LED displays that announce milk on sale for US$1.99,you might also run across FillBoards, sold by Alvern Inc. of Houston. FillBoards are three-by-five inch paper ads that fit inside a frame on the pump nozzle so that you can¹t help but read the ad when you reach for the nozzle.

More ominously, Advanced Information Systems LLC, in Midland, Mich. has been rolling out the Pump Radio Network, a loudspeaker attached to the nozzle that airs four 20-second and two 10-second ads. The first and last ads pitch items sold at the station while the other ads promote local businesses. The volume on the Fueling Talker can be turned down but not off.

AIS started with one station in Michigan in 1997, reached 150 locations in 1999 and plans to sell franchises nationwide in 2000.

In 1997, Michael DiFranza happened to notice that everyone seemed bored and fidgety as they rode the elevator to work. "What if there were something worth looking at during the ride?" he asked himself, and almost immediately he thought of a solution.

Was it art, sculpture, a thirty-second play, a lava lamp? No, of course not, silly–it was news and advertising, aimed at today's busy business professionals. Thus was born from a captive audience the slightly slimy-sounding Captivate Network, Inc. in Westford, Mass.

Using flat-screen technology and wireless content transmission, Captivate, which has received nearly US$50 million in funding, delivers all the weather, news, traffic reports and commercials that will possibly fit in a 45-second elevator ride. Ads fill the bottom quarter of the screen and will cost from US$500-1,500 depending on the size of the building.

Captivate, whose slogan is "The Media Company that Reaches the Business Professional When No One Else Can," has already wired elevators in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston and Houston and has contracts lined up for hundreds more buildings in dozens of cities.

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