January 20th, 2011
Here’s the lowdown on the digital billboard campaign I delivered in 2009 that recognised the make/model of a passing car and then displayed an advert tailored to that car. Here’s a link to a video of the advert in action
The prototype code that was used to prove that the ‘Castrol Oilcam’ project would work is detailed below.
The ANPR (Automatic NumberPlate Recognition) camera output has been replaced with a text file called latest.lpr. Put a UK car number plate in this text file, in the same folder as the flash movie and the flash movie will read it.
The most progress I made in this version was realizing I can send an html request/query from Flash and then ingest/interrogate the resulting html page source code from the host web server.
If you haven’t done so before, please read the site disclaimer before downloading and/or commenting.
download the prototype code here
Tags: ANPR Camera, Castrol, Clear Channel, Digital Signage, DOOH, Numberplate Recognition, Ogilvy, Oilcam
Posted in Camera, Code Examples | 62 Comments »
December 22nd, 2010
This is a great JCDecaux Transvision campaign which makes use of the train destination information from the railway station and targets an advert to the audience based on their journey end point. The campaign highlights the English hospital commenting and rating service at www.nhs.uk/feedback.
Kudos goes to JCDecaux, Grand Visual and the www.nhs.uk/syndication team. The campaign runs from the 20th December 2010 for two weeks in railway stations in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham UK.
Tags: data.gov, Digital Signage, DOOH, Grand Visual, JCDecaux, NHS Choices, Open Data, Transvision
Posted in Uncategorized | 103 Comments »
August 26th, 2010
There was much excitement in the London press a few weeks ago about the Olympic Games being only two years away. About the same time I was asked by a friend for a bit of ‘dynamic countdown’ creative that they could use to test their screens with ahead of a countdown campaign that was launching across UK digital screen networks in early September.
So, like a man who has a couple of anorexic girlfriends, I thought this was a good ‘two birds one stone’ situation (that joke was pinched from Dave Gibson BTW).
I made use of the dynamic countdown code from the excellent flash programming site here.
You can download the .swf and actionscript2 .fla files from www.thisadvertneedsyou.com/samples/countdown.zip
If you haven’t done so before, please read the site disclaimer before downloading and/or commenting.
Tags: Flash Olympic Games Dynamic Countdown Timer Template for Digital Signage
Posted in Clocks, Code Examples | 151 Comments »
July 2nd, 2010
So thanks to blogs like thisadvertneedsyou.com you may think you’re ready to make your mark on the wonderful world of digital outdoor screens…
- Understand Screen Hardware? CHECK
- Understand Data Networks? CHECK
- Understand Content Creation? CHECK
- Understand the Digital Signage Industry? CHECK
But do you really understand the one thing that will make or break your DOOH business venture?
ADVERTISING
“When someone types Bahamas into the search engine and British Airways pops up at #4 in the page rankings, that’s technology. But what makes someone type Bahamas into the search engine in the first place? That’s ADVERTISING!”
I picked that up after spending a few hours with Ivan Clark earlier this week. You should speak to him too. You can find him here and here
Posted in News, Pearls of Wisdom | 169 Comments »
June 10th, 2010
Now that all the commercial guys have safely tied up their lucrative world cup content/licence deals with the digital signage networks, I thought I’d share a simple way of getting the latest world cup scores and scorers onto your digital panel with a couple of simple Flash RSS/XML templates.
There is a 9:16 Portrait Template and 16:9 Landscape Template available for you to download, modify and make use of. Each zip file contains the source .fla, the .swf movie and a windows .exe version for use on any PC.
If you use this template for commercial gain you need to consider:
- giving a donation to the guy who faithfully updates all the RSS feeds at http://www.rsslivescores.com/
- changing the background and (hidden) mask graphics in the .fla, as I got the original graphic from Google images, which I then cleaned up.
If you haven’t done so before, please read the site disclaimer before downloading and/or commenting.
Have fun, I’m hoping I generate enough good karma here for England to go all the way and win it (preferably beating Germany/Portugal/Argentina/Brazil on the way too…. 
)
Posted in Code Examples, XML Reader | 119 Comments »
May 29th, 2010
“Any digital media network is as weak or as strong as the content displayed & as good or as bad as the collective support that keeps the network running”
Posted in Pearls of Wisdom | 1 Comment »
May 29th, 2010
What is Digital Signage? Why do we need it? How does it fit in with all the other digital communication channels available to us today? What can it do for me?
Posted in Presentations | 62 Comments »
May 13th, 2010
In October 2009, Titan Outdoor and MySpace ran a 4 week promotion whereby any MySpace account holder could enter picture and text onto a MySpace group page and the resulting image and message would play on the Titan Screen networks in New York, Chicago and London.
Digital signage software specialists from Dynamax, CoolSign and Litelogic collaborated with the MySpace coders to identify a common xml format which all platforms could recognize to display the pictures/text stored from MySpace form to the DOOH Screen networks on both sides of the Atlantic.
I have hosted a sample copy of this XML file here.
The prototype flash template I made (and have made available for download) steps though the available records in the titan.xml file from ‘most recent’ to ‘oldest’ at an interval of 5 seconds.
You will see that the user text comes from the xml file and the jpeg image is loaded from a location detailed in the xml data.
This a nice simple example of how to load text into a flash file from an xml source, load/size a picture and step through an xml data set.
If you haven’t done so before, please read the site disclaimer before downloading and/or commenting. Download source files here
Posted in Code Examples, XML Reader | 111 Comments »
May 4th, 2010
Here is the ScreenMediaExpo10 presentation that I used to launch this Digital Signage community site on 5th May 2010.
It describes how digital signage panels need to become environmentally aware to make the most of the medium e.g. how to integrate digital signage with sesory devices such as image recognition cameras, temperature sensors, microphones, smell sensors etc. to create a truly reactive communication platform.
Posted in Presentations | No Comments »
