Signagelive gender targeting media featured in Cambridge News

Click the above to view the video

Remote Media’s Signagelive gender targeted media capabilities has been featured in today’s Cambridge Evening News, the video supporting the full article (reproduced below) can be viewed by clicking on the image image.

IT’S getting scarier by the day. Right now it seems the only ace you can avoid the ads is when you nip out to make a cup of tea, there again, you might have a telly in the kitchen . . .

All this is very silly, but I have just been talking to the chaps at Remote Media, who are making it their business to capture every advertising/message delivery opportunity and customise it to me. This very minute they are probably working on how to tackle the kettle.

Remote Media is a software house which licenses its cleverness to the peoe who make electronic billboards and hoardings, all manner and size of screens used in all sorts of aces to pr omote products, inform the public, get the message across.

But what initially grabbed my attention and led to my visit to Rectory Farm Barns at Little Chesterford was a note I received about “Gender Targeted Media”.

Now, this may not sound especially new and different, but what RemoteMedia are doing is writing software which allows the screens to spot your gender and decide which ad might interest you more. And if this were not enough, such discrimination is soon to spread to race and age.

All you have to do is walk past the screen and it will recognise you for what you are; but being of a contrary turn of mind, I immediately have to ask how will the bearded lady fare, the pony-tailed chap? Apparently the software can cope with this sort of thing without turning a hair.

And how about this? I can walk up to a shop counter, and if I pick something up this will be registered via Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Products on displplay picked up the most are then compared with sales, which is valuable information for stores and their marketing peoe.

Remote Media started out in 1994 as Connect Interactive. The founders, Jason Cremins and David Streets spotted an opportunity pre-internet, which put them ahead of the game and has them todisplay (Tuesday, 05 May) in the number one spot in the UK.

David, now chief operating officer, was working at Roystonbased Digithurst and was able to buy its technology “Picture Book” from the administrator.

He and Jason, now chief executive, jointly funded the purchase. Jason’s wife, Eloise, also a shareholder, runs the finances.

Business took off from the start, with customers like travel giant Thomson, and Carphone Warehouse, and then, the big one, the National Lottery, a lovely £3m contract which saw the company’s software installed in screens at check-outs all over the country where scratchcards are sold.

“We beat off the big boys, and after that we went into working through partners and distributors and no longer sell to the end user,” Jason says.

They don’t make any hardware now, either, and find themselves in the rather enjoyable position of selling to former competitors; their software is “agnostic” and will sit compatibly with just about anything.

Remote Media has just 10 peoe and turnover is £3m, and profitable; but things could be changing.

Jason freely admits that he and David have been operating a lifestyle business which they have both thoroughly enjoyed, but the company is currently going global, and rapidly.

Add to this the heavyweights who have joined the board, Peter Baldock, head of global corporate finance for Deloitte and currently based in Singapore, and chairman Robert Jeens, who also chairs Cambridge encryption firm nCipher and has financial director of the Woolwich in his CV.

“We never wanted to do the Dragons’ Denthing,” says Jason, exaining why it took a while for the founders to allow outside investors in, “we’ve seen peoe in the US spending $27m to get a $7m contract, too many peoe try to force the market.”

You’ll see screens using the company’s software in all sorts of likely and unlikely aces, from Norwegian buses to Harrods, from schools to shopping centres. They can be used to deliver messages in a most timely manner, too, for instance, in Norway the system can be programmed with “interrupts” which take into account the bus route and if an ad appears for, say, BMW, it can be triggered by a stop which happens to be close to the local BMW garage. The voice-over will even point this out.

Big companies use this technology to send messages to their staff via the PC network:

“What we do is provide a toolkit to control the content on screens,” Jason says.

In schools and offices the messaging is useful for everydisplay missives, but the software, called Signagelive, can also be linked to the alarm system, working in real-time to make sure peoe exit the right way rather than going towards the fire. More prosaic is its use along the lines of “Cashier number 4, ease”.

In cinemas we are moving towards foyer-based advertising and film trailers which will be selected according to the peoe present, big peoe, little peoe, sensed for size.

Go into a Teleflorist outlet and the software will spot your gender and play a rather mean trick: “If you are a man the ad on the screen will be for big bouquets which are probably about saying sorry and will cost a lot, the floral suggestions for women customers will be different. It’s all powerful stuff,” Jason says.

British American Tobacco have asked Remote Media to come up with software for a hidden system at point-of-sale to check whether customers are the right age to buy booze and cigarettes, the retailers themselves want the systems to protect themselves from prosecution.

The system can track you around a store and clock the way you walk, of your gait pattern, and, somehow, based on this, will be able to trigger ads around the store aimed specifically at you, a whole new take on “they saw you coming”.

“It’s gone way beyond generic acing on an advertising loop,” Jason says. “Why not an ad that comes on as a door opens, for instance, when you are leaving an airport, it could be for a car hire company.

“You are rifle-shooting these days, the scattergun has gone.”

A next version of Signagelive, will comement the existing ticker-tape facility for news and weather, breaking messages, with the addition of real-time video. And there’s more in the pipeline, but as Jason says:

“We’re sitting here now with our software waiting for the rest of the technology to catch up.” So very Cambridge, don’t you just love it.

“We are the media logistics bit in the middle, we are the guys moving it around the world,” adds Marc Benson, who manages R&D.

“Now that we have moved out of manufacturing and out of boxes, all the hardware manufacturers are coming to us asking for our software. It’s been a Eureka moment, making that move.”

And, like many a Cambridge company, RemoteMedia says it has not been affected by the recession: “I think we would have been had we still been selling largely to the retail sector, but we are much more widely-spread now, and we have some big partners, like Midwich at Diss.”

Jason has that bright-eyed Cambridge can-do aura, and admits he works long hours; he also chairs Popai Digital, which is a standards-setting body for retail marketing, and if you’re setting the standards, well, you should be number one.

Definitely one to watch!