Guest Speaker this week was Robbie Ward from BPM MEDIA. BPM Stands for Beats Per Minute and the company is located in Blanchardstown. BPM Media are market leaders providing in-store media playback systems which is starting to replace the DJ.
Basically what they do is make a ‘TV Channel’ style multimedia presentation for specific venues, many of them are pubs, and these presentations can play many music videos and advertisments for products in the venue.
Next Robbie showed us a video that his company did for a large pub in Dublin featuring many music videos. The presentation almost looks like a localized MTV featuring videos from Rihanna, Lady Gaga and The Pussycat Dolls. The music videos would play and then one would mix into the other providing a suitable quick transition between videos. At the bottom of the screen is an area of scrolling text, where the customers can text requests and messages to their friends, these can be seen by everyone in the premises and leads to a good interactive experience.
BPM often place adverts during these presentations, Robbie tells us that most viewers attention for adverts is only about 3 seconds long. These adverts promote certain products on sale in the venue and these adverts can be changed on the spot in some cases depending on how successful a product is on the night. Special Offers will often appear and these special offers can change or be withdrawn at any stage. In some cases like BB’s which is a coffee venue, they can advertise different products or special offers and the space that this is used for gets changed depending on the time of day e.g. that space may be used in the morning for the specials then it changes to lunch specials and then evening specials etc.
Robbie also explains that certain types of music can lead to a customer staying longer in the venue than they intended to and this is the main reason why BPM get hired, so that their multimedia presentations will attract customers to stay in the pubs and clubs for as long as possible spending money on special offers and promotions.
BPM choose the music very carefully, they have to make sure that the music selection is correct for the venue’s target audience. They also have to make the presentations as interesting as possible to hold the audiences attention.
My Thoughts
I think this is a very clever form of advertising, I can see alot of potential in it. I can see why venue’s would rather use this system than pay for a DJ 7 days a week, but I dont like the whole idea behind it that, the placement of certain adverts and the use of certain styles of music is there to trick the customer into buying more than they initially intended. It’s a bit like having the sweets at the check-out in the supermarket, all these marketing tricks I find a bit unfair on the consumer and so many of us fall for this. Having said that, I think this is the future of advertising in pubs and clubs around the country and I think it’s smart the way if a certain promotion is not working or is sold out, that they can change it instantly with a new one so that the entire system is instantly updateable making it highly interactive.
