I can't for the life of me understand why I'm not shown location-specific ads when I'm waiting for my money to come out of an ATM. Unlike much of the clutter we encounter throughout the course of our day, this would actually be useful. Why wouldn't I want to know that there's a Chipotle around the corner and that my ATM receipt will get me a $2 discount? I've been asking for this since 1997 [somewhere deep in my files I have the emails to prove it - I kept them because I thought for sure it was a winner and somehow I could collect royalties from whoever brought it to market - chalk it up to youthful naivete].
So why hasn't it taken off? I found this article that does a nice job of explaining why this is happening in the UK, but not the US. Among the reasons they cite are:
"One thing leading the third-party ATM-advertising charge in the United Kingdom is the number of FIs in the region that own ATMs. The U.K’s approximately 50,000 ATMs are owned by a small number of deployers, mainly FIs.
That is quite the contrast when compared to the estimated 20,000 U.S. credit unions and community banks that own an estimated 40 percent of the country’s nearly 450,000 ATMs.
The number of FIs that own ATMs in the U.K. make it easy for advertisers to reach a national audience because one FI could have ATMs across the region. But in the United States, FI-owned ATMs are more regionalized so advertisers would have a harder time spreading the word"
And ...
"As ATMs shift from OS/2 to Windows, opportunities for third-party and in-house ATM advertising are increasing, and the platform shift has moved faster in England, said Doug Sholes, Triton’s marketing director.
"Fifty-eight percent of ATMs in the U.S. are still running OS/2," he said. "In the U.K., they’ve been faster to upgrade to Windows-based ATMs, which can handle advanced advertising functions."