Minority vision.

Australia's Eyecorp are trying to build new opportunities to spread advertising. Their latest foray is in shopping mall broadband streaming advertising. According to AAP, Eyecorp is set to launch Prestige Plus, a network of more than 75 individual digital display units in 17 shopping centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Similarly, Amsterdam's Schipol Airport has just launched the Event Screen Lounge. According to Schipol Media, the Event Screen consists of two different screens which can interact with each other, with the largest screen being 20 m2.

Along with Frankfurt Airport, Schipol is probably one of the world's most media saavy airport organisations. We're still waiting for the others to catch on!

We're evangelists here at DIFFUSION for the wired/unwired world of streaming advertising, after all we've been working in this field for sometime. See what we think about what we call, 'Immersive Marketing' at www.diffusion.com.au Press Articles.

Why airports are more than just transit hubs.

The US Federal Aviation Authority (www.faa.gov/news) this week announced that it expected more than a billion people to be travelling through US airports within 10 years. What it didn't say was that people were likely to be waiting for longer periods, as airport owners and authorities struggle to provide the necessary infrastructure that will be required to meet the anticipated demands.
We think that airports need to start considering that they are on the brink of a radical change in their status as transit hubs; needing to provide more services as consumers become 'transumers'. Service infrastructure will need to replace the current shopping mall mentality as people begin to demand a more compelling airport experience, or at least service experiences similar to those they can find at home. Those hubs that are unable or unwilling to meet this need, will find usage flagging.

Not so $mart: Coles Myer's name game.

Not much is really new at Coles Myer. This Smart Buy brand has already been operating in south-western USA food stores for some time.

When Australia's largest retailer and biggest company, Coles Myer, announces to the sharemarket (www.colesmyer.com.au) that it intends renaming and relaunching its homebrands for its Coles supermarkets, you would expect that this would be handled with some level of sophistication and perhaps even evidence of consumer research. Modelling itself on the success of Britain's Tesco and Sainsbury's own homebrands, you'd also think there would have been some real thinking and research in the naming of the new lines. Even more importantly, Coles expects that the renamed homebrands lines will generate 30% of all sales by 2007. Worth billions.

So here are the new names - a budget label 'Coles $mart buy', a mid-priced line 'You'll love Coles' and a premium brand, 'George J Coles', named after the company's founder. Now we love 'George J Coles', but the rest?? Is 'Farmland' a better or worse name? A three tiered home brand line is a sensible policy, but it's also got to be seen as something serious, something that is going to feel like an attractive proposition to customers. Not merely a slogan.

Worse still is John Fletcher's idea for a name for a new liquor category killer to take on Woolworth's hugely successful Dan Murphy brand superstore. '1st Choice'. What does that mean? Like Megamart, the electric superstore, it means nothing and consequently has no way of building an identity, let alone, a brand.

Let's hope the result for Coles Myer won't be the same as when they dumped all the equity associated with the Grace Bros name in NSW and replaced it with the name Myer; a move that has still not managed to arrest falling sales and a flagging brand.

The question is, on what basis does Coles Myer makes these kinds of decisions?