Is per­son­al­iza­tion becom­ing a real­i­ty in out of home adver­tis­ing?  Two tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven com­pa­nies, who recent­ly pre­sent­ed at Ad Tech in New York, could be sell­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of per­son­al­iza­tion. Tucked away amongst hun­dreds of booths in a dis­creet cor­ner of the Ad Tech exhib­it hall were Aer­va and Mul­ti­tac­tion.    Both com­pa­nies present cut­ting edge options for out of home marketers.

Mul­ti­tac­tion has built the coolest toy in the busi­ness for out of home adver­tis­ing, it is offer­ing an inter­ac­tive table size dig­i­tal dis­play, it’s the type of thing you would see in the lat­est James Bond movie or foren­sics TV show where they main char­ac­ters work in a high tech laboratory.

If you vis­it the Mul­ti­tac­tion web­site, you’ll see that they claim to have the most advanced inter­ac­tive out of home dis­plays avail­able. So their tech­nol­o­gy reg­is­ters hands rather than points, allow­ing for rich­er and deep­er inter­ac­tions. It also allows for mul­ti­ple users to work and “play” at the same time, even though they make it seem like it’s a busi­ness tool. The Mul­ti­tac­tion cells are able to detect every object and 2d bar­code placed on the screen. You can even write, draw, and sketch with an IR pen.

Here is a super amaz­ing list of capa­bil­i­ties and features:
Unlim­it­ed num­ber of users
Any size and any shape
Supe­ri­or pic­ture quality
Ultra thin bezel
Immune to exter­nal light
Remote management
Any oper­at­ing system
Any devel­op­ment platform

Here’s a cool video of one of the fan­cy pants video iWalls.

Imagine a point of purchase display that talks and display video and you’re envisioning Aerva’s AerWave Software Platform.

Anheuser Busch recent­ly signed a deal to use Aer­va’s Aer­Wave soft­ware plat­form to man­age out of home adver­tis­ing con­tent across AB’s entire net­work of 1,000 Dig­i­tal Cool­ers in local retail locations.

Now from a mar­ket­ing point of view, Aer­va, a pri­vate com­pa­ny based in Cam­bridge and found­ed by MIT alum­ni, pro­vides vis­i­bil­i­ty to brands with access to real-time inter­ac­tiv­i­ty between social media, mobile and dig­i­tal dis­play net­works in ways to cre­ate engag­ing meth­ods of communication.

The soft­ware is pow­ered by the cloud which allows mul­ti­screen net­works to effec­tive­ly run data instant­ly and flex­i­bly. This makes Aer­va ide­al for a vari­ety of mar­ket­ing strate­gies that were pre­vi­ous­ly impos­si­ble to imple­ment effec­tive­ly. That’s why the Aer­va plat­forms are avail­able in sev­er­al soft­ware options to cater to the spe­cif­ic needs of the client, includ­ing a host­ed Web appli­ca­tion or Soft­ware as a Service.

Their mod­er­a­tion engine can check pho­tos tak­en at real-time event to guar­an­tee that the image meets the brand’s spec­i­fi­ca­tions, and then the secure images are then post­ed onto the elec­tron­ic bill­boards along with a per­son­al­ized mes­sage. The results speak for themselves.

It’s an ide­al option for many cir­cum­stances, which is why their client list is full of many impres­sive names, such as Taco Bell, Yahoo, Depart­ment of the Navy, Kodak and Beats by Dre.

Def­i­nite­ly keep an eye for both of these com­pa­nies, they are dic­tat­ing the trends of dig­i­tal dis­play and personalization.