ATM Advertising and CRM

by Curt Hall

It's been about six months since Bank of America (BoA) started running full-motion video advertising on their ATMs at various banking locations in the San Francisco Bay, California, USA, area. When this first began, I was somewhat excited about the prospect, because I had been following industry developments pointing to the idea of integrating ATMs into an organization's customer relationship management (CRM) environment. Rather than write about the topic at that time, I decided to wait and see how BoA's ATM project would proceed. And, being a BoA customer, this was easy enough to do. However, having used the system constantly for the last six months or more, I'm sorry to say that my initial enthusiasm has waned. Consequently, I thought I'd make ATM-based advertising the topic of this week's Advisor. My aim is not to pick on or single out BoA. It's just that the company offers a real-world example on which to consider the use of ATMs as another platform for companies to target their customers.