Watch this ad and I'll wet your whistle for free

May 11, 2007 by Dave Haynes

Gizmodo, my favorite gadget blog, has a post today about a Japanese vending firm that has installed 19 inch screens into hot and cold drink machines.

Google’s auto translater does a fine job of passing along the company’s rationale:

The new media ‘charm of [medeikahue]’, as for that, be sure to make see for the hand.

Everyone always, putting out 100 Yen, when you can drink the coffee and the juice and the tea etc which, have been bought simply when it becomes, how is? Before our Will B begins this business,  it tried doing the monitoring of 0 coffees at certain enterprise. As for the result. At the enterprise 30, 800 cup thing beverages were drunk in 1 weeks. This preponderant reach power, ‘is to be charm of [medeikahue]’. In addition, it installs also the 19 inches super monitor in the server. While the coffee and the juice are poured, method of taking the communication where such as TV commercial the user is new and offer of information in printing new is proposed with that monitor.

Precisely.

Digital World Tokyo has a somewhat more coherent explanation:

The new auto-vendor will appear in June, has a central LCD screen that is either 19 or 10.4 inches across and which displays ads of either 15 or 30 seconds’ duration. Naturally, the concept relies upon bored folk staring at the ads while waiting for their drink to vend.

Their reward? A free drink, representing a saving each time of around ¥80. The other side of the equation for Apex and partnered advertising agency WillB is likely to be a tasty ¥400 million in the first year of operation.

Should potential advertisers fear that people will just look at something else while waiting (or perhaps even talk to a colleague), they can rest safe in the knowledge that all cups dispensed will also feature whatever they see fit to print on them.

It’s no stretch to think this would work quite well over, pretty much no matter where. I can’t really see how the numbers would work out well, but my understanding of the vending industry doesn’t extend much beyond which machines do a better job of not giving back change.