A desire to boost diners’ average tabs and more effectively sharpen their competitive edge by providing customers with “infotaintainment” is prompting operators to explore the use of digital content management and display technologies.
Dennis Pavlatos, proprietor of the East Bay Diner in Merrick, NY, had enhanced marketing in mind when he deployed Diner Vision, offered by OOH Vision Networks, or OVN, of Hazlet, NJ. For that offering, OVN is teaming with Helius, a Linden, Utah-based developer of Internet protocol-based broadcast solutions and Microspace Communications Corp., a provider of point-to-multipoint satellite services headquartered in Raleigh, NC.
In deploying the technology, Pavlatos said, he was following a hunch that seeing specials presented in “active” fashion rather than on a blackboard alone would encourage more customers to try them. That hunch proved correct, he explained, as sales of daily specials have risen by about 25 percent since Diner Vision was introduced at East Bay about 18 months ago.
Content for the entire network is centrally managed and aggregated using Helius’ MediaWrite content distribution and management system. MediaWrite determines the broadcast content to be displayed at each diner’s location and aggregates it with content transmitted by individual diners via fax—the majority of cases—or the Internet. Content then is sent to specific restaurant locations over Microspace’s Velocity satellite service and presented at each one via the MediaGate router.
