NFC-enabled digital advertising screens will be available in 140 malls starting next month, and some major advertisers are interested, according to the NFC tag provider for the displays.

The rollout will take in around 2,000 “smart screen” displays offered by Adspace Networks. The 140 malls or regional shopping centers are in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Adspace's digital mall network has around 2,800 digital displays at a total of 206 malls, but some of the screens hang in the air, out of reach of users who might tap the tags. Mikhail Damiani, CEO and co-founder of Blue Bite, told NFC Times that the NFC capability is “being rolled out on screens that are at floor level.”

The digital advertising space will be available to advertisers beginning on April 15.

“We are in serious discussions with a few large retailers, telecom companies and movie studios,” Damiani told NFC Times.  

He said the advertising would focus on content relevant to mall shoppers, including movie trailers, coupons, and discount offers for retailers in the mall. The screens display video ads.

That content will be managed and delivered using Blue Bites mTag platform, which Damiani described as “technology agnostic,” using both NFC and QR code. Users would receive the same content whether they tap the NFC tag or scan the QR code, both of which will appear on the digital advertising displays.

When users tap the tags, Blue Bite would collect information about the type of NFC handset model consumers used, as well as the operating system and browser, but no other identifying information. Location data would come from the location of the screen, not the phone’s GPS or other technologies in the device.

“We can still deliver really relevant content but without compromising the privacy of that user,” Damiani said.

Advertisers would be able to view those analytics in real-time using the mTag platform. But unlike such tag management platforms as Identive’s Tagtrail or Proxama’s TapPoint, mTag does not enable advertisers to remotely update or manage their own content.

Damiani said Blue Bite manages the content itself, so advertisers don't have to “get involved with the intricacies of the technology,” although they maintain control over which content is shared with customers, he said.

Damiani described digital out-of-home mobile marketing as “a little bit trickier” than campaigns around static posters. Static posters are usually temporary, but the Adspace screens are permanent digital displays, and Damiani emphasized the importance of ensuring that even when the advertising content on the display changes, good content is available, linked to the tag.

In 2012, Blue Bite provided NFC technology for a six-week campaign for same-day hotel reservation apps, Hotel Tonight. Digital displays at eight airports and “hundreds” of cafes showed a brief video clip about the app, and viewers could tap an NFC tag or scan a QR code to download the Hotel Tonight app. In June 2012, Blue Bite reported that the displays had received 15,000 unique taps or scans, and 50% of those users had downloaded the application.

Blue Bite has also participated in recent campaigns for Hotels.com, Old Navy, and Sony, but Damiani said he doesn't think the companies have released any results from those campaigns.

He expressed surprise that more advertisers don't publicize their use of NFC, noting that the added media attention around the technology could increase exposure.

At February’s NFC Cluster panel discussion at MIT in Boston, Matt Kammerait of printing house Quad/Graphics made a similar observation about an NFC-enabled Lexus advertisement in the April 2012 issue of Wired magazine. “If you look at the soft side,” Kammerait said during the panel, “it also generated exponentially more impressions than were available just from that printing.”

But Damiani told NFC Times that “few and far between (are the advertisers) that want to associate themselves with anything new and unproven.”

Blue Bite expects to announce two more advertising rollouts, “similar to this, but in other verticals” in the next two to four weeks, he said.