Faceplace manufacturer Apple Industries, is using this year’s IAAPA to launch an ambitious social media promotion that puts the customer’s Face Place portrait photo on a giant electronic billboard in Times Square, New York City.
Share in Times Square is a free download to all operators of Smile 2.0 networked photo booths. A customer pays the regular vend price to take their photos in any Face Place Photo Booth that is networked with the Smile 2.0 platform. Then, for an upcharge, the customer can briefly splash the photo of their choice on one of the huge electronic billboards in Times Square. The customer also gets to write a caption that is displayed with the photo.
While the customer’s Face Place portrait picture is displayed on the billboard, a still camera (located across the Square) snaps a photo of the street scene, showing the customer’s image on the billboard. Once the photo is posted to the billboard, the customer will receive an email of their photo being seen in Times Square.
We live in the Age of Sharing, where social media is king…and what people love to share the most is pictures of themselves doing fun and exciting things.
Specifically, the customer’s smiling face appears in the giant electronic screen at 234 W 42nd St., directly above the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum, Dave & Buster’s, Madam Tussauds New York and across the street from B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill.
“Times Square in midtown Manhattan draws 460,000 tourists and pedestrians or more each day,” said Apple Industries CEO Allen Weisberg. “Global corporations like Sony, Google, Coca-Cola and many others pay $4 million apiece a year (or even more) to advertise on a single giant electronic screen.
“But now Apple customers all over the country and anywhere in the world can be world-famous on one of those same Times Square mega-screens for a few moments at a time for an amazingly affordable cost,” said Weisberg.
“With Share in Times Square, Face Place Photo Booths have reinvented the photo booth again,” declared Apple COO Scott Avery. “We live in the Age of Sharing, where social media is king…and what people love to share the most is pictures of themselves doing fun and exciting things. Letting your friends see that you were ‘famous for a few moments’ in Times Square takes the logic of photo sharing to stratospheric heights. Like New York’s favorite song says: Start spreadin’ the news!”
Other new products at IAAPA include the prototype of a new edition of Scene Machine 2 featuring zigzag graphics and an LED visual treatment for the booth exterior that emphasises its family resemblance to Apple’s larger, IAAPA award-winning Photo Studio Deluxe.
Shipping in January, Scene Machine 2 is a networked Face Place Photo Booth that showcases Apple’s Cinema Scene program, in which customers can experience and record video adventures and “pose with a movie star” still photo options.
As such, “Scene Machine 2” is the natural platform for Apple’s “Cinema Scene” program of placing photo booths in cinema chains, where customers can interact with a growing library of licensed Hollywood film properties and celebrity images.
The latest Hollywood studio to make a deal with Apple is Sony Pictures. The first Sony film to get the Apple Scene Machine”treatment will be The Star, a 3D animated Christmas film about the animals in the Nativity story. The movie opens nationwide in the US on Friday, 17th November.