It would seem obvious that replacing a static sign with a digital screen, or adding a screen to an environment, would automatically create more awareness for whatever was being communicated. It’s easy to see that putting really great video (herein generally referred to as “content”) on an HDTV that someone wants to buy is a foregone conclusion. But that is not the case. In situations where the shopper is buying a staple, like shampoo or toothpaste or milk, the shopper is so focused on the mission at hand that almost all signage, static and digital alike, is ignored. The potential to miss the audience can be frustrating to a network operator that has spent enormous amounts of money to put in a network and wants to see a return on the investment.

The ultimate goal of digital signage is to change behaviors. It could be to navigate through an environment, or learn more about a product, or catch up on the latest news. But digital signage alone does not allow the operator to be better at communicating.

You need terrific content.

The ability to engage a viewer with outstanding visual content is not easily accomplished. The awareness and respect for content is increasing because providers continue to learn about the medium. The common battle cry of “It’s Not TV!” runs through the industry. It isn’t TV in the traditional sense of what we sit down and watch in our homes each night. But it is a screen designed to communicate, and the understanding of how to communicate is evolving as fast as the industry itself. It is TV, just a different kind of TV.

In the past, the novelty of a screen in a store or elevator or subway was enough to allow the network operator the freedom to simply hang a screen and turn it on. Now we are seeing screens treated as vital elements of design, being built into the physical structures. This completes the experience for the end-user and the audience. The screens and content look like it was made for the store, rather than just added on at a later stage in the environment’s evolution. Venues are constantly looking for advantages over their competitors, but brand logos, colors, and store layout can only go so far. Compelling, relevant content can give one environment over another by bringing the environment to life.

As much as good content has the ability to engage a viewer, bad content can detract a viewer just as fast.

High quality, relevant, and compelling content is the most important feature to digital signage in any application. It is the reason you’re adding the screens. It can connect you with viewers in ways never before achieved through the traditional methods of communication. Whether you are a brand, or a product, or a service, or just someone who has information to share, digital signage gives you the ability to engage the viewer with your message.

There are myriad variables to consider when creating good content. What works in one retailer, or waiting room, or on a billboard, will not work on screens of the same nature because the audience makeup is different each time. This creates havoc for providers who are trying to get the right content in the right place at the right time. But there are a few basic principles that can be understood and applied across any medium that will give the provider and/or end user great content, great impact, and a greater return on the investment.

Great content tells a story. The unique environments and audiences give creators the opportunity to tell more intimate stories with greater impact, focusing on key features of the subject that appeal to the viewer at that particular time and place, rather than trying to cover all the bases in a short message you may find on television at home (a good reason why “It’s not TV”). Because digital signage is a more dynamic way to communicate, providers can leverage the creative resources to tell a better story about their brand, or product, or service. For example, a cell-phone provider may be able to show live action of the cell-phones screen and interface (think of the iPhone commercials) as an advantage over other cell-phone manufacturers. This has tremendous impact at the point of sale, where the phones are on the shelf, where customers ready to buy. Great content creates competitive differentiation.

Great content can engage a viewer like no other type of communication. And with the growth of interactivity through touch screens and mobile devices, that engagement can become personal and inspirational. Brands, products, and services can now connect with customers and consumers at all points of interaction, from the internet at home to touch-screen kiosks in the store to mobile social media that allows users to define a brand or product in their eyes. The effort to change behaviors and create impact is tremendous when the customer becomes engaged with the message.

Great content makes money. In the case of retailing, relevant and compelling content will encourage a viewer to purchase a product. The revenue generated from more product sales in turn becomes a budget that retailers can spend on bigger and better digital signage applications. The technology of digital signage alone does not generate the revenue needed to purchase a network. The largest revenue generator for digital signage is the content and the amount of money someone will pay to put a message on your screen.

Here’s the catch: This is easier said than done. The research and strategy that goes into creating an engaging network can be extreme and often nebulous. The factors of audience demographics, environmental attributes, and advertising requirements all play very heavily on the composition and execution of great content. For example, creating content that runs longer than a person’s dwell time at the point of viewing will keep the viewer from getting the message because she has already moved on. Another example is sound. In a noisy environment, audio will not be effective in communicating a message, so the message should be entirely visual. Any aspect of the message in audio can and will be lost on the viewer because he cannot hear it.

However, the front-end work that goes into understanding the variables of compelling content can pay dividends in the end when the understanding of important features creates guidelines from which terrific content, and viewer engagement, can be achieved.

Content is that important.

With an Internet-ready device in our reach at all times, are we ever really captive? Think about the last time you stood in what seemed to be an endless line (for me it was standing in the line to see Avatar…). How many people around you were using their phones? Were the majority of folks talking on their phones, or were they engaged in any number of non-voice based activities: texting, playing games, surfing the mobile web, writing a business email, etc.? Did you see anyone pull an e-reader from his or her bag?

What were you doing while you were in line? Did you seek sanctuary in technology to stave off the boredom of staring at your watch?

My reason for asking these questions is to get you to think about how common it is for people (of all ages) to pull out a phone, laptop, netbook, e-reader, or iPod when they’re forced to wait for something. Such evidence supports my hypothesis that the truly captive audience is disappearing.

Just because people are in a lobby, elevator, amusement park line, or waiting room for seconds, minutes, or hours, that doesn’t mean that they are captive. Thanks to the evolution of technology, while seemingly “captive,” these individuals could be performing any number of digital tasks that occupy their attention.

So tell me…

How Captive is Your Audience?

Like the first two in the series, it is full of good insights into what’s happening in stores. It is also suggests digital signage is woefully ineffective, and anyone reading this report without thinking it through and getting some perspective would quickly toss out the concept of in-store digital as something even worth pursuing. It’s that bad.

As you might imagine, that’s a bit of a problem for companies trying to sell the dream into that sector.

Miller Zell and a research firm did a survey of 999 shoppers in March of this year “to determine which in-store marketing communications elements influence and inspire purchase behavior.”

The research revealed and confirmed 60 per cent of brand decisions are still made in the store, and that in-store advertising is more influential than out of store. It suggested mass merchandise stores are where people prefer to shop and convenience stores are the least favourite. And it suggests the in-store experience is incredibly important, with more than 2/3s of respondents saying the experience was a make or break factor for them in choosing where they shop.

Notice-ability sorted out what was actively noticed in stores by shoppers, and what was not. At the top, end-caps and merchandising displays, with percentage rankings in the 60s and 70s.

At the bottom, digital signage, at a woeful 10 per cent or so.

Floor graphics did better!

Digital signage did a little better when it came to purchase and brand choice influence, but not a whole bunch. It ranks 9^th of 11 choices, and just ahead of ceiling banners and overhead mobiles.

Now at this point you may have closed your laptop, had a last sip of your coffee and headed for the roof of your building. It really could seem awful and hopeless.

But let’s stop and think about this. I can pretty effectively argue that the reason the numbers are so bad is that the execution, to date, has been so bad in retail.

One of the reasons digital screens are rated right down there with ceiling banners and overhead mobiles is that they have been hanging from the ceiling or high up on a wall, just like ceiling banners and mobiles. Except they are a fraction of the size. No amount of zippy motion graphics in ads will get people looking if the screens are well above the normal field of vision and are, in relative terms, tiny in the context of the retail environment.

An HDTV that looks massive in your living room is just a speck on the horizon of a big box store, and even in smaller retailers. And it’s just a flat-panel TV, and they’re everywhere. That novelty factor is long, long gone.

Sprinkling a few screens around a big store, hoping they will get noticed and have an impact, really isn’t much more than wishful thinking, and this sort of data really drives that point home. To service the general environment of a large retail space, you need equally large displays that actually command attention and set the tone and experience that shoppers clearly want.

That technology is coming, but the other, easier route is to use what the research tells us, and get the screens in positions where they are noticed. Those are the ends of aisles, merchandise displays, department locators and at the shelf-edge in the aisles.

I have a client that has been working with a major brand on a merchandising fixture that includes a large LCD screen integrated into the fixture, with strategy and programming specifically tuned to working that fixture hard with rotating promotions and regularly changed SKUs. The fixtures where wheeled into place in stores and the results were immediate and phenomenal, with sales jumps against control stores well, well into the double figures across scores of sites. The program has been doubled in size.

Other retailers that have put screens in positions where they can’t help but be noticed, and where the content is well-executed and steadily refreshed, are seeing sustained sales increases that easily justify the effort and cost. The recently opened Microsoft store is a fabulous example of a retail design that really exploits the possibility, with full walls of tiled screens. Expensive, sure, but not all THAT expensive. Hugely impactful, though.

Miller Zell also told me (I asked) that another reason the numbers were low was critical mass. There aren’t all that many retailers yet with real screen networks.

This stuff DOES work, but getting it right takes a lot of careful consideration and use of the information available, LIKE these kinds of reports. The days of retailers and network operators “hanging and hoping” with their screens have to end, and people in the industry have to take a role by flat telling their clients, “That’s not going to work.”

I think I have a starting point, but want to frame it with first understanding some of the factors.

Five years ago, you could put an ad on the big four networks, have your footprint and hit most of your target demographic simply because you were on at the right time. Psychographic targeting has completely changed the landscape of advertising. It’s no longer about what, when and where, it’s now about who, why, and how.

Today, we have multi-channel campaigns, sometimes several channels within a single retail environment. For example, if I have three separate channels in my store (home theater program, computer screens, and a checkout program), I need a variation on a single spot that is bi-lingual, appropriate for the channel, and geographically segmented to each of the top 10 DMAs in the United States due to regional promotion. That’s 60 versions of a spot.

Ugh. No one has time to do that.

Many end-users (venues, network owners and operators) are not broadcast professionals or creative types. They are corporate marketers that view digital signage as a brand engagement point that will excite the customers and generate revenue. If you ask them how long it takes to make a 30-second commercial, some will answer, “30 seconds.”

Because of the agency’s historic position in the creative management of brand and product campaigns, much of the industry assumes the agency is the master of the domain: full knowledge of psychographics, content creation designed for individual targeting, media planning and channel deployment logistics, and metric measurement analysis. And there tends to be an implied assumption that all this is on the agency’s dime.

The reality is that the agency doesn’t know any more about your customer than the man or woman who walks past your storefront on the other side of the street. And none of them have the time or the budget to go and learn everything about your customer.

But you do.

Here’s Where We Start

The end user must own the testing and measurement of the audience. The responsibility of developing a concrete metric on the network’s value to the environment should reside with the end user who made the decision to install the network. The network should be part of the marketing plan.

You need the right content to develop measurement. Where do you get that? You don’t get it from any external agency; you get it from within your own four walls.

You should produce your own content because you know how to impact your audience better than anyone. Historically, I, not any agency, have produced the advertising with the greatest impact on my audience.

The cost to produce content and measure your audience will be lower because you can engage other departments and to spread the costs. For example, if you know your private label that wants to advertise, introduce them to the idea of producing multiple versions of a spot for testing purposes. It costs much less to version creative in production than go back and re-edit mastered content. If you’re large enough, engage your marketing research department to build a test and measurement study to collect sales data on the products or services promoted in the advertising and understand where the greatest impact occurred.

If you are a small venue, think about contracting a third party to do this. If you’re really small, Apple’s iMovie HD works just as well as Avid or Final Cut Pro. (I have personally created my own content with Final Cut Pro.) A $5 gift certificate to answer a couple intercept questions goes a long way for loyalty. You know that customer will come back to spend the five bucks and probably a few dollars more.

And use OVAB’s metric measurement guidelines to build your case.

Then share that information. Most agencies and other end users don’t care to know quantity sold or the cost; they want to know if your content had impact, that your content drove sales. With multiple versions of the same spot, you can help me understand the impact. As Nikki Baird put it, “…the why behind the buy.”

Some companies are already trying this. What I find interesting is these efforts are coming from brands, not agencies. I have worked with brands to create content for specific channels with successful results. I have educated them on why they need to change it for our environment and I have showed them how to do it. The result is stronger consumer engagement, and better sales.

The challenge is to stop one-off efforts and start integrating this process into long-term marketing initiatives.

Agencies do get it, and they do care. What they need is open-source collaboration with retailers and brands to build the expertise to develop multi-channel content so that end users can get back to engaging the customer and making money.

So there’s a starting point. On your marks…

At corporate, I asked meeting attendees to watch both spots. I showed the trailer at the beginning of a meeting and the clip at the end of the meeting. Then I asked if the audience if they could tell me the running times of the spots.

In almost every case, the viewers felt the trailer was longer than it was, by about 30 seconds. The actual running time of the trailer was 2:30. In contrast, the viewer felt the clip was shorter than it was. Many felt it was only about 30 seconds, when its actual running time was 1:05.

The trailer was not engaging. It felt longer than it was. However, the viewers were so engaged with the clip that they lost track of time.

I recently wrote about a Stanford study written by Jennifer Aaker and Cassie Mogilner on the effects of time versus money. Part of that study included perception. The authors surveyed attendees at a concert in San Francisco with free admission. But, people had to wait for long periods to get tickets. When attendees were asked about the time they spent to see the concert versus the amount of money spent to see the concert (They asked random individuals: “How much time will you have spent to see the concert today?” or “How much money will you have spent to see the concert today?”), the responses to the question stressing time were more favorable. What was surprising was that those who waited in line longer said their satisfaction with the concert was higher.

What does this mean? The more engaged a customer is with something that will benefit his lifestyle, the greater the discrepancy in perception of time as the he moves down the path to purchase. (How many of you have seen a movie that was so good that it felt like it was half as long as it really was?)

The role of Digital Signage in any environment impacts not only the shopping behaviors, but also the psychological effects of the time spent in the store. In a recent study, 45% of all customers interviewed had a perceived wait time of five minutes less than those interviewed in a store without a digital signage network. In the same study, 68% of all customers interviewed prefer to shop at a store with digital signage.

Perception of time has deep impact in areas of where the psychological effects of waiting could be detrimental to the overall experience, like amusement parks, checkouts, grocery markets, gas stations, and waiting rooms.

If you can relate to your customer’s lifestyle and purpose for being in your store, you can create compelling content that eases the perception of time spent with the products and services you sell, creating a truly engaging experience.

As the advertising kicks in, the intended audience sometimes is missed because the consumer is rarely ever the shopper.

The consumer is the grade schooler, the tweener, or the teenager, needing everything from brand new pencils and rulers to new iPhones and laptops. The shopper is almost always Mom. With credit card in hand (it used to be a checkbook, when I was a kid), she hits the stores ready to find the perfect tools for her child’s education, as long as it fits perfectly within the budget.

Due to the comfort of repurposing content, this audience factor may not be considered when using digital signage to support a campaign like Back-to-School. The student will see how cool it is to get a new gadget or notebook, but it may not resonate with Mom because she’s focused on saving a few dollars.

While we know that the audience mindset is different and the demographic targets are more refined, what becomes apparent is that the consumer is not the shopper.

The purchase decision often starts outside the store, but may start with the child. And while she may want that sweet-looking backpack, it’s Mom who is doing the purchasing. Mom may be going up and down the aisles, trying her best to set aside her judgement of what her child should wear while still favoring a cost-effective way to help her child look cool. At some point, the message has to shift focus from the consumer to the shopper.

In the May/June 2009 issue of The Hub, Joan Chow, Executive Vice President of ConAgra Foods, provided insight into how her teams understand the similarities and differences between the consumer and the shopper:

“The shopper insights folks connect very closely with the consumer insights folks, but they look at the insights from both the retailer’s and the shopper’s perspectives. For example, the Slim Jim consumer is typically a young teenage boy, but the Slim Jim shopper, depends on the store. If it’s a convenience store, the shopper is the teenage boy, but if it’s a grocery store, it could be his mom. So, we want to understand her perspective when she goes into the store: What’s the appropriate message that’s going to resonate with her? Where should we be placing Slim Jim in the store? That’s where shopper insights really come into play.”

This type of shopper insight reveals that the proposition for a brand or product must be different depending on four factors: The consumer, the shopper, the retailer, and the location in the store.

Does your shopper insight go that deep? It should. It could mean the difference between pencils and Slim Jims.