Don't Step In It

 

Digital Signage is by every account the advertising medium of the future and the present. When I started my company Video Billboard in 1989 our first decision was Beta or the upstart VHS. Back then almost every component of the Digital Signage industry didn’t exist including the digits. We have over the years studied the Art behind the Media and have settled into a very solid viable product.

 

It seems to me that an emerging technology like Digital Signage is a very attractive opportunity to any entrepreneur, consequently a multitude of start ups have been developed without a how-to book. What I mean by this is, there are currently no standards set for Digital Signage formats it is only recently that some are cataloguing nomenclature (buzz words) in an attempt to add some measure of structure to our industry.

The technology now is so available and so affordable and attractive everyone is entering the genre with their best guess, which is yielding a few survivors, less successes and many casualties.

 

There are now countless media suites guaranteed to provide you the most up to date access to your market, truly making the networking side of Digital Signage understandable and do-able, but expensive. In fact this ease of operation is only exacerbating the failure rate in the industry by over stating the ease of operation and understating the critical components which are message transfer and retention.

 

The key to having a successful Digital Signage company is really not the technology. The key to success lies in a basic advertising objective, the ability to pass the message effectively to your audience.

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If you remove any component of this effective transfer process of information you will fail.

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For example: I have seen a state of the art delivery system 42” plasma, high end computer, high speed internet, high traffic location, sounds good right. Wrong, their message was a 60 second text narrative about a drink recipe and the history of a vineyard with accompanying elevator music. The store staff wanted to rip it out by the roots for disrupting their lives with the music. This beautiful expensive system was assigned to a remote corner of this large beer and wine store where no one would stop to look unless they were desperate for the latest spritzer recipe. I watched the screen for an eternity (about 5 minutes), there was no reason for me to look at it other than my interest in Digital Signage. So this beautiful state of the art system in every respect is doomed to failure because they didn’t act on fundamental advertising principles.
 

I tell my staff the most important component of our company is not the delivery technology, the up to the minute information, not our ad design alone, it is what happens in the micro second between the screen and the eyes. If we have done our job properly on behalf of our advertising customers there will be an effective transfer of information in that instant. Now every thing I have mentioned, the plasma screen, the real time updates, the Digital Signage advertisement, these are all components that act in harmony to create the environment necessary for this effective transfer and retention of information. If you do not have a clear understanding of all that is required to perform this service, you will fail to provide a valuable service to your customers.

 

Now that we know how to fail, let’s talk about succeeding. So let us work backwards in two directions from the critical moment of transfer from the screen to the brain. Those two directions are the “technology delivery” and “the audience”. First let us look at our product. You must not let your audience wander off, we have to keep the messages coming, and we must keep them engaged.

There are three components to this process.
 

1. The first is Action; the human brain’s most primal instinct is a response to movement. If you have a static image on a Digital screen you are no more effective than static signage as far as effectual message transfer. The only benefit is to you for increasing the size of your inventory. But as far as value to your customer, not likely. The brain responds to movement so give it to them, keep the messages moving.
    

2. The second critical point is do not loose your audience; this loss can be accomplished in several ways. Put a long boring ad with way to much text and no colour. Add sound so they run away. Make the ad too short so they can’t figure out when one ad starts and the other begins.
    

3. The third component is not critical to message transfer but is the ease of operation; this is where the media suites come in. You can upload an ad in real time, respond to market trends. These are all very valuable benefits of Digital Signage but not a critical component of the actual message transfer and memory retention.

 

We at Video Billboard Media Arts Corporation have found in our twenty one years in the industry that 10 seconds is just the right length for a Digital Signage ad. I won’t go into what it takes to create an effective advertisement; you can hire my Design Group for that (shameless plug).

 

The other side of this critical moment is the audience.

1. Make sure you have an audience. An example of what not to do: “Urinal TV”, that is a small TV located in front of a urinal actually it is above it sorry. Is this a high traffic location? I hope not. Is this a captive audience? It depends on the beer. You are selling your client exposures; you can’t provide this by positioning your screen in front of one guy who probably can’t focus on it anyway. What we do as a Digital Signage providers is position the screen in a high traffic area where the audience is in line or waiting. This dwell time is when your potential audience is the most vulnerable and susceptible to suggestion.

 

1. Make sure your message targets your demographic. If you have an audience that is primarily tourism, pitch your travel agents, your water slides and cruises. This is one of the main advantages of Digital Signage is to target the demographic by screen placement. With conventional media an advertiser throws a wide net with a broad based demographic. Yes his target is in there but the question is, is his group seeing it? With print there is no guarantee a client’s target demographic is going to see the ad on page 9 of the paper. With Dynamic Digital Signage, your demographic is defined by virtue of the location and traffic and your exposure is assured by the primal human response to movement.

 

If you adhere to the basic principles of advertising and Digital Signage you stand a chance of success. Digital Signage is poised to accelerate beyond conventional media because of our abilities to effectively target our audience. What we need to do as a group and this is the most important point I would like to make today is that we must coordinate our networks, standardize our formats and categorize our demographics so we can take advantage of national advertising dollars. All this is easily within our abilities. We can coordinate our efforts and present one collective network to National agencies and offer them the ability to target by geography or demography.
 

If Video Billboard can be of service to you or your clients please call, we love to talk about Digital Signage.

 

Good luck, we're on the right track.

 

Jim Hickman

Owner

Video Billboard.