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Capturing Digital Signage: Giving Consumers Relevance
Chaotic change — involving billions of dollars — is churning the waters of advertising, retail marketing, cablecasting and broadcasting.
Churning in particular are the traditional relationships between the ad side and the operational side of these telecasting industries.
Yet, with ad models changing, it’s time to look beyond the home screen to reach the eyes of consumers. Now, cable operators and cablecasters must begin wedding their business to digital signage in order to better survive in the Brave New World of Giving Consumers Relevance.
Take the local cablecaster in New York City, Time Warner. Like most all broadcasters and cablecasters in many larger metro centers, TW in the Big Apple already has the pieces necessary to add a new revenue stream and a new business model, called digital signage, to its Triple Play collection of video, telephone and broadband Internet delivery.
These tools include content production personal, equipment and facilities; local, regional, national and global content libraries; and local marketing and customer service operations (including billing bases).
Digital signage is deployed today on over 500,000 U.S. flat-screen monitors, and for the year just ended, The Carmel Group estimates almost $1 billion was generated, toward an estimated $2.5 billion as of year-end 2010. Moreover, the amounts mentioned above say nothing about the money that will no longer be spent in traditional advertising for shot-gun-like scattered ad messages – aimed at masses of consumers wherever they travel or reside – as ad agencies and their clients realize the importance of sending pin-pointed pitches to precise pods of people.
Flat-screen monitors, small, large and everything in between, are being deployed in retail malls, on freeways, in medical offices, and in corporate facilities around the world. Times Square in NYC, The Strip in Las Vegas, and dozens of arenas and stadiums, are but a few of the prime examples of how Americans are taking to this new form of communication and message delivery. At recent trade shows, one developer has even created a digital sign screen that is displayed on the front or back (or both) of a T-shirt.
With their new-found ability to avoid ads — especially those that are thrown at the masses in a typical cost-per-thousand fashion — consumers are reacting to content, including commercial messages, that helps them and is relevant to their lives.
A typical consumer today can use satellite radio, an MP3 player, a digital video recorder, the mute button, or any number of other tools to duck the ads thrown at them via the traditional media. As but one more example, as they drive, consumers can chose to ignore the same vinyl sign that they pass by every day for weeks or months on the way to work.
But take the same consumer and give him or her a specific message that conforms to what he or she wants to buy, and do it on a bright display that is easy and quick to read, and he or she will even accept a limited incursion into their privacy (and what makes them as a consumer tick), in order to capture that helpful information. Indeed, once advertisers find what individual consumers like and want, more and more doors open to that consumer, especially if the delivery and the message are sensitive and apropos.
Another opportunity for the Comcasts and Time Warner Cables of the Digital Signage World is to build and invest in the operational sides of digital signage. This means buying up and leasing digital signage infrastructure, which they then populate and run, in their own communities. In addition, content delivered to flat-screen monitors can be specifically adapted to special audiences in special venues, more and more economically and flexibly.
In a world moving toward the mantra of “Relevant Content,” digital signage delivers that, and the match between cablecasters and digital signage is largely there and ready to become more.
Jimmy Schaeffler is the chairman and chief service officer of The Carmel Group, a Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif.-based consultancy, publisher and conference organizer that focuses on the global, multichannel industry.
