Digital Media: How Sticky is Your Content? Part 1

Are you giving your audience a reason to take a second look at your digital sign?

Congratulations. You've completed your first digital signage playlist. Lots of interesting pages with attractive graphics, easy-to-read text, and a neatly placed logo.

You sit at your desk marveling for a moment, considering what you've accomplished. Sipping your hot coffee as you review each page one last time, you reach into the sack you grabbed earlier in the morning at the corner bakery for your favorite pastry -a freshly baked cinnamon bun drizzled with delectable sugary glazing.

Inspecting your pages, you bring the bun to your mouth. Right before sinking your teeth into it, you see the glazing has affixed the bakery tissue used to remove the treat from the bakery display case to your pastry. Without a second thought, you peel the sticky, thin paper away, take your bite and imagine your boss's delight at seeing the product of your digital signage labor.

As you reach down to click through to the next page in the playlist, the tissue -stuck to your finger by the sweet bun glazing- tags along for the ride. You notice the unwelcome passenger, but not before clicking your mouse and smearing the sticky substance from your finger and bakery tissue onto the mouse button. Agitated, you grab the tissue with your other, clean hand, peel the bakery tissue from your mouse and finger and throw it down on your desk.

Calming down, you grab a cleaning wipe, pick up your mouse, rest your elbows on your desk and carefully clean up the minor mess before noticing the time and racing off to your boss's office for a meeting to review the new digital signage content.

Upon entering her office, she catches you off guard with her observation. "I've reviewed your digital signage presentation," she says in a tone signaling her dissatisfaction. "Tell me, why on earth would a customer ever give our digital signs a second look?" Before you can answer, she instructs you to give it another try. "Build in a reason to keep them coming back for another look," she advises.

As you acknowledge her request and turn to leave, you hear her say. "By the way, what's that stuck to your elbow? It looks like a piece of tissue paper." As you close her office door, you see the bakery tissue glued to your sleeve and realize the only thing sticky about the content you dealt with today was the glazing of the cinnamon bun you removed from the bakery bag.

What are the things that can make your digital signage content sticky? Like Web developers looking to attract repeated visits to their sites, digital signage content developers must remember the importance of earning a second, third and even fourth look from their audiences.

What content can you develop or tap into that sticks in your viewers' minds, not unlike the pesky bakery tissue did to everything it touched? What steps can you take to create or tap into existing desire on the part of your viewers to glance at your signs whenever they walk into your shop, sit in your service area or traverse the aisles of your store?

Those are the types of questions you should be asking yourself as you contemplate creating your digital content. Please stick around, because I'll address some of them and give you a few concrete suggestions about making your digital signage content sticky.

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