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Content Advice: Content May Be King But Who's Doing The Coronation? |
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When I was a much younger man, a college professor warned me against the use of clichés in my writing. The problem with clichés, he said, is that they are by definition “hackneyed” and “trite." Leave it to a professor to send me back to my dictionary to figure out what he was trying to say.
Being worn out, however, seems to be a matter of opinion. After all, how many people drive cars with more than 100,000 miles, especially in today’s economy? How many patch the knees of their kids’ blue jeans? Who discards a dull knife?
To me, clichés become clichés because they succinctly bundle a truth into a few memorable words, which become used to the point of exhaustion because they so aptly describe something. To “reinvent the wheel” with an original phrase might leave you “looking for a needle in a haystack,” requiring you to become “busier than a one-armed paperhanger” when a simple cliché would have conveyed your point without the fuss.
The media in general -and digital signage specifically- have their own clichés, “the mother of all” which is: “Content is king.” (By the way, isn’t it odd that Saddam Hussein would have coined a phrase that fast became a cliché in the United States? Or, was he simply the gateway for a cliché from his culture to ours? “But I digress.”)
The kingship of content is easy to understand. If you want someone to read your newspaper, listen to your radio show, watch your TV program or look at your digital sign, you’d better give them a reason. That “tried and true” reason is content. It better be fresh; it better be interesting; it better serve your audience’s needs; and it better look just as professional as the competition’s presentation.
Those who are successful in the media understand these truths instinctively. However, the same can’t be said for the digital signage universe. Sure, there are digital signage ad networks being put in place by megalithic media groups. Professionals in these groups understand the importance of content, but there is another vast group of digital signage users who aren’t professional communicators. They run independent retail stores, car lots, local restaurants, bars, and any one of a thousand other small enterprises. These people “first and foremost” are business people concerned with all of the things that got them to the level of success they’ve achieved so far. Adding digital signage adds another responsibility, the implications of which may not be fully understood.
Obviously, these small business owners are adding digital signage because they understand the importance of promoting their goods or services. But they likely don’t have the time, understanding or expertise to develop the content that fully exploits the potential of the digital signage medium.
For small business owners, this raises a critical question: If digital signage is king, who’s doing the coronation? In other words, how does a small business owner with limited resources create –or afford to hire someone to create- digital signage content that attracts the attention of viewers, holds their attention and influence the process of making a purchasing decision? How do they make their content king?
While there’s no simple answer that meets the needs of all small business owners, there are some straightforward, logical steps to make clear, effective, professional digital signage messaging possible. In my next blog, I’ll review some of those steps to help small business owners put together the messaging they envision for their digital signs. Till then, at the risk of using a cliché, “stay tuned.”
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HDTV Perspective: High Definition Signs Grow Increasingly Important |
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By the millions, households in the United States and around the world are buying HDTVs, which increasingly makes high-def digital signage a must-have for anyone serious about grabbing the public’s attention.
HDTV is becoming more commonplace in U.S. households and around the world everyday. The latest figures from research firm In-Stat show that as of the end of last year there were 22 million homes across the country where HDTVs were being used to display high-definition programming, and another 17 million that have installed high definition televisions but aren't yet watch HD programs.
Worldwide, too, the number of HDTV households is on the rise. In 2007, the number of homes across the globe with HDTVs stood at 29.6 million. By the end of last year, that number had grown to 37 million, In-Stat said.
There appears to be no slowdown in consumer adoption of HDTV going forward, either. Despite the ongoing recession, consumers are projected to gobble up high definition consumer electronics at an incredible pace. A recent forecast from research firm iSuppli, foresees unit shipments of HD products worldwide growing threefold from 2008 to 2012, when they will number 202 million. Granted, iSuppli clumps lots of different HD products together –everything from HD set-top boxes to high definition game consoles. Regardless, though, this tally also includes displays, and more importantly it points to a day in the not-too-distant future when high definition stuff will be the rule, not the exception.
What does any of this have to do with digital signage? Quite a lot actually. The same people who live in HD households and watch their high-def TVs day in and day out also are in public on a daily basis seeing digital signage messaging at airports, hotels, stores and restaurants.
The growing tide of people exposed daily to high-def programming and televisions demands professional digital signage communicators to ask themselves a single, simple question: “How well does my digital signage messaging hold up to what my viewers see everyday in their homes on their HDTVs?”
Like it or not, the public increasingly will judge the digital signage messaging they see against what’s seen at home. Digital signage content producers who lag behind the growing public appetite for high definition run the risk of sapping the "wow" factor from digital signs.
The good news for digital signage content creators is that although they will have to retool their creative arsenal of hardware and software for high-def, the prices of those tools have tumbled in recent years to approach and in some cases equal what they were accustomed to paying for standard definition tools. From professional level camcorders to HD video editing tools, high definition text and animation software to special effects packages, high-definition creative tools are affordable –especially when compared to a few years ago.
Equally sweet music to the ears of businesses looking to deploy HD display panels as well as HD digital signage playback servers and controllers are also more affordable than ever. At the same time, they offer all of the functionality, if not more, than their existing standard definition counterparts.
To be sure, large and small businesses alike are keeping a close eye on their capital and operating expenses given the current state of the economy. While doing so is a reality of doing business in today’s economic climate, it’s equally real that the number of folks at home with HDTVs is growing. To stay competitive for their attention, deploying high-def digital signs and creating HD content will increasingly become just another cost of doing business –one that even the most frugal business manager won’t be able to afford to ignore.
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Economic Growth May Be Closer Than You Think |
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According to a leading research firm, the digital signage industry when viewed as a whole will see growth this year.
Guess which business segment of the U.S. economy is expected to grow 33 percent this year? No, it’s not homebuilding, automakers or purveyors of credit-default swaps. It is the digital signage business, which will experience part of this growth at the expense of other media.
A study released last month from noted research firm ABI Research made the surprising forecast. Even after factoring in the ongoing recession, the “Digital Signage Market Analysis” study foresees the U.S. digital signage market, which includes hardware, software, installation and maintenance, growing by a third.
According to an ABI Research industry analyst, one main reason for the growth is that traditional advertising media are losing their appeal. Possibly unknown only to digital signage newbie’s, digital signage offers something traditional advertising media can’t: the ability to reach buyers with dynamic messaging at the point of sale. When shoppers are in a store, evaluating which brand to buy, digital signage has the chance to snatch a bit of mindshare at the precise moment a buying decision is being made. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and even the Internet cannot make that claim.
Another recent report released by SNL Kagan backs up the argument that traditional advertising is losing its appeal. According to SNL Kagan, which has produced annual reports forecasting broadcast industry revenue for the past 20 years, local and national TV spot advertising revenue declined in 2008 by about 7 percent. That decline has continued this year, and the firm projects revenue from television ads dropping about 16 percent in 2009. While the recession is responsible for much of this decline, the changing media consumption patterns of the public also seems to be having an effect. In fact, the SNL Kagan analyst responsible for the report advises broadcasters looking to weather the storm to cut expenses and develop alternate digital platforms –presumably to win back audience drifting away to new media. As that drift accelerates, advertisers seek new ways to reach an audience, and digital signage appears to be benefiting from that desire.
The ABI Research study also credits improvements in the appearance of displays, declining prices for electronics, lower-cost digital storage and the inclusion of interactive technology as factors contributing to its rather rosy forecast.
To be sure, digital signage exists in the broader economy, and the depth of the decline there will impact its growth. ABI Research acknowledges as much, but it seems at this point that the effect of the broader economy is more akin to slowing a speeding locomotive than pulling the emergency stop cord.
Even during this general economic recession, jumping aboard the digital signage express makes sense, especially for marketers and advertisers who wish to position themselves to take full advantage of the recovery to come. While doing so might seem counterintuitive to those looking to cut expenses, the truth is companies are continuing to advertise during this recession. Choosing to reallocate some of those existing ad dollars to digital signage not only provides an attractive alternative for those who have grown weary of advertising in traditional electronic media but also gives those advertisers a strong presence at the point of sale when shoppers one day return in droves to the stores.
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DOOH: The Value of Metrics |
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For digital signage ad networks to mature and prosper, advertisers and ad agencies must be assured they’re reaching the audience they pay for and their budgets are not being wasted.
If you watch the local news on television, you may notice that the stories get a little more graphic, the news a little more sensational and the anchors a little more solicitous in February, May, July and November. Why? Because that’s when ratings are measured in more than 200 television markets nationwide to determine who’s watching what, and how many of people are watching it.
If you work in a specific industry, you may subscribe to one or more trade magazines with articles of interest to your peers. If you recommend, specify or actually authorize the purchase of new products and services for your business, you probably receive these magazines for free. If you happen to forget to re-subscribe, you may have been on the receiving end of a phone call from someone --not trying to sell you a subscription, but attempting to get you to provide the verbal equivalent of filling out a subscription card. Why? Because you are a member of a sought-after demographic that those advertisings in that magazine seek to reach.
If you follow Internet marketing at all, you may have read stories over the past couple of years about click fraud –an artificial inflation of online reader responses to banners, buttons and other ads. Click fraud has caused a lot of grief for some of the biggest names on the Internet. Why? Because advertisers pay for each click on their ads based on the representation that there was actually someone with some bit of legitimate interest in their product or service that clicked.
What in the world does any of this have to do with digital signage? Simple, each example illustrates the importance ad agencies and advertisers place on reaching the number of people they pay to reach and often the demographic “type” of person they are targeting for their commercial messages. Audience ratings, circulation audits and bona fide ad responses are critical to monetizing media. Advertisers must be assured that their dollars are paying for something they actually wish to buy. Measuring audience metrics via independent third parties has served both the media and the ad communities by establishing an essential component to the ad buy, namely trust. It all comes down to the expression former President Ronald Reagan made famous when negotiating with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear arms reduction: “Trust but verify.”
For digital signage networks to be taken seriously by ad agencies and their clients, they must deliver a level of audience verification similar to those available with other old-line media, such as TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. Fortunately, advancements in digital signage technology are on the horizon that will allow this exact type of verification. Digital signage cameras mounted on or in the bezel of flat panel displays combined with the right software can count viewers, track where they are looking and catalog some demographic information, such as gender and approximate age, about digital signage viewers are on the doorstep of the industry.
As this technology rolls out into the mainstream, it could give digital signage advertising networks a significant boost among media buyers as there finally will be concrete, verifiable metrics upon which to make ad buys and allocate budgets. Whether or not, media buyers will take a digital signage network’s word that the audience numbers they are representing based on this technology are actually true is another matter. But that issue seems easily addressable by bringing an independent third party to verify these findings into the mix. I could even imagine a scenario where a digital signage network “ratings” service would foot the tab for the measurement technology to separate it from the signage network and add legitimacy –of course for a fee, probably paid by the signage network.
Certainly privacy advocates have raised concerns about this sort of technology. However, steps can be taken to mask the identity of individuals being tracked by the cameras and allay fears about Big Brother tactics.
It seems to me, this type of technology promises to deliver an important component that has been missing from the digital signage ad network arena. Look for the financial success of these networks to grow as this sort of audience measurement technology –or some other yet to be defined approach that gets answers for the same need of verifiable metrics- gains momentum.
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