This week, to help a friend out, I went and stood on an exhibition stand in London’s Olympia for a couple of days. The event I was attending was called “Screen Expo 2009”and was aimed at users of Digital Signage.
Digital Signage is a relatively new marketing technique (also called DOOH - Digital Out Of Home). Basically, marketing messages can now be delivered to remote displays located anywhere – on streets, on building walls, in stores and so on. Marketers have been showing their adverts to people waiting in Post Office queues for years but modern Digital Signage goes far beyond the simple display of television adverts on screens located in waiting rooms.
Firstly, digital signage can be interactive. For example, images can be projected onto the inside of the glass in a shop window and then a viewer standing on the other side (in the street) can touch the glass to interact with the image, maybe to zoom in on something or to get more information or to view the image from a different angle.
Also, digital signage is starting to become “intelligent” and many displays now include sensors that use some sophisticated software to gain an understanding of who is looking at the display. If the software detects that the viewer is male (or predominantly male in the case of multiple viewers) it will select male relevant content to show on the display. A good example would be a car showroom where images of a car may be being shown on a wall display. If the display detects that a woman is watching, it will start showing family and safety related content. However, if a male is watching, it will show more performance related content. Digital signage brings together almost every part of a company’s marketing activity such as their online web based content and puts it in the heart of a store or on the street. Instead of just showing adverts, the content can educate or entertain and really engage with the viewer.
So, why did such 21st century wizardry take me back in time? Well, the exhibition I was attending reminded me of the computer industry 20 years ago. The exhibition hall was packed with companies offering various components of the solution, each with the expectation that the prospects wandering around the hall would know what they needed and would be prepared to put it all together.
Some years ago, the computer industry sold its products to people that really understood how it all worked and how it all went together. The marketing was all aimed at the tech savvy buyer and was highly technical, feature driven and complicated. Can you image buying a car by deciding which engine you want and I don’t just mean what size, I mean would you like an engine from manufacturer A, B or C and then deciding what size you wanted. Then you would choose your transmission system supplier, your chassis supplier and so on and you’d hope all this stuff worked together. You’d either be a highly skilled mechanic who could build the finished car yourself or you would need to employ the services of a specialist company that would put all the component parts together for you.
Even though car manufacturers themselves make only a small part of the vehicle these days and rely on component suppliers to provide them with everything from spark plugs and batteries, switches and tyres, they still deliver you a complete finished product that you can simply drive away from the showroom without needing to do anything more than sign the hand-over form.
These days, you can buy many computer systems in a similar way. A large manufacturer sources components from the likes of Intel and Microsoft and they deliver a system that is just about ready to go in just a few minutes with the systems pre-configured as ordered and all the software pre-installed.
Well, the digital signage industry is nowhere near as advanced. In order for a large retailer to start using digital signage in their stores they need to be experts in so many technologies and marketing techniques that it is not difficult to understand why such a powerful technology is struggling to gain real momentum.
I am not even sure it is a technology sale. Having spoken to some of the confused and dazed delegates at the event it was clear that what they wanted to do was have a marketing conversation about how to convert window shoppers into in-store buyers or how help customers understand complex products without employing an army of highly trained shop assistants. They were not in the least bit interested in discussing which cabling topology or wireless standard to adopt or which display mounting arrangement worked best with large format plasma displays.
My friend’s stand (Rocket Communications) was offering an end-to-end service that included content design and it was like an oasis in the middle of a hi-tech battle ground. Marketing folks wandering around looking for a way to up-sell cosmetics in the concessions area of their department store suddenly found themselves talking to people that understood marketing and who wanted to discuss messaging and all the things they worked on every day. They would engage with us for a while and talk to humans in plain English before they had to step off the stand and head back into the world of speeds and feeds and digital multi channel encoders with HD signal splitters and signal repeaters.
Once the digital signage industry starts talking to its customers in a language they understand and offering solutions they can actually use, without needing to recruit a translator, I think we will all be amazed at how clever some of the solutions are and how much more interesting they can make a trip to the shops.
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