Digital Signage Spot Blog

Digital Signage at the Zoo and you can too! (A commentary to complement my photo)

By Paul Barnhart, Marketing Coordinator, Scala

After a recent conversation with a co-worker regarding exotic animals we have seen/hope to see, I thought about zoos.

You ever have a bad trip to the zoo because there were no animals out and about?  Or maybe it was way too crowded and you could hardly catch a glimpse of what the animals were up to?

I think it’s safe to say most people have.  Little kids are always excited for their favorite animal…in certain cases, it may be all they care about.

“I want to see the monkeys!”  
“I want to see the lions!”
“I want to see the polar bears!”

Now, when you think about it, most of these animals sleep a ridiculous percentage of their day away.  Any sign of activity would be at night or first thing in the morning when public zoos have their doors closed.  So, outside of feeling slighted with the cost of parking, entrance and the fact that you smell animal stench in the hot sun all day, you don’t want to also have disappointed kids to deal with.

Furthermore, most of the zoo habitats provide plenty of nooks and crannies for animals to easily avoid the public eye, so there’s a lot going against you having a successful trip.

Placing monitors at these elaborate habitats would be a huge help to many of the tourists and schools on field trips.  When the school children are all pushing and shoving to get to the front and see the zebras just to stare at nothing, the monitor can be linked up to an interactive sensor in the pen of the animals to track their movements.

With an interactive digital signage system in place, it would be easy to make the excursion more informative and engaging.  When it finds them, whether the animals are inactive or out playing, it can show facts on the screen about their daily habits or how their life in captivity differs from their life in the wild.  If it detects lack of movement i.e sleep, the program could share information on the sleeping habits and why you’re not seeing anything fun.

Content can always be changed and updated to keep it fresh:  give biographies of specific animals, point out the group leader, mention zoo news and expected additions of fauna - let the paying public know…Educate them in an entertaining way so that they can learn something new on subsequent visits – even if the animal is asleep again (or still).

Bottom line, a little digital signage network at zoos could spruce up an empty habitat regardless of what level of activity their animal pen is showing.  Plus, I’m sure zoo staff would like a system that did all this and also provided the benefit of recording animal activity to study at a later time.

A digital signage network such as this would have allowed my colleague to bear witness to one of God’s most interesting designs:  the platypus…even if it was just catching some shuteye.

The Case for a Single Media Management Platform

By Andy McRae, Director of Sales, Scala Canada

Given the economic climate over the past 2 years, it is not surprising that retailers are looking to In-Store advertising to generate revenue. Major retailers can provide literally hundreds of millions of impressions per year across their channel. Think of the store as the channel and the products as the content….

Many of these retailers have undergone expensive studies to determine who is in the store to make it easier to sell access to those eyeballs.

I see two major issues with this In-Store network. First, it can’t be only digital or only static. You must have one network consisting of every media type in the store. Each media opportunity is profiled so that it can be sold by audience as part of a package.

The second issue is the sheer number of ad faces in the inventory. Each store in the network can have hundreds of different faces. The retailer must be able to easily check availability, generate proposals and work orders, manage the production and content and provide feedback to the client.

By creating a single media management platform and tying it into the store’s POS and inventory systems you can avoid having competitive programs running at the same time in the same store. You can also tie the ad program to the sales results so you really know whether the program worked or not.

Imagine how much easier it would be to manage if you could just query your system for available ad opportunities in the Northeast region with a Hispanic profile and an electronics department, then push a button to generate a proposal.

Does such a system exist? Have you seen Scala’s Ad Manager lately?

Digital Signage is not all about ROI

By Guillaume Proux, Vice President, Asia, Scala

My colleague pointed out this very beautiful example of digital signage (shown in the video below) used by Maison Hermes in Japan.
(You can read a little bit more about the project here).

I think this is a wonderful illustration of how we have to rethink the whole concept of digital signage in shops where the first preoccupation always seems to be the return on investment (ROI). 

For more and more companies, digital signage is becoming an essential component of their marketing and communication strategy together with the traditional advertisement based marketing and an increasingly mobile online presence.

However while anybody nowadays understands traditional and online marketing as a necessary evil and indispensable cost of doing business as a modern enterprise, too many companies see digital signage essentially as a revenue opportunity and not as a strategic communication medium.
  
The reason is of course very simple: a serious digital signage project is very capital intensive in its execution so it only seems natural to see some kind of return on the investment. However, one should liken digital signage with the heavy expenses incurred when renovating and refitting a shop or upgrading all TV sets in hotel rooms to brand new LCDs. How can we calculate the ROI of those heavy capital expenses? Very likely that there is no magic formula. Clearly there is a benefit in doing that or shop owners and hotel operators would not incur such expenses.

However, while the benefits are intangible - hence impossible to quantify - they are usually the kind of benefits that any self-conscious business should strive to obtain:
- better brand recognition
- better brand image
- stronger brand emotional attachment
- higher customer satisfaction rate
- stronger satisfaction index
- bigger average basket size/variety
- higher product or brand loyalty
- better educated customer

Basically, digital signage is all about turning a business that provides basic packaged goods or services into an "experience" oriented business.

As pointed out in the book "The Experience Economy", to extract higher margin and avoid becoming a commodity one should strive to build a business that not only appeals to our basic tastes but also appeals to our mind by building highly differentiated products and services. An oft discussed example (albeit slightly flawed if easy to understand) is how Starbucks has completely modified the coffee industry value chain by managing to extract very large margin on a decidedly banal product like coffee beans.

Today many of our customers harness this principle by building increasingly impressive digital signage deployments that appeals to the mind of people, that enable them to obtain many of the intangible benefits of digital signage. One example of this would be the the Sprint Store Grand Moment special events that any shopper can experience every hour in the Kansas City Sprint Store.

So, when discussing digital signage projects with your customers or business partners, keep in mind that digital signage, even if it can be used in a revenue generating manner, is also an excellent tool for companies wanting to provide their customer a specific and customized experience that has a long-term, high return on investment value.