In Digital Signage, Bigger Is Not Always The Answer

December 9, 2016 by guest author, sixteenninewpadmin

Guest Post: Jørn Olsen, Pronto TV

I used to have an old wooden boat that I would spend a lot of time maintaining and polishing every autumn, to be ready for the next summer.

Jørn Olsen

Every year, my “boat-neighbors” swapped their boats to something a little bigger than last season. Instead of changing my boat every year, I made sure that everything was working to its potential, so I could focus on have a good time. I didn’t go bigger.

So how does this relate to digital signage? People who already have installed digital signage, and have become familiar with the technical terms, usually end up wanting more. And by more, I mean higher resolution, brighter and bigger formats, in order to capture the attention from more potential customers.

The industry is listening, and making bigger and better stuff every year. Now normally, capturing attention is indeed easier with something that is bigger and brighter, but not always …

In my company, Pronto TV, we managed to raise the attention level of consumers by 117%, leaving the screen the same size and following a simple shopper-marketing concept.

We recently conducted a small experiment together with a client who wanted to optimize the effect of the current in-store setup. We started to look for improvements and found out that the attention could increase as much as 117% just by positioning the window screens optimally.

So, what is an optimal placement? It’s where the customer traffic is, and in the line of sight; in other words (or in Herb Sorensen’s words) in the path of shoppers.

This might seem elementary, but a lot of installations are not done with that in mind.

We placed a small camera on top of two window-screens, and ran a video analytics program on it. Video analytics can, among other things, measure how many people see the screens, and for how long.  We changed the angle of the window screens from 90 to 70 degrees, to see if this changed the attention towards the screens (in opposite directions on both sides of the entrance).

Just by facing the screens to the passersby (in the line of sight), we managed to increase the attention by 117%.

I would guess that the size would have needed to increase substantially to get this kind of increase in attention. The screens “popped out” by aligning them to a normal line of sight.

So … bigger isn’t always better! Sometimes it is better to make proper use of your existing old-wooden boat.