commentary

If you read the literature from most digital signage vendors you may come away with the impression that it’s really important to supplement your key marketing messages with extra extra information feeds showing weather, traffic, news headlines etc. A digital sign with lots of changing information on it, they claim, will attract more attention. Such systems allow you to clutter the screen with all manner of panels, split screens, RSS feeds and other rapidly changing information.

We say that the conventional wisdom is wrong and here’s why:-

1) The information they typically display from RSS feeds is readily available to consumers on their phone, on the radio as they drive, … or through many other channels. Merely duplicating the same information they already have is not interesting.

2) A cluttered screen fragments your message in the spatial dimension: you are dividing their attention between multiple elements on screen and thus each element likely gets less attention.

3) Someone glancing at your screen may never see your actual marketing messages – in the space of the 10s of attention you have from them they might see only the weather screen. Did you spend all that money on a digital sign to show people the weather??

4) Your digital signage should reflect the attributes of your brand: If your brand is elegant and refined your digital signage should be that way too. A busy screen with rapidly changing panels littered around the edges is neither elegant nor refined.

5) Your digital signage should reflect the typography and colors of your brand. You have chosen certain font styles and color schemes. Mixing in RSS feeds using Flash or HTML technologies typically results in a morass of different font styles, sizes and color schemes. Stick with clear simple colors and typography that aligns with your branding.

6) Your digital signage should also amplify the temporal qualities of your brand. Are you a ‘fast-paced-sports-store’ or a ‘slow-gentle-spa’? Chose an appropriate pace for your digital signage as it transitions from screen to screen and message to message. Mixing in rapidly changing RSS feed panels will destroy this aspect of your branding just as easily as the mixture of typography and colors will.

7) If you absolutely must display news, weather or traffic please make it relevant and filter it to show just the local or exceptional items. Do show important breaking news, don’t show last night’s headlines. Do show a major traffic incident that affects routes near your store, don’t show a traffic map on a Friday afternoon that displays the normal slow patten. Do show an alert for an incoming winter snow storm, but not a display that shows today’s weather will be the same as yesterday and the same as tomorrow.

None of this is intended to mean that you should just display a static image on your digital sign. To the contrary, the use of color changes and subtle transitions can help attract attention and bring eyeballs to your digital signage displays. But keep it subtle – the human eye has amazing motion detecting capabilities – it doesn’t need a display that flashes from black to white across the whole surface area.

Here at SignSwift we are focused on helping you communicate YOUR content, YOUR marketing messages and YOUR brand to your customers. We want to help you create great looking displays that have really high quality text over graphics that will communicate your messages effectively with the least distraction.

We want to help create ATTRACTION not DISTRACTION.

Microsoft has issued a statement saying that it isn’t using Kinect to collect information about users in order to personalize advertising content shown to them. This comes after Dennis Durkin, of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, suggested that the Kinect hardware could do just that.

But think for a moment about the possibilities of a 3D camera that can detect people and assess approximate age and gender and how that could be used to adjust the message showing on screen. There are of course some vendors already working in this space but the possibility of a low-cost 3D camera system like Kinect could be a game-changer in terms of making this capability affordable.

Advertising billboards that address passers by personally with targeted advertising have been seen in sci-fi movies before, most famously in Minority Report where one bill board announces “John Anderton. You could use a Guinness right about now” as he walks past, but the idea came long before that. In The 6th Day with Arnold Schwarzenegger for example a circular billboard addresses him personally also. How long until this same technology is common place in malls and airports?

Take a look at this video to see some of the capabilities of the Kinect sensor technolgy:

Now imagine them applied to a digital signage system, one that deliver a targeted advert matching your profile. But why stop there, with this technology it could also put you in the scene wearing some new clothes, of course. A system like that could be the a huge crowd attractor for the novelty value alone.