I came across two articles in the news today about in-store television networks that shed a bit of light on the possible business models and ROI potential of in-store advertising. The first article is actually some PR from satellite content network provider IMTV
about a project that they're rolling out in Russia. The company
intends to invest $10M to deploy a network of advertising screens
across the region, starting with their first deployments in Ramenka
Company. While not tremendously exciting (to me, anyway) in and
of itself, what caught my eye were the specifics of their content
formatting:
"Every area will have its own timing of ads
broadcasting. For instance, Food and Non-Food areas will have [a]
7-minute cycle which consists of 20 advertising clips, each 15 seconds
long. The time cycle in BWS area is 3,5 minutes, in the Cash desk area
- 6 minutes, in Halls and Corridors area - 3 minutes. The customer
stays a little longer in the Restaurants and Cafes area that is why the
time cycle for commercial[s] here is 15 minutes."
So their
recipe for success is perpetually looping short-duration commercials,
presumably for items found in the store. They clearly have given
some thought to total cycle length, factoring in the amount of time
that a person is likely to linger in a particular area of the
store. I would like to have seen a bit more information about the
type and style of their advertising content: are they just repurposed
TV commercials or specially-created in-store TV ads? And will
they all be 15 second clips, or will segment lengths vary too?
The next article comes from the New Jersey Star Ledger, which claims that CompUSA has had excellent success with their own in-store TV network. The really amazing quote from the article:
"In the stores that included advertising, sales of the advertised products averaged 29 percent more than in the other stores" (my emphasis added)
The
article also goes on to describe the benefits of displaying content
away from checkout aisles, where customers have likely already made
their purchase decisions. And speaking of purchase decisions,
we've once again encountered the famous "70% of purchase decisions are made on the sales floor"
quote. As usual, it's unattributed. Does anybody have any idea
what the original source of this quote is? Does it have any basis
in reality? It would seem to be anecdotally true, and it makes
plenty of sense to me, but I'd like some corroboration.
So what does all of this mean for us in the digital signage industry? Well, if you believe all of the studies and forecasts
coming out, the market is still "poised for explosion" but hasn't
actually exploded yet. Whether or not that's true, we do know
that all of the necessary technologies have come of age, business
models are maturing, and more companies are going public with the
results of their signage experiments. This, in turn, helps
newcomers and established institutions alike to make intelligent
decisions about the best way to implement their digital content networks.
In-store digital advertising is no longer looked upon as a quirky
experiment or pet project; it's now a bona fide component of a
retailer's overall display marketing strategy. Even stalwart VARs
and integrators are starting to take notice (click that link, it's a good overview from Integrated Solutions for Retailers, which I highly recommend).
Because
the market is still so young, it's hard to get solid data about the
efficacy of in-store digital signage. But the initial results
that I've seen (and posted about, of course) indicate that a
well-implemented signage network can perform the nearly-miraculous
retail trifecta of lowering costs, improving customer satisfaction, and
driving sales.