Lately I've been spending a lot of time thinking about ways to accurately measure the overall impact of digital retailing technologies.
The first thing that I stumble over is the definition of "impact". Does
it mean relating viewership/user base to improved sales? Improved
customer satisfaction? Increased floor traffic? And once we've picked a
definition, what is the best way to measure it and then interpret
results? Once you've come up with a measurement, how should it affect
your business model and pricing strategies?
I know that I'm not
the only one thinking about such things, and in fact the question of
how to measure media consumption is one that has drawn the attention of
marketing and advertising firms for over a century now. In the past
year or so, UK-based MediaWeek (quickly becoming one of my favorite websites) has written a number of articles on the subject, and the latest in the series
(from August 2nd) highlights our need to find and use a standard metric
in order to avoid industry fragmentation. They categorize three "units"
of measurement: footfall (the gross number of visits of people who walk past each digital sign or interactive kiosk), reach (footfall, counting each viewer or user only once), and impacts
(the net audience of people proven to have viewed or used the system).
The first two correspond nicely with the notions of impressions and CPM
from my "Calculating Digital Signage ROI: 3 Metrics that Matter"
article. The notion of "impacts" is a more generic way of encapsulating
what I call "immediate feedback response", or IFR. What I like about
the term is that it can be used as a blanket term for the number of
people guaranteed to have seen an ad or used an application, regardless
of how this guarantee was obtained. What I don't like is that there
still isn't a great way to secure this guarantee.
According to
MediaWeek, possible ways of auditing digital retailing networks include
relying on retailer information (like footfall traffic, etc.) and using
a qualified auditing firm (think Arbitron or ACNielsen). Of course,
neither of these take advantage of some of the benefits of digital
retailing media. For example, with interactive kiosks one can log the
events that take place on each device and use that as a very
well-qualified means of recording traffic. Likewise, monitoring
technologies can be used to supplement manual store audits, however
these are still fairly immature technologies and are prone to errors
(like this idea to basically put RFID chips into everything and track where they go).
How to charge?
The
#1 question that I've been asked lately is how much to charge for a
"slice" of time on a digital sign, or similarly, for a single customer
interaction event (such as an application the customer submitted) on a
self-service kiosk. The MediaWeek guys got a great quote from Hyperspace's James Davies (the digital division at poster specialist Posterscope),
who notes that "[y]ou have big screens, little screens, screens with or
without editorial, high frequency, long play. How you consume in the
back of a cab is very different to how you consume walking down the
aisle of a supermarket." Further, "a common trading currency does not
equate to a shared pricing structure. The rate cards for both Vogue and
weekly real-life title Pick Me Up are based on circulation, but an ad
in the glossy monthly will be relatively more expensive because of the
value of the audience and the worth of being in a lush environment with
a longer lifespan." Relating the different kinds of digital advertising
networks to magazines is a great idea, and immediately helped me to
understand all of the pricing issues that surround these kinds of
networks. Case in point: I've seen clients draw up invoices for their
advertisers totaling anywhere from $125 to $125,000 per month. But in
the former case, the price was per-screen, per ad, and the content
running on the screen was entirely composed of 30 second commercials,
while the latter case was a package price to place a 30 minute
infomercial clip on several thousand captive audience displays. Thus, an apples-to-apples price comparison isn't appropriate at all.
So,
it doesn't look like we'll be seeing industry-standard pricing for
collecting marketing data on a kiosk or showing an ad on a digital sign
in the near future. This is a key challenge in the industry, because
this "lack of common currency is one of the reasons that digital hasn't
established itself as a medium that people can feel confident in....
Anything that gives buyers confidence will allow the media to grow and
set a challenge to other media owners to grow," says Chris O'Donnell,
the managing director of OneZeroOne
(the digital division of outdoor specialist Kinetic). We can only hope
that better education of network owners, advertisers and digital
signage providers will lead to at least an accepted standard of which
success metrics to focus on, along with a better understanding of how
these translate to ROI. Until then, it seems like we'll have an
ever-growing set of industry terms to deal with.
Some other useful MediaWeek links:
Outdoor media owners debate common currency
The leaky cauldron of media measurement