North American Narrowcasting Market: economic dates and advantages

“The education phase is over,” said Norman McLeod, Director, Market Research at InfoTrends, speaking on the opportunities, demand, and competitive landscape for the digital out-of-home market. InfoTrends published a landmark research report on the size and scope of the digital out-of-home market in 2004 called The North American Commercial Display Market For Networked Digital Signage. The report is often quoted today and will be updated in the second quarter of 2009.

“The Internet is the biggest competitor for advertising dollars with digital out-of-home media,” Mr. McLeod said. Other key points made during his presentation include the fact that the advertising-based business model is outperforming other network models. He pointed out that many digital out-of-home networks are falling below original projections regarding CPM rates.

According to study data, narrowcasting revenue is currently valued at $452 million. InfoTrends/CAP Ventures expects this market to experience a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of over 20%, reaching $1.3 billion by 2009.

At the same time, however, the market sizing and forecast show that the largest single revenue component for this industry is and will continue to be external advertising revenues. An additional $161 million in advertising revenues were generated in 2004, and this amount is expected to increase at a CAGR of 40% to reach $857 million in 2009.

Figure 1: United States Narrowcasting Revenues, 2002 – 2009 ($Millions)

The Narrowcasting Advantage

Why narrowcasting? For one thing, a number of traditional channels are becoming less effective. Television audiences are fragmenting with the huge number of cable channels, and perhaps more seriously, remote controls with "mute" function and picture-in-picture capability enable more and more of the audience to skip or ignore the advertising. Daily newspaper readership is in decline, while the magazine audience is also fragmenting. Narrowcasting delivers the message to a known demographic group in a defined setting.

The most powerful of these settings is retail sites, as the message is being delivered to consumers who are in a purchasing mode. Narrowcasting systems are also found in a wide variety of settings, including:

Airports Retail bank branches Gas station forecourts ATMs Hotel, mall, and movie theatre public areas Tops of taxi cabs and interiors of buses Casinos

Elevators in high-rise office buildings Trucks and truck trailers Health practitioner offices Billboards Trade show signage Backdrops for political and stage and screen events Food halls and student unions in colleges

Installation of a well-designed narrowcasting system enables reduction in the number of static printed signs. The potential savings in actual print costs are considerable in themselves, but the potential savings in deployment costs (program coordination, signage shipment, erection, compliance monitoring, and eventual dismantling and removal) are even greater. There are also compelling broad advantages to narrowcasting, such as:

• Narrowcasting is sound-capable, which enhances the ability to capture the consumer's attention and deliver a memorable, high-impact message.
• Narrowcasting offers a dynamic picture rather than static signage. Many studies have confirmed that moving images are far more eye-catching than static ones, and the structured survey confirms that retailers and advertisers are in full agreement with this concept.
• Narrowcasting enables messages to be deployed more rapidly, changed more frequently, and managed more effectively.
• Central control and monitoring has the capability (although not yet always effectively realized) to improve compliance while reducing the amount of time spent by local staff on signage/promotional deployments.

News by Infotrends
The information on InfoTrends came from the Digital Signage Universe Website. Please include a link and credit line for Digital Signage Universe.

http://www.digitalsignageuniverse.com

Do low prices really have to mean poor store design?

What in-store experience can we hope for at the lower end of the price spectrum and do we have any right to expect it?

We may all be trading down at the moment – or at least that's what the figures from Aldi, Lidl, et al would seem to indicate – but does that mean we should leave our expectations about what a store should look like at the door?

It's not so long since the received wisdom was that those venturing into hard discount stores could more or less like it or lump it, because the prices were such that there was little room for such fripperies as design, layout and visual merchandising.

In truth, nothing much has changed with the onset of the credit crunch and discount food retailing environments remain largely devoid of inspiration.

But here's a thing. If the whole of the UK really does cross the portals of these undeniably cheap merchants, then the retailers involved may have to raise their game just a little.

With Tesco reminding us at the entrances to its branches that it is the UK's largest discounter, it may not be that long before the siren call of the neighbourhood discounters becomes a little less sweet when faced with the might of some of the bigger players.

Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and even Morrisons have all spent large amounts on honing their interiors and they all pass the recognition test where if you took the name off the door, you'd still be able to work out which store you were in.

Not so with Aldi and Lidl, where identities are still sufficiently indistinct for shoppers to understand little more than that they are in a place that sells cheap stuff.

If the food inflation that has been feeding the exodus to the discounters begins to ease, as people who should know are forecasting it will, it seems reasonable to assume that the tide may begin to turn as shoppers head back towards greater choice and better environments.

The spiritual home of hard discounting is Germany, where there is a general acceptance that low price means low design input. For shoppers, that link is not firmly established in this country and there is every reason to suppose that it won't become embedded. If food inflation falls, as things stand, it's back to Sainsbury's, Tesco, et al.

All of which can only be a good thing for shoppers. We may be on the verge of seeing the original German hard discounters deciding that it's time to do something a little different from the way things are done back home.

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Retail Week

Titan Installs Digital Signage On 300 Bus Sides

Titan is to install digital signage LED screens on the outside of 300 buses across New York and Chicago.

UK company LiteLogic has secured the £2.8M deal to provide its high resolution LED 'Evolution' technology, fitted with GPS technology to enable the advertisments to be controlled in line with the vehicle's location. A similar installaiton to the company's existing systems on 25 London buses.

Titan says it has already signed up advertisers including Coca-Cola, Sprite, Sleepy's, Dunking Donuts and Oreos - and the first screens are due to be live in New York this month.

News by Aka.tv

Digital Signage Gone Rubbish

We can read in Daily DOOH:

We have had a LOT of interest in our two stories entitled 'Bomb Proof Street Furniture' and 'RENEW Street Furniture' which talked about the bomb proof digital street furniture initiative involving recycling bins in one of the financial districts of London, i.e the City's Square Mile.

We will be looking at this in more detail tomorrow (Tuesday) in town, meeting the owners and some of the investors and will be writing more shortly on a piece of street furniture that absolutely fascinates us.

by Adrian J Cotterill

Digital Signage Conference in Chicago

Building your Digital Signage Bussiness. Please, read here for more information

Will digital signage businesses survive during this economic downfall?

This question has been on my mind this past week and I've been wondering whether digital signage businesses have been impacted from this economic downfall.

After speaking to several people about this topic I came to the understanding that out of all the departments in a company, the marketing team would be the first group to go. The marketing team generally spends money to make money so this is one of the main reason why a business would strategically decrease the head count of this department. What this may potentially mean for digital signage companies is that less marketing people would look for spending money in deploying digital signage solutions even thought the solution may increase sales and profit (needs to be qualified and quantified).

We haven't felt the wave yet in Australia but I'm sure that it will hit us any time soon.

What are your thoughts on this? Visit the digital signage portal forum to discuss further.

News by The Digital Signage Blog

¿Cómo evolucionan los hábitos de compra?

Un estudio reciente de TNS nos ofrece algunas previsiones sobre los hábitos de compra y su evolución hasta 2015. El estudio de se ha basado en investigaciones en los principales mercados: Estados Unidos, Japón, Canadá, Reino Unido, España, Francia y Alemania.
Entre las conclusiones podemos leer alusiones muy interesantes a la evolución tecnológica que prevee el consumidor, integrada dentro de nuevos conceptos de tienda... siempre en busca de una mayor interactividad.
Es interesante echarle un vistazo y mantenerse informado, no es algo ajeno al digital signage, sino que le afecta directamente. Gestionar el cambio adecuadamente...

Puedes descargarte todo el estudio aquí

Digital signage content goes bilingual

LOS ANGELES — Channel M, a developer of customized in-store TV networks, is rolling out a new in-store network for PLS Check Cashers, one of the nation's oldest and largest check cashing establishments. Advertising and programming on the network, installed across the country at PLS Check Cashers stores, will be offered in both English and Spanish to reflect customer demographics and language preferences. PLS TV is the first network Channel M is programming with bilingual content. Test networks have been rolled out in 50 PLS Check Cashers locations nationwide.

"The launch of our in-store PLS TV network follows an initial beta program that demonstrated very positive results in our test locations," said Dan Wolfberg, president of PLS Check Cashers. "The qualitative results included improvements in the overall customer experience and increases in usage of the PLS products featured on the in-store program. Working closely with Channel M, we developed program features and ads that strategically promote our products and services to our multicultural, bilingual clientele."

News by Digital Signage Today... here

Strategic thinking in Digital Signage

El Digital Signage está "sufriendo" un empujón importante en España... las empresas especializadas en este medio se han unido para crear foros de opinión comunes, e incluso los ecos del 1er Salón de Digital Signage impulsarán durante unos meses diferentes iniciativas y proyectos. La otra cara de la moneda es que el principal enfoque (y énfasis) se está poniendo en las soluciones tecnológicas, aunque se tienda a decir lo contrario. Si levantamos la mirada a otros países que nos llevan cierta ventaja, encontramos mayor énfasis en la estrategia... e incluso en generar una ambientación adecuada entre todas las herramientas y estrategias de marketing, y el digital signage.

Rescatamos este artículo que nos aporta una visión estratégica interesante para nuestros proyectos de digital signage; tal vez así lo pongamos en práctica.

"Retailers see integrating in-store digital signage content with the rest of their marketing and branding messages as a way to reap the best return from the digital signage investment. But integration on this scale takes a plan that starts before the first screen is hung on the wall"

1. See it as unique

2. Set an objective

3. Get all the players together

4. Develop a calendar

5. Maximize assets

6. Measure and refine

This article originally published in Retail Customer Experience magazine, Sep. 2008. Click here to download a free PDF version.

Digital signage ads provide a better return than TV

Bill Gerba explains return (ROI) on Digital Signage. If we have a good content channel, good marketing strategy... we can have a good ad strategy

"So what does it all mean? Simply put, if we assume that my estimate above isn't wildly off the mark (and it might be), then for every dollar that comes out of TV advertising and gets put into digital signage advertising, a CPG advertiser would "recover" the entire $0.51 loss and then generate a small profit on the original amount spent. (This is based on an average return of $1.08 for digital signage versus $0.49 with TV, each on a per-dollar basis.) For an advertiser that spends $10M a year on TV, simply moving 10% of that into digital signs would be like reducing their ad budget by $590,000 without sacrificing performance. In fact, there would probably be a performance boost, since their skills with designing and deploying ads for digital out-of-home environments would improve with experience. If we extend this trend to the advertising industry as a whole, moving 10% of TV ad spend into digital signage would save $4.5B per year, with no loss of performance and lots of upside potential.
All else equal, will a spot on a digital signage network "do" more than a spot running on TV? And where does the bulk of an in-store ad's value come from: "hard" sources like sales lift, or "soft" sources like brand recognition?

London Expo expects 4000 visitors, 130 stands

The 7-8 April event, held at Olympia National Hall in London, is expected to attract 130 exhibitors and 4000 visitors in total.

Highlights include a new content and network owners' area, and an expanded digital media gallery with screens showing networks and advertising campaigns.

Three separate conference strands will focus on out-of-home media, out-of-home technology, and digital media in retail, while visitors will also be able to attend daily industry briefings on topical issues. A call for papers will go out shortly.

Read full article here

Digital Signage needs marketing strategies

We can see in digital signage a lot of companies focused in technology solutions... Hardware, software, contents... but the most and first step is the marketing strategy. We need to work in the good way of the digital signage; as we can read in Ian McKenzie article:
"...technology is an inherent part of any digital signage installation, and thus should never be ignored. That said, the industry needs greater focus on what the installation makes possible and accomplishes from a traditional marketing perspective, and that requires deep knowledge and expertise in creating and implementing sound marketing strategies"

Read full Ian McKenzie article on Digital Signage Association here

Primer test para el Digital Signage en España... aprobado!

Acudimos al 1er Salón del Digital Signage en España (Casa de Campo - Madrid), organizado por TotalMedia, donde todas las empresas dedicadas al digital signage pudimos compartir experiencias, conocimentos del sector y proyectos futuros en los que colaborar.
En un clima excepcional, aprendimos a cuidar cada uno de los pilares del digital signage: desde la estrategia inicial, hasta la instalación, contenidos y los soportes de emisión más oportunos. Sin dejar de lado el trabajo del día a día, que requiere un estudio contínuo del medio y una correcta medición de impactos con propuestas de acción concretas que ayuden a evolucionar y dinamizar el canal.
Nos encontramos con soluciones de hardware (displays, pantallas antivandálicas de gran formato, videowalls...) muy profesionales, adaptadas y desarrolladas específicamente para el Digital Signage... esto es lo que se necesita, para un proyecto de DS serio, debemos trabajar un hardware profesional, con buenas garantías... el medio es importante.
Destacaron también los avances en medición de impactos; la identificación de la audiencia es una realidad, ya nos acercamos al GRP Efectivo en el punto de venta.
Aprovechamos para estudiar nuevas soluciones de software y de contenidos... lo que nos llevó una vez más a reafirmarnos en que para un proyecto de DS óptimo, debemos aprovechar al máximo las posibilidades de ambientación del punto de venta. Hicimos especial hincapié en ello en la conferencia "Errores habituales del Digital Signage... hacia la ambientación del punto de venta", para potenciar el valor del digital signage como medio de comunicación eficaz, y no verlo solamente como la publicidad del futuro. Lo más importante es entender el significado y el "uso" que daremos a cada proyecto digital signage al que nos enfrentemos, y trabajar cada uno de los pilares de forma profesional, ofreciendo al cliente un servicio global y continuado.

Valoramos muy positivamente esta primera edición en España, un aprobado alto... mientras seguimos caminando para mejorar y ampliar experiencias de cara al 2009. Si queremos un medio profesional, cada detalle del proyecto debe trabajarse con profesionalidad.