The complete digital signage tracking solution

Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 1:23 pm by DigitalSignageBlog, 1 Comment »

If you’re a business and are new to digital signage, the first thing that you might wonder is “How will I earn revenue through digital signage?”. The answer is simple, ADVERTISING. You basically sell advertising space on your digital signage screens to potential customers/advertising agencies/manufacturers for a premium price.

How will you sell this idea? People like to deal with facts and figures and the best way to sell advertising space is to let your advertisers know what they’ll get. Now, the only problem you will encounter is how to provide your clients or advertisers with “proof of play” reporting information. Currently, the only methods of tracking this information is to use either the built-in reporting tools (what time, how long and what content was played) that comes with the digital signage player/software or you can purchase additional equipment to capture information about your audience i.e face recognition (normally the cost of this unit is almost the same amount as the digital signage player so the overall solution may have just doubled in cost and there may be potential privacy concerns).

For most businesses, it will be difficult at first to get advertisers interested especially when there are several limitations on the methods to track whether an advertisement was played and who saw it. Simply providing a report that states that the player executed a command to play a file is not good enough. Even providing a report that someone (gender and potentially what age) saw the screen may also be not good enough.

If I was an advertiser I would want to know whether my advertisement was actually displayed on the screen (the screen may have been turned off or the cable between the player to the screen could have been disconnected – so why should I pay for advertisements that were not displayed) and then potentially determine whether the advertisement met its targeted audience.

At the moment a complete digital signage tracking solution is missing in the market. We hope that a company will come up with an ALL-IN-ONE solution to further engage more advertisers.

If there is a solution out there, let us know. You can be our eyes and ears on this one.

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Tags: advertisers, advertising agencies, all in one solution, reporting, tracking

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

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1 Response to “The complete digital signage tracking solution”

Daniel Parisien
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:44 pm

May I first say, I’ve been reading your website for quite some time now and I feel compelled to add to this post. I finally feel like I can contribute to the discussion on your site.

May I suggest you investigate my company’s product, the BroadSign Suite. It has all the capabilities you describe above built-in (with the exception of visual recognition). We participate greatly in OVAB (www.ovab.org) and along with that group, we are committed to raising the acceptance level of digital signage advertising to that of other mainstream media such as television, radio, print and now Internet. OVAB and BroadSign are deep down a similar path Internet advertising companies had to go down just half a decade ago and we see the light at the end of the tunnel for digital signage.

You are correct, there will be a minimum barrier to entry for companies that wish to sell advertising. One of the benefits of using BroadSign software-as-a-service is that you join a group of 150+ digital signage network operators that are do business in over 25 countries around the world – each make revenue through the sales of advertising. These networks include Accent Health, Zoom Media, Channel M, NeoAdvertising and Reliance Industries.

We have the proper relationships and the functionality in our product to help digital signage networks participate in strategic planning with agencies and provide accountable reporting for all advertisements that played on displays connected to PCs powered by BroadSign Player software. These reports were designed in conjunction with BroadSign clients, OVAB members, Nielsen, Arbitron and our agency relationships in order to provide several layers of summary-to-detail reporting (all auditable by a third party).

If you are interested in more information, feel free to visit our website at http://www.broadsign.com/ or contact us at welcome@broadsign.com. I would be please to provide you with a demo of our software-as-a-service product and discuss our managed services offering.

Kind regards and keep up the good work!