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.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News