Hello everyone,
I spoke with a client of ours some time ago who uses digital signage in a museum. He gave me some interesting insight confirming what we’ve been working on for a while now. He said that he truly believes that his digital signage network is working for the museum.
Notice why.
“Digital Signage is working great for us!”
The first thing I asked him for were numbers. “Ah!” he said, “ I never performed the science experiment but I know it works.” I proceeded to explain to him (as we’re used to in this industry) all of the exciting and interesting tools for measuring results in the digital signage industry. “They look great!” he said, “But I already know that it works and it works great. One of the best decisions that I’ve ever made.” Of course I needed the answer to my next question - How do you know? “I just know. For instance, we will announce a tour for a particular area and at a particular time. This announcement only makes its way to the digital signs, not to our program or the poster boards. Sure enough! When it’s time for the tour, there is a long line of visitors waiting to go.”
This was interesting to me so I pried a bit more and asked him how it’s been working in their food court space.
“Again, no science experiment, but I do know that when we feature cheeseburgers, we sell a lot more cheeseburgers.”
Generally, if there are no numbers attached to a reaction or result, it’s not credible. So how can we add some credibility to this? It was obvious to me. He was excited about results that didn’t really make the museum any money. The profits made on the sales boost of cheeseburgers is made by their food provider, not the museum, and the tours are the “value-added” portion of the museum.
After hearing this I started to catch my clients excitement. I have seen this particular museum’s network on multiple occasions and noticed that the screens are basically showing stills. They are sharp, clean, and good-looking, but there is no real movement on the screens. This is contrary to everything that I have been told in the past from this industry; movement on the digital signage display has been the norm. I remember it like it was yesterday, “Movement is the best thing for better results”. This relates to crawls, video, animation, etc… So I alluded to the fact that adding movement is what should be done to make things even better.
“We tried that,” he said. “We added video and moving text to ‘enhance the visitor’s experience’ and it all went to hell.” What is he saying? I mean, video, animations, and moving text are the HOLY GRAIL of digital signage; not only did he rip it out of his content, he started disrespecting it!
Sure enough, once our client added moving text, animations and videos, the lines of visitors waiting for the tours dwindled to nothing. No more cheeseburger sales boost – no more value to their digital signage network.
What conclusion should we come to? Is video, animation and moving text the poison of digital signage? Apparently in some cases it is. Which direction we choose to take is up to each of us. The digital signage industry may end up being that old dog that can’t learn new tricks, unless we turn it into the new dog that learns old tricks.
Andrew Hoffman
Vice President
Noventri
20940 Twin Springs Dr.
Smithsburg, MD 21783-1510 USA
800-359-1858
301-790-0103
Fax: 301-790-0173
andrewh@noventri.com
http://www.noventri.com.com
http://blog.noventri.com/