Tracking Sales Uplift: Advertiser’s Dream Come True?

James Bickers published this article on digitalsignagetoday.com about measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in retail. Following the solid return-on-the-advertising achieved by ‘pay-per-click’ and e-commerce, marketers today want the same level of accountability from other media. This is one of the reasons traditional network TV spots are going out of favor: they are expensive and it’s hard to prove that anyone watched them at all.

Potentially, digital signage in retail can offer the same or even higher accountability than online advertising. Once the customers are in the store, they have a broader choice of goods to buy and they are more responsive to relevant product info because they are already in the purchasing mode. So, it seems obvious that you should be able to look at the digital signage campaign schedules and content data and see if the campaign had any effect on the Point-of-sale transactions.

Sounds easy? Not quite, say the experts interviewed: Bill Gerba, June Peoples and Dick Trask. There are challenges to overcome, such as: correlation of large volumes of non-standardized data, reluctance on the part of some retailers to grant access to their POS reports and the need to integrate digital signage in the overall in-store marketing strategy.

But still, I would say, it’s not rocket science… and both databases are digital after all. I think it’s fair to expect someone to come in and make it easy to track sales uplift against digital signage campaigns within the next 2-3 years. DS-IQ seems to be firmly in the lead in this field. I wonder why nobody else is claiming this niche opportunity.

3 comments September 25th, 2007