The problem is, in the real world, a lot of networks have neither accurate proof of display stats, nor regularly updated audience measurements. The audience surveys are very expensive and are usually done only once in a few months or once a year at best. So, the accountability becomes fuzzy.

This could be resolved first of all by improving the proof of display reporting process, and, secondly, by implementing digital monitoring of viewership.

Digital cameras that capture every instance of a customer looking at a sign, the duration of eye contact, often even the age, gender and ethnicity of a viewer are already available on the market. The monitoring is real- or near-real time, and various types of reports can be generated based on that data. This new technology allows to deliver the ad impressions numbers as “hard” data, as opposed to the “soft” data, when only a sample of audience is polled by way of traditional exit interviews and then the results are extrapolated to the whole “universe”.

Such proof of performance can be sufficient to analyze the effectiveness of media spending in a non-retail environment. In retail, however, the ultimate goal is sales lift (see the previous post on the topic), so the campaign performance picture would be completed if sales conversion data is added to the two previous tiers, i.e., proof of display and audience measurements.

Earlier this year I have proposed draft definitions of “the three tiers of accountability” for in-store digital signage:

Tier I:
Proof of ad delivery: How many times was my ad displayed on the targeted screens, in what markets, locations, sites, and over which period of time? Such analysis requires robust proof-of-play reporting mechanisms. This level of accountability is used to justify billing per campaign and reconcile invoices. It also facilitates pricing your airtime, if you want to base it on the cost per ad play.

Tier II:
Proof of audience delivery: While my ads were served, how many customers had the opportunity to see them, or actually saw them? The trick here is: you cannot prove audience delivery without having accurate proof of ad delivery first.

Tier III:
Sales uplift measurement. This is the crowning achievement of advertising effectiveness analysis that has become easily available only in Internet advertising (when it is combined with e-commerce) and properly set up in-store digital signage networks. It requires correlation between ad campaign data and POS data.

While we generally agree with your four components of an accountable digital signage reporting solution, we would respectfully add two additional factors: traffic and awareness. Traffic is represented the foot traffic passing by a specific location (the potential viewers) and awareness represents the percentage of people that are aware that a digital signage device is in place, displaying content. Everything in the system can operate perfectly, playback on the device is logged correctly, screens are on and displaying ads correctly – but without foot-traffic and awareness, there is no measurement of how many people actually SAW an ad.

By adding these two data components, the advertiser now has a more complete picture of their digital signage campaign’s performance. As Tom mentions, it’s imperative that standards be put forth by those looking to lead this industry.

The future of critical mass digital signage is intrinsically tied to advertising that is contextual and matched to the behavior of the consumer – and the kicker….accurately measurable to the connected consumer who is moving from platform to platform (TV to the PC..leaving the house with cell phone in hand and frequenting the 4th screen, digital signage OOH environments).

As an industry, we must set the standards – now – for Ad Serving and Ad Measurement with universal agreement to opening up all competing digital signage players and backends with the requisite SDKs/APIs and creating data compatible XML widgets to access the ad servers. If we don’t – Cisco, Google or Microsoft most certainly will.