Proof of Display + Foot Traffic + Awareness (+ Sales Uplift) = Proof of Campaign Performance

November 2nd, 2007 Nurlan Urazbaev

Ken Liao from SeeSaw Networks sent this great response to Daniel Parisien’s post “The Dirty Little Secret of Digital Signage: Proof of Play vs. Audited Proof of Display“:

“Daniel – great topic. We, at SeeSaw, whole-heartedly agree with the industry moving toward much greater accountability. It is refreshing to see your position that proof-of-play goes beyond logs of a playback device and needs to focus on playback at the screen level.

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 (Muniz) mentions, it’s imperative that standards be put forth by those looking to lead this industry.”

I think Ken brings a highly valid point: in order to get reliable impressions numbers, you need to measure the audience and match that data with the proof of play (rather, proof of display, as per Daniel’s definition).

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-time, and various types of reports can be generated based on that data. This new technology allows networks 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 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 critical for justifying billing per campaign and reconciling 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 so far only in Internet advertising (when it is combined with e-commerce) and at properly set up in-store digital signage networks. It requires correlation between ad campaign data and POS data.

Entry Filed under: Digital Signage ROI, How to: Digital Signage Tips, The Big Picture, Toys and Technologies, Uncategorized