Social networking sites, much like TV networks, need to involve consumers in the conversation and illustrate that they value consumers’ role in advertising.

Digital Out-of-Home is such an exciting and powerful medium becasue it exists to deliver the right message at the right time. Its flexibility and targeting power allows advertisers to craft unique messages for alternate demographic groups.

Advertising in today’s media environment of choice and consumer power works as long as you bring consumers into the conversation. Social networking sites must find a way to provide their subscribers discernable value in advertising to them.

Thaks,
Martin

EyeClick is an innovative company that does amazing work in the field of interactive projected images. their line of products include various interactive surfaces such as: interactive walls,floors,windows and tables
they are cutting edge and creative, a company to keep an eye on!
http://www.eyeclick.com

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.