Measuring audience participation in digital signage – is it needed?

With the ever increase in technology advancement, digital signage needs to be measured, or does it? If an advertiser does not measure the results they will certainly be missing on some part of the captive audience, alternatively if the campaign is to targeted they may miss some of the audience, that are on the pringe.

The Out of home video advertising bureau (OVAB) created some guidelines for reporting on general audiences. The problem is that some developers and digital signage integrators do not follow the guidelines when creating content for the general audience.

One of the most common problems is that there are several organisations vying for the attention of the buyer, so we have to address the areas were the digital screens are placed, different personality’s of people and the different demographics, as these can all vary from one location to another.

One of the main problems hindering the digital signage is how they can measure the audience effectively, as some of the demographics will not have the same attention span so they will not pay attention to the dynamic adverts.

There are several reasons that puts digital signage ahead of other advertising mediums, the speed of change – a campaign can be edited and changed in less than 5 seconds, compared to printed medium that would take days to do the same. However, printed medium can be monitored, from how many sales per day, to how many people called a particular business using the reference code from a newspaper. Without this traceability, is it difficult for advertisers to believe the claims, until they see the results themselves.

A simple way to measure audience participation is to incorporate a web cam into the LCD enclosure, this way the demographics can be verified, producing real data so that in turn we can improve our digital content.