Day one of the Strategy Institute conference in Las Vegas on Digital Signage Content Strategy was pretty mundane, with a couple of exceptions.
I enjoyed the presentation by Mark Stojack and the team from the Chicago office of Draft Worldwide on "Your Advertising Agency's Role in the Content Creation Process".
In my experience, ad agencies have had three big hurdles to overcome when it comes to creation of digital signage content:
1) Most have cultures and infrastructures built around creating complex, expensive, full motion television commercials with the intent of winning Clio Awards in May instead of driving retail sales in January. There are exceptions. I'll mention them in a minute.
2) This media bias is not exclusive to the creative departments - their 'unbundled' media buying agencies have no idea what to do with digital signage. Broadcast buyer? OOH buyer? Promotional media buyer? New media/internet buyer? Who knows?
3) And finally, big agencies think with big dollars. Digital signage content needs to be constantly refreshed. And a digital signage network runs 12 hours a day or more, 7 days a week. That's a lot of content to create. Budgets need to be in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars per minute of programming. Not in the 10's or even 100's of thousands of dollars per minute.
I admit, Draft had me this afternoon. Their creative was simple, created in Flash, and made effective use of motion while still conveying simple item/price information. They got it. Until they talked about the cost of content creative. And that's when I realized that ad agencies still don't get it. I've run the hard numbers on several digital signage network installations in the past six months, and I can't make them work based on the pricing the agencies want for creative.
The agencies rationalize the negative ROI by suggesting that incremental value in 'soft' areas like branding, awareness and improved customer service need to be considered. At DW+Partners, we say that a positive ROI and the above soft benefits needn't be mutually exclusive. We can deliver it all, and retailers should expect no less.
You know who else seems to get it? MarketForward in Chicago - a division of Publicis that is built around the application of emerging technologies to marketing problems. Media neutral = good solutions.
Other selected quotes from the day:
"Content is the key to measurable results."
Joe Finizio, POPAI
"Content is not just about the art of creativity. It's about creativity to drive business results. It is also a science."
Lyle Bunn, BTV+
"Ads are like alcohol - the more you have the less you remember."
Rebecca Walt, Convergent Technologies
"What digital signage does best is bring movement to merchandising."
Pat Hellberg, Nike
Written at: The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas
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