Pat Stoner - VP of Sales
First you got the budget approved and now you’ve spent the money on the digital signage network, created all of the content and had a successful deployment. Life is good! Then your boss asks “What’s our ROI?” And you think to yourself “Oh $@#*!”, while you are actually looking down at the ground, and then blurt out “Give me six months and I may have an answer.”
Right behind the content development bottleneck, calculating a meaningful ROI is the second biggest problem for the digital signage industry to solve. Billions of dollars are being spent annually but it doesn’t appear that anyone really knows if they are getting a positive ROI.
Typically when asked about ROI for DS implementations it’s the same old standard pat answers. If sales are increasing it’s because of the success of the DS project. If they are bad it’s because there was technical issues or bad content or the dog ate the ROI report. Same old clichés, but no real facts or figures.
In doing research on ROI I found quotes like “There isn’t necessarily a link between ROI and digital signage.” and “Until recently (and even still), the world of digital signage metrics was a bit of a wild, wild west environment.” Really is that the best we can do?
There are some companies who are truly making the effort. They are investing in market studies and six to eight months later they have their 3″ report that may or may not give them answers. Even if it does, it is most assuredly out of date information.
This is digital signage, not brick in mortar signage. It’s the digital age and content changes rapidly and the industry needs to be able to calculate and react to ROI just as quickly. I have looked around and think there may be hope and it actually comes from the makers of Scotch® Tape and Post-its®. That’s right 3M™.
According to their web-site (http://www.mmm.com/informatics) 3M Informatics is a radically different Digital Communication Network software platform that measures, optimizes, and predicts the true effectiveness of your digital communication content.
It appears that it is made up of three components; 1) Content Effectiveness Measurement, 2) Automated ROI Optimization and 3) Vision Attention Modeling. They state that it’s precise, accurate and lightening fast. It reveals actual cause-and-effect relationships between your content and your sales data. And it continually optimizes that content for maximum revenue, automatically. If this is true this is not only radical it could be revolutionary.
From reviewing the web-site it is hard to tell if this is general release or not. They talk about needing collaboration partners that have 20 or more properties in their DCN. It appears that the product came out of the 3M labs and combines complex algorithms and visual acuity to get the results. It is definitely worth checking out the site.
Whether it is 3M Informatics or another product this is what the industry needs for ROI. We can no longer live in the wild, wild west! I know that at Flypaper we are confident we solve the industry’s content creation issue. We’d love to be able to see our clients feed that content into a program that shows them instant results. Wouldn’t that be a novel concept?
