Since it's a holiday week in the US, I'll try to keep this post short, sweet and full of pretty pictures. That last part will be easy, since we'll be looking at the print ads deemed to "work best" in a recent GfK Starch study. In fact, some of GfK's comments so closely echo our own recommendations about digital out of home ads that I'd like to explore their opinions in more detail. It's still hard to find good examples of effective digital signage content on the web, but I think we can learn a lot from our cousins in the print world.

Advertising Age published a showcase of the top 12 ads based on the GfK Starch research, and I've picked a few of them to analyze below. As you read through each one, notice how closely the best practices for print mirror our recommendations for making digital out-of-home content.

Ad: Sony

GfK says: Black backgrounds lend a kind of three-dimensional effect to an ad, particularly if the image in the foreground is colorful and contrasts sharply with the background. In such cases the image practically pops off the page.

We say: Here's a great example of something that works great in print, but is usually a bad idea for digital signage. Remember, digital screens emit light, whereas printed images reflect it. That means while your print ads can look great and utilize high-contrast white-on-black schemes, doing this on your digital screens will result in a dim image that will attract less attention than one using a brighter background.

Ad: Cobra

GfK says: One of the most basic of the Starch principles of effective advertising is "Keep it simple." Cobra does not clutter the page with extraneous material, but provides one key element, the artfully positioned club heads, as a powerful and alluring focal point. The Cobra ad also vastly increases the likelihood of reader engagement by doing something that is lacking in too many ads: It lists and explains specific product benefits.

We say: Aside from the fact that this ad uses a low-contrast scheme (which again would never fly on a digital sign), we're in complete agreement with GfK's notion of "keep it simple." The fewer items needed to get your message across, the better. This is even more true in a glance medium like digital signage, compared to a static medium like a magazine where a reader can choose to linger and re-read the content if he chooses.

Ad: Ritz-Carlton

GfK says: In short, the ad flows easily from top to bottom and relieves the reader of any need for heavy labor. One thing that Starch has learned over the years is that the more an ad demands time and energy from a reader, the less likely it is to generate interest and involvement.

We say: That note rings true on digital signs as well, and again is even more important in our medium, where an advertiser may only have a second or two to get the message across.

Ad: Citi

GfK says: An old tennis-player's dictum runs, "Never change a winning game." Citi Cards has had considerable success with this campaign, and the reasons are not difficult to fathom: It is simple, features an attractive photograph with a compelling focal point and offers an easy-to-read block of copy (again, with dark type against a high-contrast white background).

We say: Again, GfK calls out points that are just as relevant when making digital signage content as in print work. By using an eye-catching image to attract a viewer's attention, and then minimizing the number of other potential distractions, Citi makes viewers stop, take notice, and read along.

Ad: Estee Lauder

GfK says: [This ad] breaks a few rules: a variably shaded background behind the body copy and justified-right (but not left) margin for the copy in the two first paragraphs. (Non-justified left margins for ads with a large amount of copy rarely garner high readership scores.) But the ad also employs the color that we have found to be the most eye-catching of all -- blue -- and it carries the ultimate trump card: It clearly articulates in its headline a product benefit that is highly important to the audience of the publication and expands on that benefit in the body copy.

We say: The low-contrast scheme used here works better on the printed page's reflective surface than it would on a screen's emissive one -- especially since a printed page is 100% viewable at any angle, whereas the visibility of an LCD screen decreases at more extreme viewing angles. Graphic design issues aside, the copy's clear headline and well-articulated product benefit would make this ad right at home on a digital screen: just ditch all of the accompanying text, and leave the headline and product shot up there the whole time.

Ad: Burt's Bees

GfK says: Advertisers who 1) cut off their models' precious bodily parts (like the top of their heads) run a considerable risk of reader abandonment; and 2) place copy against a photograph or other variably shaded background tend to discourage readership of copy. ...[however the ad] clearly suggests a product benefit in the headline and then expands on that headline in the copy. Magazine readers will overcome a great many visual obstacles to gain an answer to their most pressing question: "What's in it for me?"

We say: Again, there are graphic design issues at play that make this spot work well in print, but would require a re-think before being used on screen. There's insufficient contrast between text and image to be easily readable, and of course the font is too small. However, using an attention vampire (in this case, the face) to grab a viewer's attention, and then offering a list-formatted series of benefits to encourage viewer comprehension, are points right out of our best practices guide. With a few minor formatting changes, I can easily see this type of ad working well on a digital screen.

Closing thoughts: The evolution of digital out-of-home vs. print

Obviously, print designers have had a long time to figure out what works and what doesn't in magazine-style ads. They understand their medium very well, they have a clear idea of who their readers are, and most importantly, those readers are actively reading. In other words, print designers don't have to go through many gyrations to get a reader to actually encounter an ad. Of course, getting them to read it is another matter altogether, but that's where compelling visual design, a clear headline and a strong call-to-action come into play.

One other thing struck me, particularly when reading GfK's comments on the Ritz-Carlton ad. Our industry, absent the support of the major (and often iconic) agencies, still lacks a clear sense of style. We don't have anything like a "classic David Ogilvy-style ad", or any other "classic style" for that matter. Perhaps it's because there's no one dominant player -- or even a set of them -- when it comes to making content for digital screens. Will that change in the near future? My guess would be "no". Just like the Internet, digital signage advertising has started small, and consequently draws the bulk of its content from smaller agencies and internal creative teams. By the time the major agencies finally get on board with digital out of home as a standard part of their offerings, there will already be a huge number of entrenched creatives pushing content out onto a myriad networks. We can only hope that the growing number of people designing content for digital signage networks will pay attention to the best practices we've identified, since good content will only help the medium grow.

I'm always looking for more examples of what happens when you take a great ad and move it to another type of media:
Can you think of any iconic print ads that would (or wouldn't) translate well to the digital screen? What about TV? Are there any great spots that would do well in-store? I'm always looking for more examples, so know of any, please let me know in a comment below. Thanks!


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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

I came across an article about the "digital signage ecosystem" in the June issue of Digital Signage Magazine. Written by iSuppli's Sanju Khatri, it's largely a re-hash of the industry research they've been conducting and presenting in various forms over the past few years. Two things did catch my eye, though, thanks to the nifty graphics used in the article. The first has to do with the "ecosystem" itself -- the collection of parts and pieces, vendors and contractors, and customers and suppliers that must come together for a digital signage project to get deployed. The second is iSuppli's analysis of the cost of deploying and managing a digital signage network. Since these are topics near and dear to my heart, I thought I'd point them out to folks who don't normally read Digital Signage Magazine, and offer up a few new thoughts on each.

What the heck is a "digital signage ecosystem"?

We've written a number of articles about the essential role a project manager or integrator plays in any digital signage installation. Whether it's an internal person or team responsible for overseeing the implementation of the project, or an outside firm hired explicitly for the cause, the project manager may have to communicate with (and foster communications between) any number of vendors, partners and customer endpoints. In iSuppli's mind, such a scenario looks like this:


As it just so happens, I recently wrote an article about project management for Sign Business Magazine, and did up my own chart for the occasion. Here's how mine looks:


Of course, the two images are capturing different things -- iSuppli's focuses on the parts that go into a digital signage solution, whereas ours focuses on the people that make it work. Where they list a separate bubble for suppliers of different software and hardware components, we just list "product vendors," and then show the relationships that take those products off the shelves and put them to use. I think this is particularly useful when trying to illustrate how complicated a project can get, even in the early stages. My point with all this? Too many companies still think "parts" rather than "people" when approaching digital signage. This can lead them down an expensive and time-consuming path that ends with a marginally successful installation (if the network gets installed at all). The parts are certainly important -- after all, I'm a parts guy myself -- but it takes substantial know-how to put them together and keep them not just working, but working to their fullest potential.

Revisiting the cost issue

The other part of the article that grabbed my attention is where they talk about the cost of deploying a digital signage network. Since we do a similar article in this blog about once a year, I was eager to see how our latest cost estimate based on actual digital signage projects stacks up against iSuppli's mountain of research. Here are the two charts side-by-side:


Wow, it's a good thing that the number of categories and the names for each one (which we've been using for about four years now, mind you) are exactly the same. Otherwise, a comparison might have been a bit more difficult. The first thing you may notice is that iSuppli's chart is for initial costs only, so the pricing for "content management software" must assume a one-time license fee, and not a pay-as-you-go model like we use. That's fine, because our costs (which are based on Software-as-a-Service, but not necessarily our exact pricing for FireCast) assume three years of service and technical support, so that may be a wash. Also notice that iSuppli omits technical support from their pricing scheme, despite the fact that they list it in their ecosystem diagram. This suggests that they're either bundling some portion of it into the costs for the various software components, or they've left it out because it's not part of the initial project cost. To wit, Khatri notes that: There are two main components for the ongoing cost -- content creation and technical support. The content cost is the big unknown and probably the biggest factor in (sic) the digital signage network does not work.... Depending on the scale of deployment, around 80 percent of the ongoing cost could be attributed to content creation and the rest (or 20 percent) to ongoing technical support for content and network management. Without any ongoing cost estimates to start from, I can't speculate what iSuppli thinks it might cost to maintain a network over time. But I can tell you that based on our estimates, perhaps as much as 60% of the content management software fee goes towards technical support or upgrades in some form or fashion.

In any event, our numbers seem close enough to iSuppli's (in percentage terms, at least) to suggest that they're still a good ballpark estimate for those planning to deploy a digital signage network. However, if you're just getting started, I definitely recommend you take a long, hard look at the organizational chart above and try to budget your time and money accordingly. It may seem easy to figure out how much the different parts of your project will cost. But when it comes time to finally turn on your network, you'll find that it's just as important to have the right people on your team.

Have you deployed a digital signage network, or do you have one in the works? What changes would you make to the charts above? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Ever since we started writing about shopper marketing in 2006 we've received a lot of emails and phone calls asking for information, case studies and advice about how to make shopper marketing work. Unfortunately, we're not really experts in the subject -- we just watch it from the periphery to make sure that our customers' digital signage and kiosk projects are following best practices (to whatever extent those even exist today). So when people ask us about it beyond the context of digital merchandising, we usually try to figure out what kind of help they're looking for and refer them to a suitable expert in the field. This is easier said than done, since shopper marketing has only recently become secksy, and it's often hard to figure out who these people should be talking to. Apparently we weren't the only ones having this problem, as the HUB Magazine, in partnership with Hoyt & Company, put together a research study to determine what makes a good shopper marketing firm and identify the top companies in the business. They released the results of their study a few days ago, and were generous enough to share their results with those of us who participated.

As the report's introduction notes, the shopper marketing sector has more money pouring into it than ever before, and continues to grow rapidly. Based on a recent Deloitte/GMA study, shopper marketing budgets are growing in excess of 21% per year, versus the industry-leading Internet, which is managing a "mere" 15% annual growth rate these days. At this rate, shopper marketing expenditures might reach 8% of total marketing budgets by 2010, which as the report notes, is over half of what the industry currently spends on consumer promotion. So what is shopper marketing, you ask? Like virtually everything else in the marketing world, there are some disagreements about how to define it. However, the HUB settled on a fairly concise definition: Understanding how one's target consumers behave as shoppers in different channels and formats and leveraging this intelligence to the benefit of all stakeholders -- brands, target consumers, retailers and mutual shoppers. When asked, the survey's respondents primarily suggested things like promotional strategy, in-store POS, marketing strategy and display design. Self-service kiosks, digital signs and all of the newfangled stuff that we deal with on a day-to-day basis were not mentioned. Why? Because shopper marketing is about the message, not the medium. Whether the work done on the communication strategy is executed on a static poster or an LCD display makes no difference to the pool of advertisers, brands and retailers tapped by the study. This makes more sense today than ever, given the ever-increasing number of media that you can deliver a message on.

What are the goals of those executing shopper marketing strategies? Not surprisingly, the number one response was "improved sales" (something brands and retailers can actually agree on!), followed by "softer" benefits like improved loyalty, improved ROA, etc. My favorite part of the report (and if you're new to shopper marketing and need to get up-to-speed fast, it's the part that probably makes the whole thing worth the price of admission) defines a set of best practices, objectives and organizational implications for reaching your shopper marketing objectives. I wouldn't feel right about spilling the beans entirely, given that this is supposed to be a paid report, but I will say this: the woes of the shopper marketing manager sound a lot like those of the digital signage manager. It seems that we're not the only industry plagued by projects not being driven from the top-down, not getting the proper buy-in from all of the different departments and agencies that will need to touch it in order to make it a success, and not having enough guaranteed funds over enough time to make sure that the project not only gets off the ground, but actually is given a chance to thrive.

But back to the beginning of this post: presumably there are agencies out there that know all of this stuff already. These select few have learned how to navigate around a lot of the obvious pitfalls when undertaking a new project. Who are they? Well, according to the roughly 750 respondents in the HUB survey, the top ten shopper marketing agencies are:

1. Mars Advertising
2. Saatchi & Saatchi X
3. TracyLocke
4. Ryan Partnership
5. Catapult Marketing
6. Malone Advertising
7. Alcone Marketing Group
8. Marketing Drive
9. The Integer Group
10. DraftFCB

I've been in touch with a few of these guys over the years regarding digital signage projects (many of which never got past the early stages, but that's fairly typical of our industry and not usually the agency's fault.) From what I've seen, these agencies can tell you more about what goes on inside a typical grocery store, big box retailer or specialty chain than you can probably imagine. If you're serious about owning the First Moment of Truth and getting your message across to shoppers in a retail environment, you could certainly do worse than to tap one of these groups for their expertise.

So is the HUB study worth buying? At $400 (at press time), it's certainly a lot cheaper than many other reports that pertain to our industry, so it's a fairly small investment. However, unless you feel that shopper marketing strategy is something you need to understand to make your project successful, there's probably not a whole lot that you'll find to be useful. In fact, the report might best be used as a jumping off point for companies just starting out with a new retail marketing project, especially if they don't have a huge amount of expertise in that area to begin with. Of course, if you're shopping around for a shopper marketing agency, it offers a good overview of the relative strengths and weaknesses of some of the top agencies in the biz, according to a lot of people who are (more or less) in the know.

To learn more about shopper marketing, you can start by reading the synopsis of the HUB survey (or of course you can purchase their full report if you like). You might also be interested in our other articles on this topic, including how to use shopper marketing to improve the store experience, best practices for leveraging shopper insights to drive retail success, and why you should run shopper marketing experiments. Finally, if you need help integrating digital signs and kiosks into a shopper marketing strategy, feel free to contact us to discuss your project.

Have you worked with any of the "top" companies listed in the HUB survey? If so, what was the most surprising or insightful thing you learned from that relationship? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Bill's Note:

Many of you know Pat Hellberg as the director of Nike's digital signage networks. This week, we're fortunate enough to have him provide a counterpoint to the digital signage content creation articles that we published a few weeks ago. The following is Pat's take on how to create inspiring digital signage content -- and after 19 years at Nike, he obviously has a solid basis for his opinions. Pat recently left Nike to join the ranks of the tiny but growing number of digital signage specialists in the field today. Got a content question or problem? He's your guy. So without further ado, here is Pat Hellberg's official take on making content for digital signage networks. I'll be leaving my feedback in a comment below. I definitely encourage you to do the same.

Man vs. woman.
Democracy vs. tyranny.
Coke vs. Pepsi.
These are among the great struggles of all time.
Lest we not forget, art vs. science.

The renowned philosopher Nietzsche might have been mindful of that very struggle when he wrote: "What one should learn from artists: how to make things beautiful, attractive and desirable for us, when in themselves, they never are." By the way, this is the same Nietzsche who coined the phrase that many of us in the digital signage industry lean on in times of great despair: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Now I'm no Nietzsche. And I'm certainly no scientist. Bill Gerba is a scientist. In a good way. Bill's recent science-based series on making great digital signage content took one view. But there's another.

So to Bill's point, let me offer a counterpoint.

Let me first say I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the power of chunking and coding, the promotion of sans serif as the optimal attention-grabbing font and the dissection of human reactions to color. Who knew that blue reduces the feeling of claustrophobia?

With no bona fide textbooks to guide us through the do's and don'ts of digital signage content creation, we should be beyond grateful that someone with Bill's experience and expertise pulled this together. We need all the help we can get in prompting our customers/shoppers to check out what we're putting on the screens.

But that's not the end of the transaction. Once they've checked it out, that's when we have to hook 'em.

And that's when science needs to hand the baton to art.

For the past l9 years, I've been in the front row, watching some of the smartest kids on the block create one of the strongest brands on the planet, Nike. In the formative days of Nike, research and metrics were never as important as instinct and passion. Science? Oh, it has always lived in Nike product. But in the consumer communications tug-of-war, aspiration has consistently crushed science. Did you ever buy a pair of Air Jordans because of the air or because you could lace up the same shoes as the greatest player of all time?

I have to say that during our years of creating content for the Nike Retail Network, I can't recall a single discussion about fonts, color or contrast. I worked with brilliant graphic and motion designers whose instincts led them to the appealing and to the attractive. That's what artists do. They create content that they know, in their gut, makes things "beautiful, attractive and desirable."

Now I know what you're thinking, and you're right: I'm not oblivious to the realities of our business. Digital signage networks demand large quantities of content. And artists don't work cheap. Big need and big costs. That's an expensive, impractical combination.

However, the potential aesthetic appeal of digital content should not be ignored. Think of your favorite broadcast commercials. You love them, and more importantly, you remember them, because they are funny (creative writing is a vastly underrated form of art), cool, visually/aurally interesting or otherwise experiential. In other words, they appeal to your senses. For those keeping score, that makes it art 1, science nothing.

I just left Nike to go out on my own as a consultant in the digital signage industry, concentrating on content strategy. I hope to help network operators produce long-term, sustainable content plans that don't break the bank. If they need help producing the content, I'll help with that too. I'll probably steal some of Bill's material. It wouldn't be the first time. And I'll combine it with my knowledge of branding, marketing and romancing the product. I won't demand that every 15 second digital signage video look like a work of art. But neither will it resemble a laboratory experiment. It's all in the mix. Art vs. science doesn't have to be a struggle. Given the right proportions of both, the end result can be a proper compromise which can both attract and engage the customer. And that would be beautiful indeed.

What do you think? Is the path to success governed by art, science, or a combination of the two? Where would you draw the line? Leave a comment below and let us know.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

As we mentioned in last week's summer reading list, POPAI's tome about The Power of Marketing at-Retail has been on our short list of "must read" books for quite some time. The third edition, which just came out a few months ago, includes some very useful new additions. The new chapters cover design aesthetics and, of course, this newfangled digital signage stuff. The bottom line: if you're even thinking about putting digital screens into a retail environment, you should read this book.

So I suspect lots of you might go get the book, and then immediately open it up to the digital signage chapter. But why? You probably already know most of what's there, since you've already read a whole book on the same topic, co-written by the same author -- Lighting Up the Aisle, by Laura Davis-Taylor. And if you're reading this blog, chances are you already know a thing or two about digital signage anyway. However, if my experience talking with new customers is at all typical, there's a good chance that lots of you aren't so familiar with the inner workings of retail marketing, merchandising and POP displays. While these topics might seem parochial or even irrelevant to some, even a brief flip through the POPAI book should tell you otherwise. As I've said before, you must understand the venues that you're going to be working in. So in short, consider these topics to be at the very base of your retail-oriented digital signage education.

How can you get the most out of POPAI's book? I recommend you start with Chapter 10: "Global Trends in Point-of-Purchase Advertising", which was written by the book's editor, Robert Liljenwall. You'll quickly get your bearings in the world of retail marketing, as Liljenwall explores some of the techniques that seem to work well across cultures. After that, you should head back to Chapter 1: "From Marketing Management to Marketing-at-Retail", by Northwestern's Francis J. Mulhern. At a mere eight pages, it's a lightning-quick introduction to the dramatic shifts taking place in retail marketing today, as well as an explanation of some of the similarities and differences between marketing in a retail environment and elsewhere.

Having covered the business basics, your next stop should be Chapter 2 ("Consumer Behavior at the Point-of-Purchase"), followed by Chapter 6 ("P-O-P Advertising Design and Creativity"). In Chapter 2, McGill University's Hugh Phillips dissects the shopping experience in an attempt to illustrate why we behave the way we do in stores (my take: we're irrational creatures of habit). I also love his section on the shift from "tactical" to "strategic" marketing, which we continue to see every day as more brands and CPG companies continue to (finally!) make in-store and out-of-home essential components of their multi-channel campaigns. Chapter 6 is written by James Eby at Wunderman. It focuses on the process of creating great creative, rather than the specific techniques (color, type, etc.) that go into the creative. Starting with the assignments and tasks that a POP marketing team might undertake (brainstorming, identifying the objective, etc.), he quickly takes us through a day in the life of a creative retail marketing group.

Next, I recommend you take a little break from the book and check out our own compendium on designing content for digital signage. These articles should give you a better feel for the similarities and differences between working on a digital medium versus the static ones found in stores today, and fit in especially well with the points from Chapter 6 of the book.

From there, how to best navigate through the rest of the book is up to you. Interested in the measurement debate, and how it affects brands, retailers and marketers alike? Check out Chapter 5 on "Post Promotion Evaluation". Are you more sales-focused? Get a better feel for some of the sales promotion tools used in retail stores, how they work, and their relative strengths and weaknesses in Chapter 4: "Sales Promotion Planning". I'd recommend checking out at least a few of the updated "Trends in Retail Marketing..." chapters, which are written by various analysts, retailers and brand marketers, plus Rick DeHerder's chapter on project management. That last one should be particularly eye-opening for those who haven't come from a retail or POP background -- the project management for static POP projects can be just as challenging as for a digital signage deployment. In the end, even the best-managed projects find that huge numbers of their displays never get deployed, are deployed incorrectly, or end up getting installed at the wrong place and time. Talk about frustrating! At least with digital signage, once the screens are out there, you pretty much know that your content is going to show up when and where you want it to -- provided you didn't make any mistakes scheduling it, of course.

While we're talking about POPAI, I also want to let you know about a neat event taking place next week. On Thursday, June 12th, they'll be conducting an Introduction to Digital Signage webinar, which I'll be presenting. This particular program probably isn't a good fit for most of the readers of this blog -- many of whom eat, sleep and dream digital signs. But if you know somebody who's just beginning to learn about the industry, or if you have a client or partner that needs a little help getting started, this is a great, cheap, and vendor-neutral way for them to jump in head first. This webinar will be given by a different member of POPAI's Digital Signage Advocacy group about every other month, so don't worry if you can't make it this time. If you'd like to register for the webinar, click here to sign-up. I hope to see you on the call!

We got some good comments last week on the "summer reading list" article mentioned above, but I'm always eager to learn more.  So which boo ks, websites, and other resources would you recommend to someone who's just starting out in this industry? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.


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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Here in the US, Memorial Day is widely viewed as the start of summer, so a lot of you are probably making plans to get the kids off to camp, visit family and friends, or just get a little bit of time away from the office right about now. As I was discussing plans with a colleague, he brought up something I don't remember very fondly from the summers of my youth: the Summer Reading List. You know -- that list of books that you had to read before the first day of school in the fall. Frankly, I don't know when or how this concept came about, but I can recall many a Labor Day weekend (the traditional end of summer here) where I'd be frantically "reading" volumes late into the night trying to get ready for school the following week. If you'd like to recreate that experience for yourself, or maybe show a little solidarity and support for your own kids this summer, I've put together my own recommended reading list to peruse. But instead of a tired old collection of books that your teacher picked out, we're going to focus on some of the most interesting questions that we all face in working with digital signs and kiosks. Here are my top recommendations for you and your team, grouped into a few categories:

Books about in-store marketing

Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
By Paco Underhill

Some people think the observations in Why We Buy are too obvious to be noteworthy. I disagree. While some of the tips are common sense, this book is still a must-read for anyone involved in delivering messages to shoppers in our increasingly cluttered retail environments. Underhill's follow-up work, Call of the Mall is also compelling, but builds upon many of the trends noted in this quick read.

The Power of Marketing at-Retail
By Robert Liljenwall

POPAI has been publishing this impressive resource for many years, and this latest edition covers both traditional in-store messaging (like POP displays) as well as newer technologies like digital signage (expect a more complete review of the new, revised edition in the near future). It's also full of high-quality photos of successful in-store campaigns. If you're a POPAI member, you may already have a copy on your company's bookshelf, so ask around.

Books about digital signage

Lighting Up the Aisle
By Laura Davis-Taylor and Adrian Weidmann

We first wrote about Lighting Up the Aisle when it came out last year. It focuses on how to implement digital signage in a retail environment, including a handy list of warning signs that your project might be on shaky ground.

Digital Signage: Software, Networks, Advertising, and Displays: A Primer for Understanding the Business
By Jimmy Schaeffler

I haven't read this one yet, but reportedly I'm quoted in the introduction, so it must be good :)  I've also heard good things from other people whose opinions I generally trust. My take is that it appears to be a little more focused on the components of a digital signage network than Lighting Up the Aisle is, so it's probably a good complement to Laura and Adrian's book. Again, I hope to be able to speak more intelligently about it in a few weeks when I've actually gotten around to reading it.

Books about branding and the customer experience

Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands
By Kevin Roberts

Since many out-of-home media campaigns are designed to improve brand recognition, it's helpful to understand what makes for a world-class brand that consumers can relate to. This book looks at the characteristics of great brands that have persevered over time, and unlike many other marketing and branding-related books, approaches the subjects in an easy to understand fashion.

Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
By Howard Schultz

Starbucks has been taking a lot of criticism lately, but the insights that Schultz shares here are pretty timeless. Whether you're working with retail stores, banks, restaurants, medical offices, or another type of venue, this book will give you ideas about how to improve the customer experience at your sites.

Sound Business
By Julian Treasure

Depending on how you use it, audio can be a great asset -- or a huge nuisance. This book looks at how to drive sales and improve worker productivity by fine-tuning the ambient sounds in your environment. Since in-store audio has a lot in common with digital signage and other out-of-home media, the tips can be applied to a wide range of applications.

So, now you've got my recommended summer reading list. I hope you'll give at least one or two of these books a try and let me know what you think. Of course, if you really want to solidify your knowledge of the industry you could always go back and re-read the 250+ articles in our archives.  Considering how wordy my writing is, though, you might have an easier time wading through War and Peace a few times... :)

Meanwhile, I'd like to open the floor to other suggestions:

Are there any books you've found really helpful for understanding retail, advertising, or other topics? What about business books in general?

Leave a comment and let me know!

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

For the past few months, our articles have focused on a simple question: how can you make your digital signage content more effective? To answer this question, we've looked at quite a few rules-of-thumb and real-world examples of how to create great content. However, I also know that going through the whole series can be a bit daunting. After all, we're talking about nine articles and more than 9,000 words -- not exactly light reading. So to make things easier, I've put together a quick reference guide to the digital signage content series, complete with a brief summary of the key points from each article. Whether you're reading the articles for the first time or you just need a refresher course, I hope you find this one-stop shop useful.

• Making great digital signage content: The serial position effect
  
  Place your most important messages at the beginning and the end of your list. Introduce the first item on the list at a slower speed, and leave enough time at the end for people to remember the last item. If possible, choose your two best messages and get rid of the rest.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Get better recall with chunking and coding
  
  Group key phrases or concepts together -- batches of three usually work nicely. Repeat important words and phrases 2-3 times in a row for reinforcement. Consider using alliteration and rhyme, since people are trained to respond well to these patterns.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Optimize for context and eliminate distractions
  
  Use imagery and symbols that are relevant to the viewer. These should make sense based on the tasks viewers will be looking to complete when they see your screens. Be careful when including images that are very attention-grabbing, like people's faces and pictures of babies. These can easily divert attention from your core message.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Crafting your copy and call-to-action
  
  Keep your text simple and clear. When writing your call-to-action, start it with a verb, keep the verb and subject close together, and either leave the call-to-action on screen the whole time, or show it several times per spot.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Sorting out font faces, sizes and styles
  
  Use sans-serif fonts and large font sizes so that viewers can read your message at-a-glance. Don't use too many fonts in a single piece of content, and don't go overboard with colored text. Avoid writing in all caps.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Does color matter?
  
  Choosing one color over another rarely has any impact on the success of your content. So, pick colors that meet your business and stylistic goals, e.g. those that match the color schemes of your venues or advertisers.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Use contrast to your advantage
  
  More contrast between foreground and background is a good thing. A minor change like increasing the contrast by 10% can make the content easier to read, and recognizable to a much larger audience.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Motion, silhouettes and animation
  
  Use motion selectively: you don't want to interfere with readability or comprehension. Give people enough time to read the text, and don't move your text around abruptly. When you're animating an element, try to pick something that has a strong and easily-identifiable silhouette. Consider keeping your logo and other important features on the screen at all times, without excess motion.
  
  
• Making great digital signage content: Composing shots and scenes
  
  Remember that digital signs have more in common with posters than with TV. Match up your text and visuals, and treat each slide like it's a stand-alone poster. Use visual transitions to link related slides within a larger piece of content.

Wow, we really did cover a lot of ground here! I still have a lot more questions, though, and I bet you do too. So tell me:

First, what else would you like to know about digital signage content? Where should our research lead us next?

Second, what was your favorite (or least favorite) article in the series, and why?

I really appreciate your feedback, so please leave a comment and let me know.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Whether you're making a five-second station ID message or a 30-minute long-form segment, sooner or later you'll have to come to grips with two challenges. First, most of the members of your "audience" don't consider themselves an audience at all: they're there to shop, visit, navigate, or do any of a hundred other things, but probably not to watch your out-of-home media campaign. Second, as a corollary to that, there are going to be a lot of people -- the vast majority, really -- who never see your piece in its entirety. This can be frustrating for designers who count on their audience watching a clip from start to finish in order to get the gist of it. It's even worse for the viewing audience, who are left with bits and pieces of content that have no meaning without context.

Six steps to better composition

As you may have guessed from reading our recent articles on content production, people are still over-thinking how their pieces should work. We continue to see highly complex spots that, while produced with very high production values, demand too much viewer attention for far too long to be viable in the field. While there's no guaranteed, 100% effective solution to this problem, we've found one approach to be extremely useful: treat the clip as a series of scenes and shots. Just as a movie director composes a film from numerous small pieces, effective digital signage content can be constructed from segments designed to catch attention and relay some information quickly -- sometimes in a mere second or two. To maximize the chance of getting your message across to an increasingly distracted audience, try to remember that digital signs work more like posters than TV. We recommend the following procedure when going from the idea phase to the production phase of your content creation process, which is kind of like storyboarding in reverse:

1. Articulate your core idea as a series of messages that are only a few words long (no more than a sentence).
   
   
2. Think of a single image or visual element that goes along with each of these core ideas. (One image per, for now. Don't worry, you can add more later!)
   
   
3. Now, take each message-visual combination and mock up a quick poster. For example, think about what a movie poster might look like for the message "Tide gets your whites whiter!" Each mini-poster should stand alone -- i.e. poster #2 shouldn't depend on content from poster #1.
   
   
4. If you're using a voiceover or other dialog, try to segment it into sound bites that go along with each poster instead of using a single, contiguous speech.
   
   
5. Assemble related "posters" together into scenes with transitions and segues that link them together, but don't make them depend on each other.
   
   
6. Finally, assemble the scenes into your finished spot.

Real-life examples

If done correctly, you'll be left with a cohesive piece of content that can still get useful information across to people who might only look at it for a few seconds. One of my favorite examples for illustrating this kind of technique comes from Artisan Complete, a retail POP/out-of-home media company based in Canada. The images to the left come from an ad for Natura cleaning products that they entered into the POPAI Digital Signage Awards contest in 2007. Though the complete segment is a full minute long, it's divided into several shorter segments. Each of these shorter segments, in turn, can be broken up into individual shots that are clear enough to function like regular posters. Each stands on its own, and while the subsequent scenes reinforce previous ones, none of them depend on each other.

The Natura clip ran in Home Hardware stores in Canada, and it was scheduled to appear on screens that were placed directly above piles of the featured products. Thus, even though the last screenshot on the left doesn't include an image of the product or any other information, it still served as an effective advertisement of the product's availability, and provided a call-to-action that was easy for viewers to act on. Even better, it didn't require the viewer to see any of the other segments to understand it.

Bringing it all together

As you design your individual "posters", arrange elements using the information we've outlined on this blog over the past few weeks. All of our standard rules apply: use short blurbs of text that are easy to chunk and code and are ordered to take advantage of the serial position effect. Include a call-to-action. Use an attractive font. Avoid unnecessary distractions. Use color and contrast to your advantage. Check moving elements to make sure they're discernible from the periphery.

While it would be nice to say "follow these tips and you'll have great content," of course it isn't quite that easy. The past few blog articles illustrate some best practices for digital signage content creation, but it's still going to take a good deal of audience research, design savvy, and, of course, creativity to produce spots that really stand out. However, all of those things equal, I'm confident that content designed with our recommendations in mind will show consistently better performance (in the firm of higher comprehension and recall rates) than those that don't.

What's on the horizon?

So, what will we cover next? We're doing more research on content length (duration), screen placement, multi-zone versus full-screen content, best practices for using sound, store integration, and multichannel marketing, so expect to see those types of articles in the future. I don't have enough data about any of these topics to make recommendations quite yet, but that's probably a good thing. Frankly, it's been a while since we've covered any of the interesting things going on elsewhere in the digital signage industry.

I'd love to hear your feedback too:

• Have the articles in our "Making great digital signage content" series been useful?
  
  
• Did you learn something that might change how you design your content?
  
  
• Do you disagree with anything we've covered?
  
  
• Is there anything you'd like to add?

Let me know in a comment below and I'll do my best to tailor future articles accordingly.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Color, contrast, a simple message and a strong call to action. These things are all important, and they each need to be understood in your quest to create effective digital signage content. But the techniques we've mentioned so far would all be common knowledge to the workaday graphic designer at an agency or even a print shop. We've yet to talk about anything unique to our digital medium. So today, we'll focus on one of the most important differences between digital signs and static signs -- namely, the ability to show moving images. While you may think that having an object move on screen would make it more eye catching and more memorable, the opposite can also be true. In fact, poorly-planned motion can decrease visibility and readability, making your content less effective.

7 things to keep in mind when using motion

Fortunately, there are a few tips and tricks you can use to avoid such problems. As you'll see, they're basically extensions of the best practices we've discussed in past articles. To begin with, consider these seven key points:

1. Just because you can make it move doesn't mean that you should. Chances are, the out-of-home environment where your digital screens are located already has a lot of visual clutter. This is true for retail stores, health clubs, airports and practically everywhere else. Adding motion to multiple screen elements may not make them any more noticeable or visible from a distance. So far we've only found this to be true in very cluttered environments, but you'll have to try it in your own venues to be sure.
   
   
2. Don't let motion interfere with readability or comprehension. This one's easy: if you're relying on text to get your message across, and the motion you've added makes the text harder to read, your content's performance is going to suffer.
   
   
3. You get only 1.5 - 3 seconds of full attention for glance media. Thus, any period when important text or other critical message components are off the screen is potentially a missed opportunity to connect.
   
   
4. Leave enough time to read the text. Don't trust your own judgment -- if you're the designer, find somebody who hasn't seen the content before and make them read it. If they can't read your message at least three times in the alloted amount of time, either take out some text or leave it on screen longer.
   
   
5. Treat moving text like it's not there at all. I'm not talking about a slight jiggle or flash here and there, but if you have content whirring across the screen from left to right, nobody's going to be able to read it -- or at least, not all of it. So if you really want to make sure there's enough time to read your text, don't count your transition times towards the amount of time you're leaving it on screen.
   
   
6. Motion on the periphery is more subtle than motion in the middle of the field of view. A small animation on the border of your screen will exaggerate the eye's natural left-to-right sweeping motions as it reads along. Putting animation in the middle of the screen next to text will pull the eye away from the text during these natural eye motions, which are known as saccades.
   
   
7. The most important features of your spot should be static. If you have an easily-recognized or well known logo, a common catch phrase or slogan, or some trademark imagery, keep it on screen for the full length of the clip. That way, even people who don't get the chance to see the clip in its entirety will still be able to associate what they've seen with your brand or core message.

Using moving silhouettes to your advantage

One of the most useful tools we've found for understanding the impact of motion on readability is what we call silhouette, or the relative contrast patterns of moving images. Because our peripheral vision is only really good at picking out shapes and outlines, we naturally identify items that we're not directly looking at by their contrast against the background. Thus, you could say that a moving image's silhouette is the only thing noticeable about elements in a viewer's periphery. Moving elements that have a strong and easily-identifiable silhouette will take fewer cognitive resources to identify than those with less recognizable silhouettes. Of course, a silhouette profile of a moving element will change as that object moves, so it's important to make sure that simple motions are exaggerated and lines are kept as clean as possible during the movement. Consider the following:


Most viewers with average vision will have no problem discerning these images when looking directly at the content. But for customers merely glancing at it (or even subconsciously watching it in their periphery), all they will see are object outlines -- especially when objects on the screen are moving. Consequently, the image on the left will be much more "recognizable" at-a-glance because of its strong silhouette. This is true even though the image on the right uses a distracting attention vampire that would normally suck attention away from other elements when viewed head-on. Plus, silhouettes aren't just important for getting people to notice your content from the periphery. Moving images with a strong silhouette can be also moved, scaled or rotated without significantly reducing comprehension time for direct onlookers. So, your fancy visual effects will have less negative impact on readability and comprehension if they modify elements with an easily discernible silhouette.

Next week, we'll put together everything we've learned so far while examining the last critical component of any good digital signage spot: the scene composition. Just as each shot in a well-crafted movie is carefully laid out on camera, so too must our ads and announcements be arranged to form a cohesive product.

Perhaps you agree with all this academic stuff. Or maybe you've got your own ideas about how to make content great. Either way, leave a comment and let us know what you think about using motion in digital signage.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Laura Davis-Taylor asks the following over at RetailWire:

Gaze tracking technology is becoming a very exciting option for providing shopper insights such as how many people walked by a screen or display, how many looked, at what and for how long. This is true progress for the Marketing-at-Retail space, as it opens the door to real-time analytics that allow us to respond according to what works - and what doesn't.

As exciting as this new technology is, there is an active strategic debate around it. Media buyers indeed want this valuable information to help them plan their media exposures within retail stores. However, privacy sensitivity has increased over the years and this new method of tracking may not sit well with them. Do Not Call and Do Not Mail lists are alive and well in many states and DM News has recently been reporting on the proposed Do Not Cookie bill. This points to less - not more - tolerance around personal privacy in other channels.

Should in-store marketers install gaze tracking systems that profile shopper demographics or is it opening Pandora's Box to a privacy backlash?

Our take:

WireSpring's Bill Gerba contributed a response to the question, as follows:

The collection of the data is fine if a shopper has given consent to be tracked, but the logistics of keeping track of who has agreed and who hasn't in-store are very tough to solve right now, even if you use some kind of token or RFID-based system.

The bigger problem is that retailers have proven more or less inept at data security, so any private information collected is virtually certain not to remain private for long.

Retailers can't even keep credit card data safe. Why would we think they could do a better job with an even larger volume of data (and one without any current government oversight or industry regulation a'la PCI, no less)?


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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

When we make a substantial change to a piece of content, we expect it to have an equally substantial effect on how the content is perceived by viewers. But if this relationship fails to hold, as we saw in last week's article about color, it can be rather confusing to decide what comes next. After all, agencies around the world spend countless hours making sure that their ads conform to brand style guides and best practices, matching fonts, colors and animated effects against a list of approved choices. Surely it's not all in vain, right? To some extent, I'd argue it is. While consistent visual design is important for presenting a unified face to consumers across multiple channels, the recommendations you see in the corporate style guide aren't necessarily the best ones for helping viewers notice and remember your message -- especially if your message is coming across on a medium or in a venue that wasn't considered when those best practices were first established.

Concept, style, and the path to "good enough"

Unfortunately, figuring out the combination of visual elements, styles, and colors that will elicit the best possible response is next to impossible. For starters, you would have to test a huge number of variations. Next, as long as different people continue to think and act differently, you (the designer) will come up against the law of diminishing returns once your content is "good enough" for most people. But what's the quickest path to "good enough," since even getting that far might take more time than you care to invest?

After a lot of research, we've concluded that there are basically two kinds of changes you can make: concept changes and style changes. Here's an example: A concept change would be deciding whether or not to use the pink bunny in your Energizer spot. However, a style change would be deciding whether to have it on a black background or a white one (gross simplifications here, but hey, these posts tend to run on too long as it is). Aside from a few high-level generalizations, there's no way I could possibly tell you what the right concept for your brand/product/category is. That decision usually gets made by people high up the corporate ladder as part of an overall strategy or campaign. But what I can talk about, after lots of trial-and-error testing, are some important style changes to try out -- particularly style changes that affect the contrast of your images.

Adding contrast to the mix

As we alluded to last week, one of the first things that designers try to tweak (whenever possible) is the color scheme of the content. Admittedly, there are cases where tiny changes in a color or gradient can really improve the aesthetics of a piece, whether it's on TV, in print or on a digital sign. But as it turns out, contrast, not color, is far more important when it comes to getting your content noticed, watched, and remembered. Because digital signs -- whether LCDs, LEDs or plasma displays -- all emit light (as opposed to regular posters which reflect ambient light), their ability to show contrasting colors actually changes with a person's viewing angle. Thus, if somebody glances at your screen but doesn't see it head-on, they might miss the bright colors and clever imagery that you're using. In the worst case, all they'll be able to see are the outlines between light and dark areas. I think that's why changing the contrast of different visual elements can have such a significant impact on the overall readability and recall of digital signage content.

Not surprisingly, Clear Channel and other billboard companies have done a significant amount of research on which color combinations are easiest to see and read, and we've found that their conclusions hold up extremely well for indoor digital signs too. For example, consider these four color combinations:


Overlapping areas of complementary colors (for example, red and green) are difficult to focus on because our brains tend to interpret the different wavelengths of light that they use as slight vibrations. This makes the text harder to read and other visual elements harder to distinguish. Likewise, overlapping colors with a similar color value (brightness) will be difficult to distinguish for most people (and virtually impossible for the color blind). This problem is worse on LCD screens, which have the most trouble maintaining high-contrast imagery when the viewer isn't standing more or less directly in front of the screen. To maximize exposure and guarantee that signs are noticed and read, Clear Channel also makes a few recommendations, including this palette of 14 high-contrast color schemes for use in outdoor billboards:


Black and yellow provide the most bang-for-your-buck when you're designing out-of-home ads, even though black-and-white would be a higher contrast choice. The reason has to do with the physiology of the eye as well as the context where the ads are seen: Since black and yellow have both different hues (colors) and values (brightnesses), the eye readily distinguishes between them using both its rods (brightness detectors) and cones (color detectors).  From a context perspective, yellow is less prevalent than white in the typical outdoor environment, so yellow content tends to be more eye catching. Content creation for digital signage is essentially a constant struggle between getting noticed and getting remembered. Thus, the small tradeoff in readability by using less-contrasting yellow instead of white can be justified by the greater chance of grabbing a viewer's attention in the first place.

How better contrast buys you more impressions

The contrast between foreground and background can have a big impact on how easy it is to decipher content on the screen. In some cases, even a minor tweak (like increasing the contrast between foreground and background by 10%) can make the content recognizable to a much larger potential audience, since people can see it from a wider angle. Contrast also has a direct impact on readability, which in turn influences how well viewers will recall your content. So, make sure to consider what your spots look like to people across the aisle, down the hall, or on the other side of your lobby. What looks spectacular on your monitor 18" away may be indecipherable if you move back a few feet or turn your head by just a few degrees.

Next week, we'll delve into another area where contrast is critical: separating out moving elements so your viewers can focus on the important part of your message. One of the big advantages of digital displays is their ability to show moving images. But believe it or not, using motion doesn't always make content more eye catching. We'll investigate how to include the right amount of movement when we talk about silhouettes, our term for contrast-in-motion.

Meanwhile, if you have any tips on how to create high-contrast content while keeping the style guide police at bay, leave a comment and let me know!

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

From their press release:

VisionChina Media's total revenues were $13.6 million in the first quarter of 2008, an increase of 304.5% compared to $3.4 million in the first quarter of 2007 and an increase of 13.5% compared to $12.0 million in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Advertising service revenues were $13.2 million in the first quarter of 2008, an increase of 326.0% compared to $3.11 million in the first quarter of 2007 and an increase of 13.2% compared to $11.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2007. Total broadcasting hours reached 25,980 in the first quarter of 2008 compared to 23,908 in the fourth quarter of 2007. Average advertising revenues per broadcasting hour were $493 in the first quarter of 2008 compared to $474 in the fourth quarter of 2007. On average, the Company sold 6.24 advertising minutes per broadcasting hour in the first quarter of 2008 compared to 8.69 advertising minutes per broadcasting hour in the fourth quarter of 2007. Up to March 31, 2008, more than 380 advertisers had purchased advertising time on the Company's network either directly or through an advertising agent.

Media cost, the most significant component of advertising service cost of revenues, was $4.7 million in the first quarter of 2008, representing 77.3% of total advertising service costs, compared to $3.2 million or 77.6% of total advertising service costs in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Gross profit in the first quarter of 2008 was $7.2 million, a decrease of 4.9% from $7.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2007, and an increase of 1145.7% from a $0.60 million in the first quarter of 2007. The decrease of gross profit in the first quarter 2008 from the fourth quarter 2007 was primarily due to the increased media costs associated with the three new exclusive cities that were included in the Company's network: Taiyuan, Chengdu and Ningbo. Advertising service gross margin was 54.3% in the first quarter of 2008, compared to 64.8% in the fourth quarter of 2007. The advertising equipment gross margin in the fourth quarter of 2007 was 15.4%, compared to 17.3% in the first quarter of 2008. Excluding the three new exclusive cities, the average advertising services revenues were $543 per broadcasting hour.

Our take:

WireSpring is generally bullish on the prospects of digital out-of-home advertising in China, due to their extremely large population which continues to gain wealth and purchasing power despite economic slowdown in the west.  Further, low labor costs and the opportunity to study Western businesses and infrastructure providers (and learn from their mistakes) continue to give the Chinese key cost advantages which are handily utilized in their enormous digital signage deployments.

There is one potential caveat for the entire market, though. China's government, while slowly warming to the idea of free market capitalism, remains a Communist entity, and as such has the potential to invoke stringent new laws against consumerism and advertising (or enforce the ones the currently have on record).  While such a prospect remains unlikely for the time being, it cannot be discounted entirely.


New! Click here to leave a comment

Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Quick: what's your favorite color? I bet the answer popped into your head before you even had a chance to think about it. Color is funny like that -- though we frequently can't explain why, we tend to have preferences for certain ones over others. Some of our color preferences may change with the fashion and design trends of the day. Others may remain with us throughout life. Some are born out of patriotism or nostalgia, while others come from memories with strong emotional attachments. Whatever the cause, there's no doubt that colors can grab our attention, make us stop in our tracks and even play to our emotions. But does that mean that color can change the way that digital signage content works?

There are many conflicting views about how colors affect our physiology and psychology. While researchers have proven that colors can alter moods and even raise blood pressure, most viewers aren't going to pay enough attention to the typical content clip running on a digital sign to feel the full effect of this (versus, say, looking at art or even watching a 30-minute TV program). Thus we're forced to look for more subtle ways that colors can influence our behaviors. While I could posit my own theories on this, the folks at Mohawk (yes, the flooring/carpeting manufacturer) have already done the heavy lifting for us. In fact, C.B. Whittemore posted part of Mohawk's guide to color on her Flooring the Consumer blog, along with four other posts about the power of whites, patterns, neutrals and eco-inspired colors. I've paraphrased their more interesting findings here and combined them with some other details that we've compiled over time: Red

• Causes adrenaline to be released, increasing pulse rate and blood pressure
• Heightens sense of smell; taste buds become sensitive, appetite improves
• When white is added to red, the color evokes feelings of innocence, tenderness and softness

Pink

• Relaxes the body, lowers pulse and blood pressure
• Lends a feminine image to the subject matter
• Strongly associated with Breast Cancer Awareness movement in the US

Purple

• Typically relaxing, though can occasionally have the opposite effect
• Can be used as either a warm or cool color

Blue

• Relaxes the body, lowers pulse and blood pressure
• Can reduce feelings of claustrophobia
• Currently, the most common "favorite color" in the US

Green

• The human eye can perceive the widest array of green colors, so even minor clashes are very apparent
• Associated with springtime and the environment
• At present, it's being re-branded into the banner concept for a socio-political movement, which may create strong positive or negative connotations for different people

Yellow

• While it has no proven physiological effects, people who see the color yellow claim to become more happy and cheerful
• May focus attention and concentration
• The association of yellow to the sun is near universal and cross-cultural

Brown

• Commonly associated with stability and natural/rugged things
• Almost never selected as a favorite color

Orange

• Evokes an energetic response from viewers
• Like red, orange stimulates the appetite
• Like yellow, creates feelings of energy and happiness
• Children respond especially well to orange

Many of these color relationships may seem obvious to you, but there are some important caveats to keep in mind. While some colors evoke near-universal symbolism (green and yellow in particular), others may have different connotations in different cultures. For example, a white wedding dress is usually preferred in the US (evoking purity), but a red dress may be the ideal choice in China (signifying good luck). Also, even the most pronounced effects are fairly minimal and fleeting, like the idea of using red to set a viewer on edge. And of course, no matter how much research you do, different colors will mean different things to different people. We've each built up a unique body of experiences during the course of our lives, and this often trumps any larger societal associations or fashion trends.

So what do we recommend then? Despite all of the theory floating around, we've seen no over-arching relationship between color and content performance for glance-type digital signage. There were some unique cases where changing a clip's color may have altered its performance, but at this point I don't feel like there's any predictable or reproducible way to see the effect. In my book, that means the correlation between color and recall performance either doesn't exist, is too small to be noticed, or is too difficult for us to manipulate properly.

With that in mind, I'd say that color can safely be used to meet the brand/style requirements of your venue or advertiser, fit into your venue's "clean store policy" (if they have one), or meet any other marketing or aesthetic goal -- all without impacting performance too severely. Now, there are obviously limits to that: if you put dark pink on a light red background it's going to be hard to see. And that brings us to our next subject: contrast. You see, there were times when we tweaked different color settings and did in fact see a significant change in content performance. After careful analysis, though, we found that it wasn't the emotive effects of the color palette that we were seeing. It was a change in contrast that suddenly made the content more eye-catching and more visible to a greater number of potential viewers. So next week, we're going to take a look at some guidelines for using contrast to pop your message off the screen and into your viewers' minds. In my opinion, contrast is the most important visual design element for digital signage content. Together with skilled copywriting and an enticing call-to-action, it can make a measurable difference in the success of your advertising and informational messaging.

Then again, maybe color is more valuable than I've suggested. So if you have any stories about how changing the colors in a clip improved its performance, leave a comment and let me know!

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

If you've worked in an office at any point in the past decade, then you probably know that guy.  His reports, his memos, his typewritten pleas to buy his daughter's Girl Scout cookies... everything he puts on paper uses (gasp) Comic Sans. I don't know who designed that font, but clearly he couldn't have known the full extent of the carnage to come: book reports, birthday cards, banners, websites -- a seemingly endless number of documents have been printed using this over-the-top, hard-to-read typeface.  No, there's nothing funny about Comic Sans, especially if you've tried using it in your digital signage content.  As it turns out, the font you choose can have a significant impact on how much of your message the casual viewer will read and comprehend before moving on. We first talked about text sizes back in 2004, and in today's post we're going to take a closer look at some typography do's and don'ts to help you get the most from your content:

1. DON'T use multiple font faces: Mixing sans-serif and serif fonts together (for example, using Arial and Times in the same sentence) makes it much harder to read. In some tests, using multiple fonts increased the average time-to-read by 100%, though I suspect that at least part of that time was spent trying to figure out exactly what was unusual about the sentence.  I'd suggest limiting yourself to no more than two fonts in any given "scene" in your content.
   
   
2. DON'T use all caps: While you might think that an all-caps sentence would be easier to see and read, the opposite is true. An all-caps line will visually block together and take longer to read and decipher than a normally-capitalized line. It's still OK to use capitalization for emphasis, of course, but I recommend limiting that to a single word or two.
   
   
3. DON'T stack lines: Just like the all-caps note above, stacking lines of text directly on top of each other can make them more graphically pleasing, but often comes at the expense of readability.  If you must use multiple lines of text in your content, keep them visually separate from other items on the screen at the same time. It's also a good idea to use a high-contrast color scheme to make the letters as distinct and easy-to-read as possible.
   
   
4. DON'T abuse colored text: I completely understand that digital signs can show off a wide array of eye-catching colors, gradients and other effects, so I don't want to suggest that everything should be (literally) black and white.  However, we've also found that when you have less contrast between the text and the background, the message takes longer to read and is harder to see from a distance. So, you can go ahead and use your bright red copy on a pale beige gradient background, but think twice before throwing some chartreuse text onto a spring green background.
   
   
5. DON'T skew text: One of the more surprising results from our study was that skewing or slanting text -- even something as simple as going from Arial to Arial Italic -- can have a pretty serious impact on visibility and time-to-read.  The more severe the slant, the more pronounced this effect was.  So if you don't have to use italics, it's best to avoid this effect entirely.
   
   
6. DO use sans-serif fonts whenever possible: Serifs are those little dangly things on letters that make them look fancy. Many studies have looked at whether serifs make particular fonts easier or harder to read, and there's evidence in favor of both sides. My personal feeling is that serifs make small text easier to read, which is why these fonts are common in books and newspapers. But when it comes to digital signs and other large-format media, you'll get the best results if you focus on sans-serif fonts. If you think about it, this makes sense: when the viewer only has a second or two to read text on a screen that's several feet away, the simple shapes of sans-serif fonts take less cognitive effort to recognize and decipher.
   
   
7. DO make your text big enough: Small text is probably the most common problem that I see on digital signs.  Without my glasses on, my vision is about 20/40 -- not terrible, but not great either.  But with them on, it's 20/15, which is better than average. So why do I still find myself squinting and walking towards the screen just to figure out what it says? As a starting point, here is what Clear Channel recommends for text shown on roadside billboards:
   
   Viewing Distance (feet) Minimum Readable Text Height (inches) 5' - 50' 1" - 2" 50' - 100' 2" - 4" 100' - 200' 4" - 8"
   The Kentucky Department of Transportation and the OAAA have come up with similar guidelines, and if anything, our own research says to err towards the higher end of these recommendations.  What does this mean for you? Well, on a typical 40" screen at 720p resolution, your text should be at least 70 pixels tall if you want people to read it from a few yards away.

In general, time is your enemy: the longer it takes a viewer to make sense of your message, the less chance they'll read and understand the whole thing. As usual, graphic designers will be faced with the difficult challenge of balancing the brand's need for eye-catching visual pizzazz with the viewer's need for simplicity. While the former can be important for grabbing a viewer's attention and getting them to look at the screen, the latter is critical for getting the important part of the message across. Next week, we'll take an in-depth look at color: a basic yet powerful tool for making your content more visually appealing.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Ok, can I please get a quick show of hands?  How many of you have worked as a copywriter in the ad industry? Wow, that few? Ok, what about professional writers of any sort?  That's a bit better, but I dare say there are still a lot of hands down.  And that can be a problem, because the biggest "secret" we learned during our study of effective digital signage content is that the words on the screen are far more important than any amount of graphical eye candy. Now before all of you fabulous graphic designers out there leave in a huff, let me first reassure you: good graphic design is crucial, and the expert use of animated effects can have a significant impact on your content's ability to attract the eye.  But the focus of today's article -- effective copywriting for digital signage -- needs to come first when you're putting together a new piece of content.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

I wanted to come up with a set of simple, concise rules to explain what goes into great ad copy, but after a little bit of digging it turns out that someone already has.  Back in 2000, a group of influential advertising folks selected the best slogans, straplines, taglines, and headlines of the 20th century to form the Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame. And last year, the authors of "A List Apart" (a popular weblog) dissected these 115 items to find out what makes great copy. They were able to summarize it with six simple rules, which also apply quite well to digital signage copywriting tasks:

1. Be five words in length
2. Don't mention the brand name
3. Be declarative
4. Be grammatically complete
5. Be otherwise standard
6. Contain alliteration, metaphor, or rhyme

Most of these guidelines are common sense: short, simple phrases are both quicker to read and easier to remember. But I was initially surprised to see that most of the top slogans didn't feature the brand or product name.  Then it occurred to me: most of the time, these slogans (which include Nike's "Just do it," DeBeers' "Diamonds are forever" and Wendy's "Where's the beef?") appear in a brand-specific context like a print or TV ad.  And in most of those cases, the brand's name or logo will be present, making the use of it in the copy redundant.  Looking back on our sampling of effective digital signage spots, I found this trend to hold true. Because the product/brand/venue logo was frequently on-screen (in fact, we recommend that it's always on screen if possible), few elected to use the name when it didn't provide any obvious benefit.

Remember your Call To Action

Regular readers of the blog know that we're huge proponents of using a persistent call-to-action in digital signage content, whether in the form of a command, declarative statement or mere suggestion.  However, we've found that using an imperative (command) statement does tend to work better, especially when the command is immediately actionable.  If you ask a viewer to do some task that they can complete immediately (or at least in the very near future), there's a much greater chance that they'll do it.  Likewise, easier tasks are more likely to get completed than more challenging ones.

Writing a short, polished and effective call-to-action is still something of an art form. But in the course of researching this, I found a great source of inspiration: Google AdWords. Do a search for any term that's related to what your content is promoting, and chances are that somebody has already thought long and hard about the few dozen or so characters that will best convince viewers to pay attention. Of course, I'm in no way condoning plagiarism, but you should take a look at how successful AdWords campaigns are being conducted before trying to write your own copy. After all, why should you re-invent the wheel when they've already put the time and effort into the necessary research and development?  Think of it as inspiration for some approaches that you might try. I also have a few personal preferences that would arguably improve the performance of a call to action, but we honestly haven't tested them as thoroughly as I'd like to (yet). For example:

• Start the call-to-action with a verb
• Keep the verb and subject close together, e.g. "Ask a salesperson for details"
• If you can't keep the call-to-action on screen the whole time, show it several times per spot so that casual viewers have a better opportunity to see it (assuming your spots are more than a few seconds long, of course)

And before we forget:

• Follow the guidelines for using the serial position effect, chunking and coding, and contextual relevance!

Everything that we learned about memory and recognition in those articles is even more applicable to your call to action statements, since they're the things you want to be most memorable.

I know it doesn't seem like rocket science, but simple, straightforward copy and a strong call to action can make the difference between a content spot that converts and one that doesn't. And despite how obvious these tips may seem, I still run into digital signage spots that don't take advantage of them.  Airport networks seem to be the worst offenders -- or maybe that's just where I see lots of digital signage, so I'm exposed to them more frequently. In any event, I know that some of our customers in retail, transportation, healthcare and corporate communications were missing at least some of these points, so they were able to make measurable improvements based on our collective findings.

As we've seen today, the message in your call-to-action is crucial to the performance of virtually any digital signage spot.  But next week, we'll look at something that can significantly impact how (or if) viewers consume your message: what the text looks like.  Coming up, I'll give you a crash course in typography, including the font faces, sizes and layouts that work best to  get your message across.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Over the past few weeks, we've gained new insight about how psychological phenomena like the serial position effect and mnemonic chunking and coding can affect a viewer's ability to recognize the messages in your content -- and better recall them later. Today's article, however, will be the last psych-oriented one from our series. As most people in the advertising world know, recognition and comprehension are two critical stages of content consumption that must occur before a viewer can remember what you're talking about later on. Thus, I'd like to revisit two areas that we've written about in the past: the impact of context on content, and the use of so-called attention vampires.

The importance of context

In July 2007, we wrote about a study done by Mediaedge:cia (MEC) on consumer attention habits. MEC's study determined that context and content are more important than location for influencing people's attention, largely because people are typically paying attention to many things simultaneously. Therefore, they concluded, the optimal role for commercial communication content is not to work within a person's partial attention, but to pull him out of it into full focus.  MEC's research showed that "people can and will give attention to commercial communications... but only when and where it suits them." Thus, it's our job to (a) maximize the chance that potential viewers look at our screens, and (b) make sure that when they do look, they immediately understand the meaning that we're trying to convey.  The key to both of these items is contextual relevance. For example, take the following image:


Context can affect recognition and even the way that messages and symbols are translated into concepts.  What that means is that depending on a person's psychological context (which is greatly influenced by where they are and what they're doing), they might think of different things when shown the same image. For example, if you saw the skull and crossbones image in a pharmacy or on a safety poster in your office stockroom, it would (probably) immediately equate to danger or poison. Subconsciously primed with that association, you would be much more likely to read any message with the fear and caution that goes along with that state of mind.  However, if you saw that image at Disney World, a movie store or some other entertainment venue, the symbol might instead be interpreted as "pirates". In that case, you would be primed with a completely different set of feelings and emotions when receiving the rest of the on-screen message.

This is not to say that you or your viewers can be easily fooled into thinking a symbol means one thing or another. In reality, most people will understand the purpose of the message after reading it for a few seconds.  But to give your content the best chance of attracting and retaining viewers' attention, the symbols and materials used need to be as relevant to the viewer as possible, and they need to convey the right intent at the particular venue they're shown at.  Luckily, familiarity with a particular context facilitates perception within that context; that is, we pick up on things more quickly in familiar environments. So this effect would probably be more pronounced at an unfamiliar airport than at your local grocery store, for example.

Watch out for attention vampires

It's difficult to create a spot that's eye-catching, easy-to-understand and memorable.  However, it's all too easy to include graphical elements that draw viewer attention away from the critical part of your content: the message itself.  We first covered this phenomenon last June, when studies from PreTesting (which focused on TV commercials) and GfK (who studied magazine ads) found that the eye candy that makes an ad aesthetically pleasing can also dull down the brand or product message -- to the point where viewers can't recall it later.  Images of things we're biologically programmed to notice (like people's faces, babies or top predators, for example) draw attention away from other areas that might contain important information.  When used improperly or accidentally, the attention vampire effect can divert attention from the star of your content.  However, when used correctly, they can promote viewer attention in key areas and hold that attention for relatively long periods of time.  For example, consider the image below, which shows where people glanced the most within a Bulgari magazine ad:


As you can see, the people's faces drew the vast majority of viewer attention, followed in equal parts by the watch (the focus of the ad) and the other shiny things in the scene (jewelry). For Bulgari, this might be acceptable and even desirable in a print advertisement: they are selling a lifestyle, not necessarily just a product. But in a digital signage ad that may only have 1-3 seconds to get the message across, such a concept is too subtle, and the predominant use of faces diverts too much attention away from the actual product.  Regardless of which side of the fence you might be on, it's easy to see how grabbing a viewer's attention with one of these vampire images could be used to benefit digital signage content and hold viewer attention.  By the same token, it's easy to understand how it might be misused and ultimately distract viewers who would otherwise be ready to receive your message.

By now, I hope this series on creating digital signage content has taught you how to make your messages more relevant, memorable, and distraction-free. But what goes into those great messages, and what kinds of messages work best at grabbing and holding viewer attention?  Find out next week, when we'll take a look at what works -- and what doesn't -- when it comes to writing effective copy for digital signage ads.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Continuing our series on how to use mnemonic tricks to make your digital signage content more memorable, today I want to talk about chunking and coding. This is another simple effect that you can take advantage of to improve the recall rate for the messages on your screens.  Like the serial position effect that we covered last week, chunking and coding relies on specially ordering the items in a list to make them more memorable. It also leverages some innate features of human memory to reduce the amount of "effort" a viewer must expend in order to understand, and later remember, your message.  Properly chunked and coded messages can be recalled at 2-3 times the rate of similar but unoptimized messages, so this approach is especially handy if your screens are placed in locations where they compete for attention with other stimuli (which, unless you're putting them into sensory deprivation tanks, is basically everywhere). So if it's your job to put text on a screen and get people to remember what it said, chunking and coding is definitely something you'll want to know about and use to your advantage.

Way back in 1956, Harvard professor George Miller published "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information," a rather bland-sounding psychology paper that would go on to become one of the field's true classics.  Miller noted that virtually everyone has an upper limit on the number of items that they can commit to memory in a short amount of time.  That upper limit is five to nine items (or 7 +/- 2, if you like), and it seems to transcend gender, age, culture and race, thus making it a particularly good target to optimize for. Go much past this number, and the accuracy of recall goes down dramatically. In other words, if you ask the average individual to recall 15 things, you might as well be asking them to recall 50 items.

What does this have to do with making great content, you ask?  Well, as I mentioned last week, great content starts with great copy, and the arrangement of that copy can dramatically impact how much or how little your viewer will remember. Your content may relay several messages in a list, or you might ask viewers to remember a coupon code, phone number or SMS code. In each of these cases, even a simple modification to how the information is presented can have a significant impact on how much the viewer will remember later.

To begin with, let's talk about data chunking. Quite simply, chunking is a way of arranging information so that your memory has to recall fewer items later.  The most famous example is a plain old US telephone number (indeed, some have speculated that Bell Telephone originally standardized around the seven-digit phone number because of Miller's research).  Here's a little experiment: try and remember the following ten item list:

9 5 4 5 4 8 3 3 0 0
Can you do it? If so, did you find yourself naturally breaking the number down into three pieces like this?

954   548   3300
That's chunking. Instead of memorizing ten distinct items, you automatically grouped the numbers into chunks so that you'd only have to remember three.  Yes, those three items are more complex than the original ten (since you basically have the ten items plus an organizational layer on top of that), but your brain has ways of handling the storage of complex items. The upshot is that we can get around the 7 +/- 2 memory limit by artfully arranging information so that it "appears" to be less than it actually is.  Chunking works best with short lists and relatively simple items, and the effect diminishes rapidly when the viewer is presented with more than five or so items at once.

Chunking is the most effective when all of the items in the list are roughly the same "type" and "size" (e.g. numbers versus words versus phrases). That's where coding comes in.  Simply put, coding is how our brains make things easier to remember by arranging them into groups of like items.  By "like items," I mean practically any grouping that makes the list's elements seem more similar to each other. Groups can be based on virtually any obvious criteria -- for example, something phonetic ("items that start with the letter A" or "words that rhyme") or conceptual ("things that float" or "famous landmarks").  However, the key is that the criteria must be obvious: your viewers most likely won't take the time to guess why you've listed five seemingly-random items in a list, so in general, coding works best with items that are easily and naturally grouped together.

Our brains do chunking and coding automatically as we make our way through the world. However, given how much competition and visual clutter your screen content may face, you might want to take a few steps to make sure the process is as easy as possible. After all, viewers may only be gracing you with a few seconds of their attention, so you need to make that exposure count. Here's how to put chunking and coding into practice:

• Pre-order items in your list (which should be short and to-the-point!), and group key phrases or concepts into distinct areas on the screen (or specific times in the segment).
  
  
• Repeat key words, phrases or ideas 2-3 times in a row for reinforcement. This not only gives viewers' brains more time to get the idea into short-term memory, but it also primes the viewer to use it as one of the items to encode against.
  
  
• Use oldies-but-goodies like alliteration (words starting with the same letter or sound), rhyme, meter and the "Rule of 3" (building sentences/phrases as a progression of three clauses). Since most viewers have been exposed to these types of codings before, they'll naturally identify the pattern quickly and use it to code against. Remember, time to recognition and comprehension is one of the most critical aspects of any glance medium.
  
  
• Simple is better! No matter how good you get at optimizing your messages to be easily memorable, the simple ones will always be recalled the best. Don't make a five-item list when you only really need to expound on the two or three most important things. As Jason Goldberg noted in a comment on last week's article, a one-item list is hard to beat.

Armed with your newfound knowledge of how to order the messages in your clips, the next step is to think about the context in which your messages are displayed.  That's what we'll talk about next week, along with ways to avoid some common distractions that can draw attention away from your key messages.  If you're tired of all this psychology-oriented stuff, don't worry: we'll be moving along into copy, graphic design and motion before you know it.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Back in January, I taught a POPAI webinar about how to create effective content for digital signage networks (and some readers may have seen the short version that I presented during the Digital Signage Expo or my related article on the importance of keeping your content simple).  I learned so much about what makes good content while researching this presentation that I plan to share it all on the blog over the course of several upcoming articles.  We'll be covering everything from the psychology of memory and copywriting techniques to color, contrast, fontography and a host of other relevant topics, all with practical examples from the field.  Hopefully you'll find it as useful as I did.  Today we're going to start at the beginning, and that means probing deep into the human psyche to understand how our memories work.

Obviously, this is going to be just a bit of a simplification of things, since (a) there are whole shelves in your local library full of books about memory, and (b) despite all of those aforementioned books, nobody really has a solid understanding of how it all works.  Nonetheless, in the course of our investigation we found a few principles of human memory that can make the difference between a message that gets remembered and one that does not.  Luckily, these principles are both easy-to-understand and easy-to-exploit. First and foremost is something called the serial position effect.  This effect notes how an element's position in a list affects the proportion of readers who are able to recall it later.  As a rough guideline, say that you're working with a relatively short list, perhaps five to seven items of equal length and complexity. The serial position effect says that the typical viewer will recall the items at the very beginning and the very end of the list about twice as often as those items in the middle of the list. Further, they'll be able to recall the very last elements a bit better than the ones at the beginning. (This is actually called the recency effect, since our recall is better for those items that we saw most recently.)

So how can digital signage content creators take advantage of the serial position effect?  Simply arrange the information that you're presenting to increase the odds that the most important messages will be remembered.  For example, consider the following list of features that might appear on an in-store signage clip:

• More widgets than the competition
• 2 out of 3 experts recommend it
• Does twice the work in half the time
• Get 33% more for free
• Less costly than our competitors

Now suppose the manufacturer decided that "Get 33% more for free" and "2 out of 3 experts recommend it" were the most important messages, and the rest were secondary.  Instead of arranging the messages in the order above, we can take advantage of the serial position effect and present them as follows:

• Get 33% more for free
• More widgets than the competition
• Does twice the work in half the time
• Less costly than our competitors
• 2 out of 3 experts recommend it

Statistically speaking, viewers will be about twice as likely to remember the first and last items of our list (which are now the two most important messages) compared to the ones in the middle, assuming that they actually see the entire list of items. Additionally, since the recency effect usually trumps the primacy effect, our most important message should go at the end. This gives it a slightly better chance of being recalled than the first item. In other words, the first and last message in a list will have the best recall, but last typically beats first.

Can we optimize these effects even further?

You betcha! To begin with, present the first items on the list at a slower speed to enhance the primacy effect.  By giving your viewers' brains a bit more time to process those early messages, there's a better chance they'll move them from the short-term store (a very temporary part of our memories) into a more permanent storage area.  Likewise, leaving ample time at the end of a list can enhance the recency effect for the same reason.  Also, the recency effect is greatly diminished when an interfering task is given. Thus, showing your most important list item and then asking a viewer to write down a phone number or perform some other task will significantly reduce the recall rate of that last item (and all of the other list items, to some extent). In other words, if you have a call-to-action at the end of your content, keep it short and simple so it won't compete with your core message.

Here's another rule of thumb: when in doubt, choose your two best messages and leave it at that!  Of all the content we looked at, the simplest designs had the best viewer recall. Since virtually everyone can remember a two-item list, see if you can whittle your core message down to two items, and use the full length of your clip to focus on those.  And last but not least, we've been assuming that your audience will be able (and willing) to watch your clip all the way through.  But since many of them won't, if there's one message that's more important than the rest, keep it on the screen for as long as possible.  This makes sure that it's available to be seen by the greatest number of people.

Having fun yet?  I know you'd probably find this same info in any Psych 101 textbook, and it can certainly be a bit dry, but consider this: of the hundreds of media clips that we studied, our number one conclusion was that readability, recognition and recall are far, far more important to the success of a digital signage project than aesthetics, form or the "sophistication" of the content.  Sure, we'll be covering those "fun" topics like color and animation in the coming weeks, and you can find some earlier recommendations in our article on what TV and print can teach us about digital signage ads. But when creating your next digital signage masterpiece, you might get more practical benefit by using the serial position effect. It's also quite effective when combined with memory chunking and coding, which we'll be covering next week. Until then, I encourage you to try out the strategies we discussed today, and see if your key metrics show a measurable improvement.  As always, if you have any experience working with content for signage, leave a comment to let us know what you think!

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products

Digital signage contests, much like our industry's associations and organizations, are a dime a dozen these days. While that may not seem like a big deal, simple math dictates that the membership dues, "sponsorship" opportunities and application fees can pile up very quickly -- and many companies might not be able to take full advantage of the distinct benefits and opportunities that each organization or event can provide. As you might imagine, this was a topic of much discussion at POPAI's Outstanding Merchandising Achievement (OMA) meeting earlier this year. While POPAI's OMA contest is celebrating its 50th anniversary (and has become the de facto awards program for all things merchandising-related), their digital signage contest only recently got off the ground. With this in mind, the whole OMA team, along with myself and fellow industry veterans Jeff Porter from Scala and Raji Kalra from Artisan Live, started thinking up ways to ensure that the Digital Signage Awards contest becomes the competition to win -- just like its OMA sibling. Today, I'll share some tips to give you the inside track on winning this competition.

Having either watched, judged or participated in lots of digital signage-themed contests in the past two years, my team knew exactly what we didn't want. We didn't want touch screen kiosks that happen to show content occasionally. We didn't want interactive TV programs. And we didn't want entries from "networks" that still rely on mailing out CDs or DVDs instead of getting content over the Internet. What we did want was a way to showcase the best and most innovative networks and the content that runs on them. Realizing that it was impossible to compare a network (e.g. the way the screens were hung, integration with the venue's environment, etc.) with individual pieces of content, the first thing we did is split POPAI's Digital Signage Awards into two divisions: one devoted to the nuts-and-bolts aspects of making the networks great, and the other for showcasing outstanding digital signage content. (For an entertaining look at the state of content in our industry, check out Pat Hellberg's wish list for better digital signage content.)

With that problem out of the way, the next thing we looked at was the different kinds of networks that we might expect to receive entries from. One of my biggest gripes about other digital signage contests has been that they're either too focused on one particular vertical market (e.g. retail), or they treat all content from different verticals the same. We wanted a way to highlight the subtle differences that make networks and content for different verticals, well, different. So we further split the contest into five different categories: retail, transportation, hospitality/entertainment, healthcare and government/education/corporate. With these fine-grained categories and divisions, we should be able to accurately judge and showcase entries from virtually any part of the digital signage market.

The last problem that we dealt with was entry fees. From our research, we found that these varied from contest to contest, from free to upwards of a thousand dollars per entry. While POPAI simply used OMA's fees for digital signage entries during 2007, we've lowered the fees for the 2008 Digital Signage Awards to $299/entry. Hopefully this makes it affordable for smaller firms and companies who wish to submit more than one application. This was a tough one for us -- some people in the group wanted to suspend fees for a year or two in order to build up momentum. But others pointed out that having a non-trivial entry fee both reduces the number of poor entries, and gives more weight to the outcome of the contest. So after some bickering, we settled on a number that shouldn't prevent anybody from entering -- except those who probably shouldn't be in the first place (these are my opinions, and not necessarily POPAI's).

With the rules more or less settled, we turned to one last challenge that has plagued so many contests: the entry form. Anybody who has entered the OMA contest in years past knows what a challenge it can be to answer the seven long-form questions that go along with each application. Similarly, anyone who has ever judged the OMAs knows how long it can take to go through the 20-50 entries that make up a category. We wanted to simplify this, and distill the entry form down to the minimum amount of information that would separate an outstanding entry from a mediocre one. So we ditched the seven long-form questions in favor of four shorter ones that can (and should) be answered in one to three quick, bullet point-style sentences. And the questions themselves eschew touchy-feely language about values and responsiveness in favor of straightforward wording about the project and its goals. The questions we'll be asking are:

1. What was your objective?
2. Explain how you accomplished it.
3. What were some of the challenges in this deployment?
4. What were the results -- did you meet your objectives?

While you can enter the contest today, we're going to be holding a free webinar on Wednesday, November 28th to go through the process in more detail and answer any questions that might arise. If you're thinking of entering the contest (and if you have a network or you make content, you really should), I'd strongly urge you to attend. The only thing you need to do is register for the webinar during the next week or so, and then listen in from your computer. If you can't attend the webinar but would like to learn more about the contest, send me an email and we'll send over a copy of the presentation and try to answer any questions you may have. And in case you can't see the links above, you can find all the info at http://www.popai.com/oma -- just choose "POPAI's Digital Signage Awards Contest" on the left side.

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Who is Bill Gerba, anyway?
Blogging is just a part-time gig. At my day job, I'm CEO of WireSpring, makers of playback software, remote management tools, and media player hardware for digital signage and kiosk networks. For info about WireSpring's products, visit: wirespring.com/Products