Digital signage owners should look for the fine line between ambient and not

Digital signage gets a lot of lip service these days because like other forms of POP these screens can deliver marketing messages to shoppers while they're in a buying (or at least shopping) mode. The allure of being able to advertise so close in both time and space to where a purchase decision will be made makes the store a lucrative target for advertisers savvy enough to use it to its fullest potential. Unlike most other forms of POP, though, digital signs have a few other things going for them that make them unique, most notably that they can use both audio and animation to grab a shopper's attention.

While the marketing possibilities abound, there's a significant problem with a lot of today's in-store networks: they can be pretty annoying, for shoppers and employees alike. Building out an in-store media system that's effective while remaining unobtrusive is tough, even for marketing and merchandising experts. That's why this blog entry from the guys at Motorola (courtesy of this post from Experentia) caught my attention this morning. While Motorola is focusing on ways to create unobtrusive, ambient displays for the home environment, in reality they could be testing their techniques in stores as well. They note that their effort revolves around solving two fairly complex problems:

Over the past few decades many researchers have built devices that use light, color, sound, or motion to convey information about people, activities, and places. These devices let people see information at a glance, without the need to go to another device or navigate an interface.

...There are two big challenges in this space from a research perspective. The first is to create displays that are truly ambient and don't interfere with the home environment. We want to ensure that we can provide useful information without distracting people from their home lives. The second challenge is all about finding the most useful information sources for these displays. Obviously, the two are closely tied together and are a big part of our research into ambient communications.

The displays they favor aren't necessarily traditional big, flat panels, but instead encompass a broad range of devices from simple colored lights to small embedded screens. The display of a particular type of information is optimized for each device.

Visual clutter and a competitive POP environment will make ambient media a tough sell in retail right now, but as more retailers tighten down on what will and won't be allowed in their stores I'd expect these techniques to become more popular. I also expect to see "traditional" digital signage systems become more integrated into the retail environment, and the research being conducted by Motorola (and others, surely) will likely yield content creation and optimization techniques that will allow these systems to behave more like a part of the store instead of a bolted-on appendage.

To truly be effective, though, ambient media still needs to be noticed, even if it's typically in the periphery. Perhaps retailers will train shoppers to mentally correlate images, shapes, colors and sounds with the different types of information that might be displayed. A retailer that settled on a standardized set of visual and audio cues to help visitors connect with their in-store media would have the advantage of being able to quickly yet unobtrusively connect with regular shoppers. The problem of course, is that infrequent visitors would be unfamiliar with the cues, and if the media is a bit too ambient, would thus be more likely to tune it out entirely rather than be engaged by it.

Tags: ambient media, digital signage, retail media