Screenmedia Magazine - digital signage, digital out-of-home, convergent media, screenmedia magazine

It is critical that screen owners communicate with the brands, their marketing-service providers and most of all the creative agencies. I see many campaigns attempt communications via well-deployed screens only to equate to nothing overall. The majority of the time it is a direct result of over-weighted communication which the audience simply does not have time to digest.

Dwell times are extremely significant for the brand to stand a chance of message retention. Just because you are purchasing the space does not mean that you have to pad it out with as much content as you can fit in.

The creative must marry the dwell time if the message is to be taken seriously by the target audience. Obviously this can alter from location to location, but the fundamentals are critical.

Recently Kinetic and Grand Visual used audience-measurement tools to compare posters and digital screens. This was the start of something special for me as it came to the obvious conclusion: screens are king.

We recently executed a campaign in France on behalf of Orangina (pictured) and the creative was perfectly placed. We had cartoon clips which the audience could touch to see the clip which they liked best. The dwell time matched the clips seamlessly, with a duration of seven to ten seconds each. Complete success.

Running parallel to this we carried out a campaign on behalf of a well-known brand with a commercial lasting 25 seconds. Our well-placed audience-measurement cameras built into each Digiadvan immediately kicked back an average dwell time of 11 seconds. What did this tell us? The message failed!

Owners of screen media must be firm about the creative which is presented on the screens. If you allow the wrong message to go live just for revenue’s sake then you run the risk of diluted content, which the audience will not thank you for.

It is essential that you argue your point and make sure that the duration matches the dwell time. We started using Quividi audience measurement for just this reason. It was critical that we understood the deployment of our screens, and more importantly we needed to understand audience dwell times in different locations if we stood any chance of educating the client and the creative agencies.

We are now able to educate the client on their creative dwell times thanks to the results which we have established over the last year, over hundreds of campaigns. The Quividi audience-measurement tools allow us to monitor the audience and establish not only dwell times, but also gender. That is a very exciting tool to own. For some brands this information is critical: knowing which percentages of your footfall are male and female and understanding how long they absorb the message can determine the failure or success of the campaign.

Each screen location must invest in an audience-measurement tool if digital out-of-home media owners are passionate about their screens’ survival and use by clients. The creative is king, so make sure you pass this on to your creative agencies. Educate them that they must adhere to dwell times or their work is doomed!