In high school I had the privilege of working with Canada's first in-class narrowcasting system, with a now defunct Athena Group. (At least to the best of my knowledge)
The idea was pretty simple. You have a captive audience, why not exploit that?
There was a lot of backlash, especially from concerned parents that their children were being ill-exposed to the dangers of advertising, warping their poor minds. I won't go into the philosophies and moralities of this subject. That is a whole other topic about what advertising is and what does the message itself mean.
The project failed though, mostly due to that backlash and lack of government backing. Beyond the obvious political struggle faced when implementing this system in schools, the very nature of the execution is what killed it in the end.
There is a Right and Wrong way to do something.
I finished college and went to work on Canada's first real attempt on a large scale, in store application. It was good, but not great.
Any installation I saw was either shoddy, uninteresting, poorly designed or otherwise executed with a technological or even budgetary consideration.
The message itself was being lost.
This is where the first iteration failed (in school). It was treated like regular TV, force fed, long run advertising and long format content, mandated to classes that children needs to watch.
Even the first tests I was part of with that large retailer, the content was inconsistent, ran too long and had no messaging.
There needed to be a whole rethinking of the philosophy and strategy of in-store advertising.
There needed to be a right way. Most of you have seen the screens placed everywhere, from the corner store, to the Lotto counter, to driving down the Gardiner at rush hour.
What are the ones that stood out for you?
I'm guessing most of the content you came across was unmemorable and conveyed nothing interesting, dynamic or engaging?
I'm sure most people would have no recollection of the content, save a small percentage of customers.
Is this bad? I'll cover that in a second.
First off, the messaging. The single most important piece of the puzzle. Sure, a nice big flat screen with cool graphics might get a nod from someone interested in the hardware, but most people will pass it by and disregard anything on the screens.
This is where Content becomes more important than anything else.
A moving image will only capture a viewers attention for, oh, half a second, (there is research that corroborates this)
The viewer then will decide in the next second or two whether to keep looking or glance away.
In that time frame, you, the viewer must then become a participant in the message.
So many things happening at the same time! How will you ever get the message across?
Gone are the days when a technologies company can put up a screen with a powerpoint and hope someone JUST MIGHT look at it.
You must deliver a timely message, effectively and concisely in and to a frenetic world. (The words of my sage mentor, Steven Graham)
So, going back, why don't you remember? Well you kinda do, and I will get into that next but it also addresses part of the problem of super saturation and zero content or messaging.
It is important to deliver a quick, happy little message that will get people to bite VS regurgitating a mass of dialogue and information onto a busy world.
Along with that, worrying about the aesthetics over the function further devalues your image. I can remember dozens of ads that looked cool, but what were they selling me?
How Small Percentages don't always mean something bad, but lets keep going up anyway
With screens everywhere, how can one man or woman remember or even be influenced by all that noise?
Some of the research I was part of showed a recollection of less than 10%. I do not remember the actual figures but it was pretty tiny. (If I'm wrong, please correct me)
Is that Bad? Look at the trends in the data and ya, that's pretty amazing.
7 million viewers per week (in foot traffic), and maybe less than 10% recollection (howabout we say 5%) and a further less incentive (5% of that) to "grow the basket" (A term I'm trying to push as a way to explain per customer purchase growth)
Lets do the Math.
5% of 7 million is 350 000 (maybe saw or paid attention to the screens) and probably %5 (probably even lower) actually bought something more because of the screens, so we're at 17, 500 people "grew their Basket"
at an average of 5 dollars (from what I remember of the statistics)
That equates to
$87, 500 extra per week X 52 weeks in the year equals an additional 4 million dollars!!!
That's impressive.
So, capturing the attention of everyone isn't really that important, but dammit, let's get that number higher! So how do we do that? We do it through strategy. We need to separate your brand and in-store image apart form everyone else.
I will expand more on strategy later.
Narrowcasting, or in-store advertising is an exciting new medium that was daunting and difficult at first. (I was there in the trenches watching people sink their lives into it)
but it will grow to replace TV for ad money spent, mark my words, the potential for direct, to POP communications is far more powerful than any TV commercial. You'll see a huge spike in spending in web and in-store.
The only thing really narrowcasting is missing is the credulity and awareness that TV brings.
Once that hurdle is over come Narrowcasting will become the next big thing. Hell, look at the internet and how online marketing and advertising has so dramatically shifted from the wild west to the staple of international communications!
Please comment folks! We shall talk about this more later.
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