I'm participating in a panel today on "better practices" and the future of measurement for digital signage at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas. I'm on the panel with Paolo Prandoni, the founder of Quividi, a company providing measurement solutions, and Herb Sorensen, the founder of TNS Sorensen. I feel mildly outclassed!
But I find myself in a quandary: the information that Herb and Paolo will be presenting in our session is excellent - it provides a lot of details on measurement techniques, data sources, and some of the thinking on how to bring multiple data sources from within a store together to get some real understanding of in-store media. At the same time, I find myself in the same place I've been in since I first started covering in-store media as an analyst. While I have been very positive about the opportunities and benefits that in-store media can provide, I find myself playing the role of "buzzkill" when it comes to measurement.
I believe it is critically important to understand how in-store media works - what messages work, what formats of messages work (long vs. short, for example), how people view it, and most importantly how it changes consumers' shelf approach and ultimately what they buy.
But it's this last part that seems to get lost in the scramble for retail real estate, and I believe it is this fundamental gap that is one of the biggest barriers to the growth of the space. Here's the Catch-22: media buyers need critical mass before in-store media becomes an interesting place for them to invest their budget dollars. They also very much want to understand how in-store media compares to other places they could invest (like TV advertising, for example) - and so have pushed the industry to focus on defining in-store media measurements in terms that translate easily to traditional mass-media buys.
On the other side of the coin are retailers. They don't really care that much about what media buyers want, except perhaps for their own internal media buyers. In some cases, this has manifested to an extreme where in-store media plays purely a brand-building role for a retailer, and no external advertising is allowed. Why? Because the retailer is there to sell stuff - the stuff that happens to be on the shelf in that store right this very minute. And before retailers let media networks in their stores en masse - or even before they build their own networks - they need to understand how in-store media helps them sell more stuff.
Sell more stuff vs. find more "eyeballs" or the CPM's (cost per thousand viewers) that media buyers use as their measure of value is a big gap. Until we cross that chasm, in-store media will go nowhere.
Discussion Questions: Do you agree the in-store media needs to "sell more stuff"? What measures do we need to understand in order for in-store media to progress?