DS-IQ launches digital signage marketing performance service

While I haven't actually been able to evaluate DS-IQ's technology first hand (since they require an NDA to demo their product, and I'm not going to sign one of those), I've spoken with several customers and friendly competitors who have looked at implementing or integrating their tracking system into a digital signage network. Their press release has a pretty good explanation of what the service is, so I'll just clip that in:

Tom Opdycke, DS-IQ's president and CEO, explained, "Development of our service was driven by discussions with leading retailers and advertisers who are seeking new sources of actionable intelligence to inform marketing decisions in real-time. They understand in-store digital media can both build brands and drive product sales, but until now, no direct, continuous analysis of the sales impact of digital campaigns has been possible. That's what we deliver: Internet-like advertising measurement and accountability for the brick and mortar world."

DS-IQ's Web service is a complete solution that uses machine learning to isolate the sales impact of multiple variables such as creative, ad length, day-parting, or sign placement. Easy-to-understand charts and dashboards present detailed results, in real time, allowing marketers to track campaigns from their desktop.

The operational complexity of a major retail chain's in-store network is daunting; 100's of ads in every cycle, 1000's of stores and millions of transactions, making ongoing manual analysis of each campaign virtually impossible. DS-IQ's service masks this complexity with proprietary technology that automatically performs granular analysis, and then makes reports available to authorized viewers on the web. Each retail network then becomes a closed-loop learning engine where every transaction provides insight and incremental schedule improvements can be made to boost sales.

I think there is a market need for 3rd party analysis of digital signage network performance, and it will be interesting to see how DS-IQ is able to compete with the big guys like ACNielsen, Arbitron and maybe even ClearChannel as they start to increase their presence in this market.