Monday, July 30, 2007

Tesco TV to become Tesco Screens

As aka.tv notes, the name change is more than symbolic, it represents a significant change in direction for the massive digital signage network, in terms of both content form and function. The biggest change is management group Dunnhumby's realization that digital signage isn't like TV, it's like POP displays, and their changes in relation to this have yielded spots that have driven advertised products an extra 5-25%. As Dunnhumby’s Joel Hopwood notes, "You can forget about the idea that the audience is going to put anything like the cognitive effort they put into a 30-second TV spot when they’re in-store," though he did note that "referencing a pre-existing TV spot is fine."

I'd take that one step further and suggest that the vast majority of shoppers aren't going to put any great cognitive effort into anything other than shopping, and even that is probably being generous. The result of Dunnhumby's efforts is that, "five-second executions without sound are delivering sales uplifts of five to 18 percent... [and the] latest ‘brand sting’ executions have performed extremely strongly, delivering 25 percent sales uplift for the Wrigleys Extra Big One launch."

Those results, if sustainable, are certainly noteworthy, though without the proper context it's hard to say whether it's a good deal for advertisers or not. For example, a 25% increase in chewing gum sales is nice, but if that yields additional profits that are less than the cost of advertising on the network, it's not nice enough. Considering that Hopwood used them as an example leads me to believe that's probably not the case, but you get the idea.

It's nice to see that there are big companies out there that are starting to "get it." Too many others would have simply pulled the plug and written off the network as a giant capital loss, but Tesco recognized that while the potential of the thing was still good, there was a problem with its execution and management. From the looks of it, the significant steps they've taken to try and fix them are starting to pay off.

Tags: Tesco TV, digital signage

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

For your review. http://datacalltech.com/news/ (see NEC and Data Call Technologies Turn Terminals into Information Hubs through Customized Delivery of News, Content and Data)

I apologize for not linking in directly, but we are still a few weeks away from instituting separate blogs for our clients.

I will be happy to subscribe to your blog and look forward to joining your conversation.

You might mention this story in more than one of your blogs.

BTW, loved the follow up on context for ads. Unfortunate—but funny: http://digitalsignagenews.blogspot.com/2007/07/context-makes-even-good-ads-look-bad.html.

Rufus said...

Nine months further on and digital signage is being seen as alive an well. There is an article on the ERM retail media group blog about digital signage and how it is standing up to the global economic downturn. AKA are saying that digital signage is effectively immune to the economic climate. All in all I think that we can be well pleased at how many companies are demonstrably begining to 'get it'.