Walmart decides not to continue with PRISM media measurement

From the "surprise, surprise" department...

Walmart has concluded that, while Nielsen's initial run of PRISM measurements were useful enough to generate some customer insights, they won't be continuing with the program in 2009. As AdAge reports:

"Walmart was pleased with the insights they gleaned" from the PRISM pilot but decided not to participate in the national syndicated service "consistent with their internal data-sharing policies." To participate in the pilot, Walmart last year partially lifted a ban that had been in place since 2001 on sharing sales data with syndicators such as Nielsen and Information Resources Inc.

Other major backers of the research effort, including Target, Kroger, P&G, Unilever and Kraft, are still planning to push the service in the coming year, but Walmart accounts for a large portion of overall shopping dollars, so having them out of the research pool isn't going to be good news for anybody hoping to purchase Nielsen PRISM data to get a better idea for what's going on inside of the retail giant.

In addition to being compliant with Walmart's own regulations about sharing data with syndicators like Nielsen, continuing with PRISM probably would have meant duplicating some work between that effort and their own in-store measurement practices, which are slated to use DS-IQ as part of their new Walmart Smart network of digital signs.

At this point, I wonder whether Walmart never really intended to go forward with PRISM, but was merely using that program as a way to verify that their own DS-IQ data was accurate. I bet Nielsen made them a good deal in order to get them on board in the first place, so for Walmart it would have been a relatively low-cost way of getting a top-notch research firm to qualify their competing offering.

Pretty sneaky, eh?

Tags: digital signage, walmart, media measurement

OOH ratings: Arbitron's in, Nielsen's out

I've seen so many things attributed to the crappy economy at this point that I'm having trouble keeping things straight.  Does it mean harder times ahead, or more opportunities than ever? Less business or more business? Good things for the digital signage industry, or bad?

The latest news from Arbitron doesn't do anything to clear up my confusion. As today's press release indicates,

"EYE, the mall media specialist, has signed an agreement with Arbitron Custom Research to measure the effectiveness of mall-based advertisements and the psychographics of EYE mall shoppers.

Arbitron will conduct on-site mall surveys in multiple markets across the United States. This study will be comprised of two parts: adult and teen. The adult study will evaluate the effectiveness of EYE advertising based on demographic information as well as specific questions concerning shopping behavior, shopper segmentation and advertising appeal."

Contrast that with the recent news from Nielsen, which noted that,

"The failing economy just took its first research casualty. Nielsen and IMMI announced late Friday (Nov. 7) they would suspend their syndicated Out-of-Home Report, which measured viewing to TV outside the home. Since launching in April, the service only managed to sign two clients, ESPN and Zenith Optimedia.

"In the current climate, there is limited economic support for this new measurement service," the company said in a prepared statement.

The final report will cover viewing through Nov. 9, 2008.

Nielsen didn't completely close the door on the project. "We recognize that measuring the out-of-home component of television viewing is an important need for our clients. We will continue to work on out-of-home measurement solutions, including efforts with IMMI," the company said.

The service was based on a panel of 500 participants in six local markets (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston and Denver) plus 1,700 national panelists. To collect data, IMMI gives respondents a cell phone equipped with software that uses pattern matching to track media exposure."

I understand that this is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. After all, Arbitron's bread-and-butter are the self-contained research projects like the kind EYE has requested. Meanwhile, Nielsen had taken a much more ambitious approach of measuring the impact to a general set of OOH stimuli. Also, while it's unclear that Arbitron could parlay the EYE deal into a larger, more generalized measurement service for digital OOH media, Nielsen could always come back and re-activate their program if there was sufficient demand.

Personally, I don't think the economy had anything to do with Nielsen's suspension of this program. I think there are simply too few traditional media buyers interested in the medium. The people who continue to keep most digital signage networks in business today aren't using Nielsen data or even traditional CPM figures to make their purchase decisions. They're continuing to rely on pilot data and a gut feeling, which will help keep the smaller players alive for now, but could well hamper industry growth when the economy improves.


Tags: digital signage, measurement, advertising

AdAge dotes on real time 'face recognition' for digital signs

I'm pretty sure that my position on the issue of privacy in retail stores and semi-public spaces is pretty well established by now. In today's 3 Minute Ad Age video, we've heard that advertisers have quite a different opinion, likening the data to "outdoor advertising's version of TV's commercial ratings." While that's hardly true -- dOOH measurement data is both more accurate and more sneakily acquired -- I suggest you take a second or two to check the video out, though anybody already familiar with the technology won't hear anything new.

Expect the debate to get turned up a notch in a few weeks. Word on the street is that both POPAI and the ISMI have something to say about the issue.

10% of digital signage networks fail? How's about over 90%?

Haynes tipped me onto this whitepaper (here's an HTML link - thanks Google!) from Futuresource Consulting that suggests, among other things, that nearly 10% of the digital signage networks they studied failed. Specifically: "of almost 100 projects evaluated in depth by Futuresource during the research, 9 failed completely to meet any of the objectives set and 10 were deemed to be only partial successes. Add to that the fact that for a significant proportion it was too early to judge success, the risk of potential failure was high." They list reasons we've all heard before -- lack of clear ROI modelling, lack of advertising proof points, too much network fragmentation and not enough scalability, project complexity and little understanding of content requirements.

I've been doing a presentation on the show/conference circuit for about a year now called "the top 5 mistakes in digital signage and how to avoid them," and based on our larger (but probably less scientific) sample of over 600 networks, the failure rate is much, much higher than 10%. Especially if we're talking ad-supported networks, which seems to be the exclusive focus of the Futuresource research.

How high?

Well, I'll give you the most eye-popping stat: if your team/company doesn't have experience selling advertising, there's a 96% chance your network won't last 18 months.

It's one of those things I repeat in lots of blog articles and presentations, yet not a week goes by when we don't get a call from some startup that's going to take the world by storm (via ad-funded digital signs, of course), without ever having sold an ad, worked at an agency, knowing what a media buyer/planner is, etc.

I think I'll do a bigger study of the differences between our list and the Futuresource list on the WireSpring blog later this week. I'll link back here when I do.

Tags: digital signage, measurement, advertising

TruMedia's promise: we'll never record, share face data

TruMedia and their competition took it on the chin two weeks ago when a NYT article noted the rise of tracking technologies to give out-of-home advertising companies an idea of who's actually looking at their static billboards and electronic signs. Given that the story's slant was pretty negative, and the host of publications that picked up on the story afterwards were undoubtedly so, one of the chief villains of the original piece - TruMedia - took it upon themselves to explain to the world that current-generation tracking technology is probably less invasive than lots of things that pedestrians in the average city already do every day.

Specifically, they noted that they don't record actual video, they have no way of identifying that an individual that walks past on day #1 is the same guy who walks past on day #2, and that they'd never share or store clients' data.

On the one hand, TruMedia did the right thing by trying to confront the problem head-on. Not a lot of people are familiar with today's tracking technologies, even inside the digital signage industry. So when the average joe writer at the Times got wind of this "story," it was not exactly surprising for him to completely blow it out of proportion. However, I'll say one thing: I've seen TruMedia's pitch a number of times, both at conferences and in my office. It's compelling. It's interesting. But it shows a video of a bunch of people looking at a camera, and that makes it confusing. Every time they show a "demo" of their wares, I can see my face, or the faces of prerecorded folks, up on the screen. Perhaps they need to think of a way to better demonstrate their capabilities without giving the uninformed such a thing to latch on to. After all, it's awfully hard to say "we don't store video" while showing stored video.

Yeah, you and I may know it was done expressly for the demonstration, and they had everybody's permission in that case, but companies like TruMedia would be better off never having to try and explain that after the fact.

Tags: digital signage, measurement, tracking, trumedia

Camera-based audience measurement catches some flak

The New York Times has an unintentionally entertaining piece about privacy (or the lack thereof) due to the use of gaze-tracking cameras on certain billboards. The technology in question, provided by Quividi (one of the better gaze-tracking outfits in our experience), isn't anything extraordinary to those of us in the digital signage world: a little camera follows your eyes and examines the characteristics of your face to figure out what you're looking at, and guess some demographic information about you. I say "guess" because that part of the tech still needs some work, in our own experiments at least.

The goal is twofold: first, count the number of people actually looking at your sign. People have all sorts of different ideas about what qualifies as an engaged glance, but Quividi and others can provide you with data about how long a glance lasted, how many people looked, etc. Second, many want to use the demographic data to modify the content in real-time (for example, figuring out that you're a middle-aged woman and showing you more appropriate content for your market).


I'm unconvinced that this second item will ever be practical. The systems will continue to make numerous mistakes (it's just the law of large numbers kicking in), and the cost to produce all of those extra permutations of content will likely exceed any benefit of having slightly better targeting. Heck, it's a small miracle when we can convince our users to make text on their digital signs bigger than 12 point, or to not divide their 40" screens up into a dozen 8" x 6" zones. I can't imagine that the level of sophistication needed to pull off a demographically-aware content swap is going to become commonplace anytime soon, if ever.

However, plenty of people are interested in the measurement aspect of things, which at least makes more sense to me, and can skirt the pesky privacy issues that start to come up when we talk about doing on-the-fly demographic profiling. So why did I first say that the article was unintentionally funny? It was because of quotes like this:

“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”

I hate to break it to you, Mr. Cocks (if that indeed is your real name), but downtown Manhattan has hundreds of cameras monitoring public spaces -- some have been there for over a decade, and gobs more have been added since the 9/11 attacks. So while I agree that privacy is a big issue, and needs to be continually pushed to the forefront when talking about using cameras for measurement and tracking in stores and other public places, the pessimist in me thinks that most people are already to unaware and complacent to ever make a big issue out of it.

Tags: digital signage, measurement, out-of-home advertising

Nielsen to report ratings for digital signage networks

From the MediaPost Digital Out-of-Home Forum in New York comes news that Nielsen, "plans to introduce TV ratings 'pocketpieces' for a variety of place-based television networks." Pocketpieces, which sound like they should be similar to Arbitron's PPM system, are in fact just small reports (i.e. they'd fit in your pocket), that are published weekly in the print and TV biz, but would probably start out as monthlies for digital signage.

Interestingly, the reports will be published on a per-network basis, squashing any early hopes for an authoritative, consolidated perspective for the industry, but that's certainly on the table if the various pocketpieces gain some traction. The article notes that, "the first of the pocketpieces--one for health club video network IdeaCast--would be released in the next 'two to three weeks,' and that another for Gas Station TV would follow shortly after. By September, he said Nielsen would be publishing pocketpieces for as many as 10 place-based television networks."

Readers hoping for a Nielsen-certified approach for handling the measurement of the media may also be disappointed to learn that:

Unlike television and online--where Nielsen manages big consumer panels to measure those media's audience estimates--Lindstrom said the place-based media network reports would reply primarily on compiling and modeling third-party data, such as membership data from health clubs, or transaction data at retail outlets of gas station pumps. He said this would be coupled with primary Nielsen research conducted by telephone that would ascribe demographics and other important information to the gross audience estimates. The method is similar to what Nielsen has been utilizing for the cinema advertising industry for several years, and the advent of Nielsen pocketpieces has helped that medium grow its share of advertising budgets.

So the news is good, but not as good as it could have been. However, where there's money, there's services -- it's one of those laws of the free-market economy. Thus, Nielsen can use the relatively low-cost, low-investment pocketpieces not only to make some quick money up-front, but to also gauge the industry to see if it's ready and willing to buy some higher-end services.

Anybody want to venture a guess as to which other digital signage networks will be honored with Nielsen coverage in the next 12 months or so? Will aggregators like See-Saw ever be able to convince them that their heterogeneous "meta-network" can/should be tracked as a single entity? So many questions....

Tags: digital signage, advertising, measurement

Reactrix study measures interactive signage effectiveness

I don't think it's completely fair to say that the results of Reactrix's new study on their system's effectiveness are directly applicable to interactive kiosks or traditional digital signage networks, since their interactive projection wall thingies are unlike most other installations out there today. However, they play big in the customer experience space, and to that end their results are important in showing the effect that modifying the retail experience can have on advertising message recall.

Reactrix’s Arbitron study focused on two major consumer recording areas: observational, where an Arbitron employee would make note of consumer behavior from a-far, and one-on-one interviews, where an Arbitron employee would ask consumers why they made certain behavioral choices, making special notes regarding audience engagement, dwell time, visitor metrics and demographics. The results were staggering. Out of the 26 million plus mall based consumers who had an opportunity to see a Reactrix STEPscape display, (a number projected by Arbitron based on Reactrix 186 mall-based locations), 92% of them noticed or had their 'eyes-on'
it, 84% stopped to both look at and engaged with it, and 70% actually took the time to interact with it. These consumer 'opt in' statistics, revealed at a time in the industry when consumers are finding it easier and easier to 'opt out' or avoid ads, not only solidify Reactrix promise to clients as an interactive advertising medium but showcase the benefit brands get by placing ads on the innovative digital media network.

I'm not sure that glancing at a bright, shiny light counts as "opt-in." Jokes about ogling women aside, I'd be pretty ticked if that kind of behavior somehow got me listed on a newsletter list or qualified me for telemarketing calls (things I normally associate with being opted in). On the other hand, it'd be hard to argue that actually interacting with the device isn't an implicit opt-in, which is certainly noteworthy given the audience size that Reactrix is talking about (70% of 26 million is over 18 million people).

Of course, the unique nature of the Reactrix system means it's not going to be a reasonable solution in lots of places. In those cases, more traditional self-service and digital signage implementations make more sense (and are likely to get approved by management), so should you choose to rely on these efficacy numbers, your mileage may vary.

Tags: digital signage, reactrix, measurement