Monday, March 03, 2008

Adweek: GameStop TV boosts sales 19-36%

GameStop TV, while not technically falling under POPAI's definition of digital signage (though that didn't stopping them from taking home the gold medal at the Digital Signage Awards last year), is apparently showing some seriously good performance characteristics, at least if this article by AdWeek is anything to go on. The article notes that:
The [in-store TV] strategy appears to be working. Last week Nielsen Media Research released a study showing that the titles advertised on GameStop TV showed an increase in sales of between 19 and 36 percent. Products mentioned during the broadcast, but not in specific ads, also got a boost, although it was not as significant. On average, the unadvertised products saw a sales spike of 20 percent.

Several different game genres, including sports, action and first-person shooters, were studied. Each showed similar increases in sales. In addition, the amount of time people spent in the store grew by about 50 percent. (Nielsen Media Research, like Adweek, is part of the Nielsen Co.)
I'm not sure that you'll find many retailers or product manufacturers who feel that a "mere" 20% sales spike is insignificant, but if these numbers are to be believed and products featured on the programming routinely do see lifts of 30% or more, GameStop (and Channel M, the company that makes their content) may be running the most successful in-store TV network that I've heard about.

Nielsen Media Research is known for being pretty thorough and regimented, so I'm going to assume that their lift numbers are properly controlled-for and exclude things like newly-launched products that are often accompanied by massive multichannel campaigns and are notoriously difficult to account for.
If that's the case, we all need to run around shouting these results at the tops of our lungs. For now though, I'm going to keep the irrational exuberance to a minimum and see if I can find some more data on this.

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