RETAIL, AI, DIGITAL SIGNAGE, DEEPSIGHT TOOLKIT
02 February 2022
In-Store Smart Digital Signage: A Walkthrough
Smart digital signage is exploding in retail, and for good reason!
Smart digital signage is overtaking traditional media in-store. This is due to its dynamic, data-centric nature and the return on investment that it provides for retailers. Smart signage is a product that is made up of various technologies, of which audience analytics technology is a major component. It far surpasses the capabilities of traditional digital signage as it not only enables retailers to receive audience analytics data about their customers in the real-world but it also allows them to sell ad space to third party advertisers programmatically using the audience data collected. This creates a new window of opportunity for retailers to increase their revenue and monetize their retail media network.
What you can measure with smart AI digital signage:
- Audience composition (age, gender)
- Viewing behaviors per customer persona group
- Campaign performance (no.of viewers, impressions, attention time etc)
- Customer mood
What you can do with smart AI digital signage
- Deploy hyper-personalized content to every viewer
- Sell ad space to suppliers and third-party advertisers
- Increase ROI and sales as a result
In order to get a better sense of how this type of technology works in a real-world scenario we thought we would walk you through a customer’s path to purchase journey in a supermarket. Demonstrating how our audience analytics product, DeepSight, works in conjunction with signage to drive customer engagement, build brand awareness and prompt customer action.
The Customer Journey Begins
Scenario: A female customer in her 30’s enters the store. At the entrance she sees a digital signage screen that is displaying a welcome message. As she gets closer to the screen the content switches to ad content. The ad she sees is about the supermarket’s own deli and fresh cut ham and it triggers a thought that she needs to get ingredients to make her children’s lunches. The customer views the ad for a number of seconds and continues in-store. Later she purchases the advertised ham.
How does the AI work?
Prior to the customer coming to the store, retail owners will have a planned weekly or monthly marketing strategy, with specific content that they wish to run on their digital displays. The retail owner will create content for multiple screens at the store and will set different rules in the cms such as (play ads x amount of times a day in afternoon). Each of the in-store displays will be equipped with cameras, embedded, or attached to them that can anonymously tell when someone is coming within close proximity to the screen while also determining their demographics. That’s when the welcome message switches to personalized ad content.
Browsing The Aisles & End-Caps
Scenario: The customer continues through the supermarket selecting groceries. While browsing for beer she notices a promotional ad on a digital screen placed at eye-level. The ad is positioned on the beer cabinet and it is for a new light beer with a new product offer of two for the price of one. She puts down the beer she is holding and grabs two of the beers that are on offer instead.
How does the AI work?
The beer supplier logs into the CMS owned by the store and creates several ad variations of their beers to run, setting rules in the supermarkets CMS such as; show light beers to women and show lagers to men etc. Once the campaigns have been created and rules set, the content is pushed out to the store’s screens. When a person is detected in front of the screen, the technology will determine if they are a man or a woman and play content that is targeted to their demographic group. Additional insights such as age, attention time, mood etc are also obtained.
Paying For Goods at The Checkout
Scenario: The female customer has now finished shopping and is ready to pay for her groceries. She starts to place her groceries onto the conveyor belt. As she is doing this she sees a digital display above the confectionery rack showing an advertisement for family summer getaways in the Caribbean. She views the ad with interest looking at it for 8 seconds (which is at the longer attention range for most ads) and then exits the supermarket.
How does the AI work?
A third party advertiser, who is looking to advertise holidays, logs into their ad exchange and sees real-time impression and demographic data about the store’s audience. They see that their target audience (in this case women in their 30-40’s) is present in-store at that time and they seize the opportunity to reach them. They then purchase the ad space in the supermarkets media network and their ad is then played in-store.
Our audience analytics product, DeepSight is the perfect smart technology to incorporate in your in-store signage. A scalable and privacy compliant software that can offer google analytics type metrics about your in-store advertising that bridge the gap between online technology and on-premise consumers.