Digital Signage: Why Going With The Flow Makes A Lot Of Sense

Tapping into the American love affair with television gives digital signage communicators instant rapport with their audiences.

If you aren't obsessed with communications, marketing and technology like I am, you may not be aware that media consumption patterns among the public are experiencing a dramatic change.

Case in point is the book publishing industry. Consider this from a May 29 article by Motoko Rich of The New York Times: (book) "...publishers have continued to report double-digit sales declines." The same article quoted Borders Group reporting that in the first quarter of the year sales fell 12 percent.

Another glaring example is the newspaper industry. U.S. newspaper circulation declines have accelerated since fall 2008. A story from Tim Arango in The New York Times the industry experienced an average fall off of 7 percent from the same period the previous year.

While it appears interest in reading newspapers and books is declining, watching television is more popular than ever. Findings from a Nielsen report released in February reveal average Americans spent a record 151 hours of time watching television per month. That's up six hours from the same period the year before. A CNN story about the findings also found America's love affair with pre-recorded entertainment, and more specifically the DVR, helped to push time spent viewing even higher.

Marketers, corporate communicators, advertising agencies and anyone else with a message to communicate would do well remembering that while people still read, video -whether it's on a TV, a Web site, a mobile phone, a portable DVD player or some other device is today the undisputed champion of media.

Those same folks who are weighing the potential use of digital signage to communicate with the public should give serious consideration to the fact that we as Americans are immersed in video. Why fight the current? Go with the flow and capitalize on the power of video to attract attention, build interest, captivate, persuade and communicate.

On its face, digital signage offers a means for nearly any size of enterprise to tap into this lock that video has on most Americans and begin communicating with people in a medium they find appealing and comfortable. Without question, there are numerous reasons professional communicators should select digital signage as the medium to use, but none is stronger than this simple fact: People in the United States don't simply love TV; they can't get enough of it. Best of all, digital signage taps into this love affair without the expense and headaches of actually delivering "real" television.

However, just because it isn't "real" TV in the sense that digital signage generally isn't dependent on transmission of a radio frequency signal to deliver content, doesn't mean that it can present content  -i.e. graphics, animation, text and video-  that's anything less in quality than what people expect to see on their home TVs. Otherwise, the digital signage effort will squander the opportunity to piggyback on the people's preference for television.

In the next few columns, I will detail the reasons why digital signage is the right medium for many of today's common communications tasks. But before I jump headlong into that topic, I thought it best to state the most fundamental reason up front: digital signage draws on the credibility of TV with the public and leverages its similarity to television to instantly establish a comfortable rapport with its viewers.