Cablecasters Capturing Digital Signage:  Giving Consumers Relevance

Chaotic change—to the tune of billions of dollars—is rapidly churning the troubled waters of advertising, retail marketing, cablecasting and broadcasting. It is also churning the traditional relationships between the ad side and the operational/telecast side of these industries. Yet, as the rather trite (but true) old adage “where one door closes, another opens” conveys, these players must begin wedding their businesses to digital signage in order to better survive in the Brave New World of Giving Consumers Relevance.

Take the local cablecaster in Denver, CO, Comcast. Like most all broadcasters and cablecasters in many larger metro centers, Comcast in the Mile High City has the pieces to add a new revenue stream and a new business model called digital signage to its Triple Play collection of video, telephone and data/broadband delivery.

These tools include content production personal, equipment and facilities; local, regional, national and global content libraries; and local marketing and customer service operations (including billing bases). 
Digital signage is deployed today on over 500,000 U.S. flat-screen monitors, and for the year just ended, The Carmel Group estimates almost $1 billion was generated, toward an estimated $2.5 billion as of year-end 2010. Moreover, this says nothing about the money that will no longer be spent in traditional advertising for shot-gun-like scattered ad messages – aimed at masses of consumers wherever they travel or reside – as ad agencies and their clients realize the importance of sending pin-pointed pitches to precise pods of people.

With the new-found ability to avoid ads, especially those that are thrown at the masses in a typical CPM-fashion, consumers are instead reacting to content, including commercial messages, that help them and is relevant to their lives. A typical consumer today can use satellite radio, an MP3 player, a Digital Video Recorder (DVR), or any number of other tools to duck the ads thrown at them via the traditional media. As but one further example, as they drive, consumers can chose to ignore the same vinyl sign that they pass every days for weeks or months on the way to work.

But take the same consumer and give him or her a specific message that conforms to what he or she wants to buy, and do it on a bright display that is easy a quick to read, and he or she will even accept a limited incursion into their privacy (and what makes them tick), in order to capture that helpful information. Once advertisers find out what individual consumers like and want, more and more doors open to that consumer, especially if the delivery and the message is sensitive and apropos.

Another opportunity for the Comcasts and Time Warner Cables of the Digital Signage World is to build and invest in the operational sides of the new business, buying up and leasing digital signage infrastructure, which they then populate and run, in their own communities. In addition, content delivered to digital signage flat-screen monitors can be specifically adapted to special audiences in special venues, run by special clients, more and more economically and flexibly.

To sum up, digital signage deserves a much closer look by cablecasters across the U.S. and Canada, and beyond those borders, as well. The world is moving toward the mantra of “Relevant Content,” and the match between them is largely there and ready to become more. 

Jimmy Schaeffler is the chairman and chief service officer of The Carmel Group, a 12-year-old Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif.-based consultancy, publisher and conference organizer that focuses on the global, multichannel industry. He can be reached at jimmy@carmelgroup.com or 831-643-2222. He is also the author of the forthcoming NAB/Focal Press Executive Technology Briefing Series book entitled Digital Signage: Software, Networks, Advertising, and Displays: A Primer for Understanding the Business.