McDonalds, watch and eat.

Most media savvy organisations now have a YouTube site, where videos featuring company news, information and product demonstrations, help generate brand awareness and leads. But the internet is not the only platform where businesses can communicate to customers via video.

Digital signage provides an ideal opportunity to communicate directly to customers, and increasingly companies are using screens around stores and business locations to speak to their customers in an environment uncluttered by other media.

One of the latest companies to incorporate their own TV channel is McDonalds. Using screens around their restaurants, the fast food giant is planning to relay information and news as well as entertainment features.

The McDonald’s Channel will first appear in 800 restaurants in Southern and Central California and are expected to reach up to 20 million customers each month, which is more than many prime time TV shows manage.

Advantages of Corporate TV Channels

Corporate TV channels provide several advantages to larger businesses such as McDonalds as they take advantage of the high numbers of people that not only come through the doors, but also remain to eat, becoming a captive audience.

But even smaller businesses that don’t receive the scale of customers of McDonalds can benefit from corporate news feeds on their digital signage networks, as it allows companies to speak directly to their customers, bypassing news organisations and advertising companies. And with television becoming a fragmented market, due to the rise of digital technology and increase in channels, corporate television is becoming an increasingly popular method of reaching customers.

As with the McDonalds example, providing news, entertainment and feature programming, helps to encourage viewership of a digital signage screen. When content is all commercial, viewers soon mentally switch off, but by interlacing branding and advertisements in with something an audience wants to see, commercial TV can effective at advertising and generating brand awareness.

As Leland Edmondson, founder of ChannelPort, the company behind the McDonalds TV network says: “The intention is to catch and engage the customer, and then enhance their experience … This network is not intended to be all about McDonald’s. It is all about the consumer.”

The Rise of Corporate TV Channels is a post from: Armagard

With indoor digital signage screens, only customers inside the store only view the; however, with an outdoor screen, people that may not have intended on visiting the store view the message, and may be attracted inside.

Using an outdoor screen to encourage customers to visit a store is only as effective as the message displayed and the number of people that get to see it. A screen outdoors with even a great promotion will not be worthwhile if few people get to see it, so maximising the views a screen can get will greatly boost its effectiveness.

Outdoor screens have the advantage over indoor displays in that there is less digital competition, These days, digital signage is everywhere, from shopping malls and railway stations, to pharmacies and petrol stations. Outdoor digital signage, however, is still fairly rare, with only major city centres and towns utilising them for advertising.

Simply placing a screen in the front of a shop may not be enough for people to notice the content. If the screen is not facing the oncoming audience, is too high or the content isn’t eye0catching enough, people may not give it any attention. Also, compared to indoor screens, outdoor displays have a far shorter dwell time. People only view the average outdoor digital signage display for a second or two, which isn’t long to get whatever message your are trying to convey across.

To maximise the success of an outdoor screen, you first need to position the screen at the right angle, facing the coming audience. Keep the screen as near to eye-level; as possible, or failing that, angle it towards their eye-line.

Secondly, messages need to be simple. Complicated and intricate content won’t work with such a limited dwell time so all messages need to be simple, bold and to the point. Using a large, prominent font as well as using the largest screen size you can get away with, the bigger the better as often people view an outdoor screen whilst travelling past in public transport or from the other side of the road, so the bigger and clearer the content the better.

Making the Most of an Outdoor Digital Signage Screen is a post from: Armagard

Digital signage has been around for about ten years now, but what does its future hold, and will we still be viewing out of home screens in a decade’s time?

Digital signage has been around since modern flatscreen TVs first came on to the market. The lightweight, unobtrusive nature LCD and plasma screens made them ideal for placing on walls to provide advertising content.

Soon our shopping malls, airports, and other locations that receive large amounts of visitors became littered with digital signage displays, and they are now found in doctor’s surgeries, gas stations, pharmacies and outside as outdoor digital signage.

Today, the global digital signage market is a multi-billion dollar market and by 2017, it is estimated that globally the digital signage market will be worth $14 billion.

Currently, indoor digital signage is beginning to wane and receiving less growth than outdoor digital signage. As there are far less outdoor screens around, there is obviously much more room for outdoor digital signage to expand—but does this mean that indoor is reaching a zenith?

With the advent of technologies such as high definition, glasses free 3D and facial recognition software, digital signage is expected to advance, maybe not in installations, but advance in sophistication, providing both consumers and advertisers more opportunities.

Digital signage is here to stay, but the shape and design of future out of home systems may make the modern digital signage display as antiquated as the VCR.

The Future of Digital Signage is a post from: Armagard

Advertising

Providing advertising and promotion for restaurants and diners help draw in customers. During lunch and other meal times, town center eateries face stiff competition. Often, customers by on impulse and good advertisements and images can help sway their decisions.

Digital signage provides the ability to schedule different promotions for different times of the day. Digital signage also provides moving imagery adding to the appeal for customers who may find the steaming meals or glasses dripping with cold moisture more tempting than static images.

Digital Menus

The same advantages apply to the use of digital menu boards. Even fast food outlets with set menus have the need to promote specials and make regular changes, which digital signage can accommodate.

Digital menus are also good at promotion, especially when they are placed in windows or even outdoors. Increasingly, outdoor digital signage is found in drive-thru lanes, which provides the ability to push promotional items and specials.

Order Taking

Automating service can improve efficiency of a restaurant, avoiding the risk of jumbling up paper-slip orders, or even losing them. A screen in the kitchen displaying orders provides the kitchen staff with clear information as to what food has been ordered, when and at which table, helping smooth running of the kitchen.

Running digital displays in a kitchen can cause potential problems, however, due to the heat from ovens and fryers. Screens operating in these conditions require decent protection. Housing them in LCD enclosures ensures they can operate in kitchen environments; the enclosure provides sufficient cooling and temperature control and defends the screen from liquid splashes, impacts and other hazards.

Restaurant Digital Signage is a post from: Armagard

Some posters are iconic

With innovative typography and colour images, posters became an expressive form of communication, combining advertising and art. For over a century, posters have been one of the most widespread forms of advertising virtually everything from commodities, events to political propaganda.

The poster’s success owes much to its use of artistic form, with many posters from the last century now iconic images, such as the wartime posters: of  “Lord Kitchener Wants You” from the United Kingdom, “Uncle Sam wants you” from the United States, or posters declaring: “Loose Lips Sink Ships”

While posters have been with us for many years, times are now changing, with the humble poster having gone through dramatic changes over the last decade.

Digital posters are now an increasingly common sight. In shopping malls, airports and subways stations, digital advertising posters are almost as common as their static rivals, and their use is continually expanding.

Digital advertising posters have many advantages of static posters. Firstly, they don’t need replacing as new content can be uploaded instantly and remotely. Secondly, while eye-catching art on static posters helps draw the eye, moving images and bright colours of a high definition screen are even more so, especially to a modern audience so used to interactive media.

Digital posters

And it’s not just indoor locations where the humble poster is being usurped. Outdoor digital signage, while still trailing behind indoor digital signage is year-on-year becoming more popular. With the falling price of LCD screens, the use of outdoor LCD enclosures and the growing popularity of digital signage, the humble poster, may at last have had its day.

Modern Advertising Posters is a post from: Armagard

The Outdoor Digital Signage Totem and the Personal Branded Retail Totem are the latest products in Armagard’s burgeoning range of digital signage hardware.

The Outdoor Digital Signage Totem is a floor standing enclosure designed to accommodate both 46” and 47” screens, protecting them from the rigours of an outdoor environment. Built to IP64 (NEMA 4) the Outdoor Totem Enclosure provides effective defence against rainfall, temperature extremes, outdoor weather conditions and high impact forces.

Standing 1.8 metres tall, the Outdoor Digital Signage Totem is integrated with both heating and air filtration modules, providing temperature control and maintaining a stable and consistent interior environment, ensuring lasting efficiency of you screen.

Able to accommodate almost any make or model of LCD or plasma screen, the Outdoor Digital Signage Totem is an aesthetically attractive display and is shipped ready for installation of your screen.

The Personal Branded Retail Totem is a standalone indoor digital sign allowing personal branding on the sign itself. Available in 32” and 42”, this floor standing digital signage enclosure provides maximum visibility for your displays.

With removable branded panels, both front and back, this attractive-looking digital signage totem provides more opportunities to increase brand awareness for your business, and is ideal for retail areas, receptions, studios, conference centres, hotels, exhibitions and concourses.

Armagard will be demonstrating both their outdoor and retail totem at InfoComm 2011 (June 15-17, Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida) along with a range of their LCD enclosure products at Booth #4370.

Branded retail totem

Outdoor digital signage totem

Armagard Launch Two New Digital Signage Products is a post from: Armagard

A common sight around shopping malls, concourses, airports, and transport hubs, now many retail stores are using digital screens for promotion, both in-store and outdoors.

Digital signage has several benefits for retailers and stores:

Branding

Branding is important for a lot of retailers, and in particular chain stores. Generating a brand can be extremely difficult, but once achieved a brand can be more important than pricing or other shopping factors. Brand building is about generating trust, an image and a reputation.

Some companies generate a huge customer base on their brand alone—think of the big brands in computing, mobile phones and fashion (such as Apple, Nike and Microsoft); many of these generate sales based on brand alone, with people confident of products before they’ve even tried or even seen it.

Generating a brand is a gradual process; the most important aspects to generating a brand are the logo, the company name, and the strap line—again think of some of the big brand names and the logos and straplines they employ.

Digital signage provides an ideal platform for generating branding. With its aesthetics and the ability to provide full motion imagery digital signage provides eye-catching, and most importantly, memorable branding.

Promotion

Promotion is an integral part of retailing. Retailers are always trying to promote new items, over-stocked items and seasonal products. In-store and outdoor promotion has traditionally been done with static signs and posters; however, static signs have several disadvantages. Not only does the printing of promotional posters cost money, it also takes time—not just to get the posters printed but also to erect them. With chain stores this can mean that some stores take longer to begin the promotions than others leading to disparities with promotions.

With digital signage, promotional content can be uploaded simultaneously across stores. And with no need of printing—and with the right content templates, promotions can be generated in-house—avoiding the need, and time delays, in using outside contractors.

Digital Signage and Branding

Retail and Service Industry – Digital Signage Devices is a post from: Armagard

One result of this change in televisions is that the humble TV is no longer found only in people’s front rooms providing entertainment; TVs are now just as likely to be seen out of home used for all sorts of purposes from advertising, branding, promotion and providing information.

Shopping malls, airports and airports are littered with these digital signage screens as are many retail stores, but placing a modern screen outside can also boost trade and outdoor digital signage has several uses for retailers and service providers:

Promotion

Front of store signage is an important aspect to retailing and sales promotion. While static signage pasted in widow displays are a noticeable medium, using an outdoor screen provides a more engaging and eye-catching form of providing this content.

Different styles of outdoor screen also have different impacts. While digital posters and wall-mounted units can provide this sort of content, using outdoor digital totems for retail provide a feature for the outside front of a store that can engage customers as they pass.

Promotional content can be altered easily with outdoor digital signage, making it ideal for chain stores that can ensure nationwide promotions are implemented at the same time.

Providing Information

For service retailers such as restaurants or leisure facilities, keeping customers informed is an essential part of the business. Providing menus at front of restaurants, for instance, can generate custom as patrons no clearly what is on offer. While leisure facilities and transport companies can use screens to provide schedules, timetables and keeping customers informed of changes and delays.

As an outdoor screen can provide real time information this enables customers to receive up-to-the-minute information, avoiding complaints and ensuring they are kept happy.

How an Outdoor Screen can Boost your Business is a post from: Armagard

The digital signage displays vary in size, shape and complexity, but essentially they all boil down to a basic concept: an LCD screen (or plasma) that plays advertising, promotions, branding or marketing content.

Benefits of an LCD Ad Player

Understanding the benefits of using a screen for retail promotion is dependent on what you want to achieve with it. Some retailers use LCD ad players to draw customers into a store, the bright, vivid and moving imagery often more effective than static signs and printed posters (although as with any advertising, WHAT you play will make a big difference).

For chain stores, a common problem with static signage and printed posters is ensuring all campaigns and adverts remain consistent, some stores, due to delivery or staffing problems may take several days to fit their store with the relevant media, but with an LCD ad player this problem is eliminated as content can be uploaded centrally and remotely, and in real time.

Furthermore, unlike static imagery, with an LCD ad player, content can be changed to meet specific needs throughout the day; coffee shops, cafes, diners and restaurants can promote breakfast menus in the morning then change to lunch promotions in the afternoon, for example.

Another reason many retailers look to an LCD advertisings screen is aesthetics. Even the most elegantly designed print poster loses out on looks when it comes to a modern LCD ad player. And with such a variety of shapes and sizes, from digital posters, floor-standing ad players, totems and kiosks, retailers can find something that suits both their image and size/space needs.

Cost savings can also be made with advertising screens, particularly for chain stores, despite the initial costs of hardware and content creation, as over time, when you consider the savings in print costs, logistics and man-hours, savings can soon amount to a significant amount.

LCD Ad Player

Tools for Retailers – LCD Ad Players is a post from: Armagard

Currently, outdoor digital signage takes £1 in £8 of existing outdoor UK advertising revenue and is continuing to see year-on-year growth. And consumers want outdoor digital signage, according to recent research put out by a leading outdoor advertiser; however, existing outdoor advertisers are not satisfying the needs of consumers, the research claims.

The research, conducted by leading out of home advertiser, JCDecaux, found that consumers have high expectations of outdoor digital signage, wish to see it, and unlike other forms of advertising, such as internet adverts—which they find annoying and interrupts their online experience—wish to see outdoor digital signs on their commute as it helps to pass the time and adds value to their journey..

However, the research also concluded that consumers feel disappointed with many brands that utilize digital signage, and failing to meet customer’s expectations, and that customers wish to see more engaging and entertaining content; brands that ran simple static posters were “missing a trick and failing to meet customer expectations,” suggested the report compiler.

Making it Appealing

Making outdoor digital signage appealing is one of the challenges, but this research does demonstrate that unlike other forms of advertising and marketing—people actually want to see it.

Some of the more successful outdoor digital signage campaigns manage to engage customers in an entertaining way, while still managing to promote their brands and products. Of course, the challenges of outdoor can be such that striking the right balance can be difficult. Dwell time can be shorter for outdoor (particularly in bad weather), but it’s not just a footfall audience, but also travellers on buses, cars and taxis can view your sign, who may watch a screen for longer, especially when stuck in traffic or waiting at a bus stop.

And you don’t have to be a big name advertiser to provide outdoor digital signage to commuters. An outdoor screen placed at the front of a high street store can be often be visible to both passersby and commuters, and are often not as expensive as people think. A simple commercial grade screen placed in an outdoor LCD enclosure can provide a simple and inexpensive outdoor digital sign. Although providing the content is another challenge …

Customers Want to See Outdoor Digital Signage According to Research is a post from: Armagard