Late in 2014, researchers in Microsoft’s Canadian subsidiary surveyed 2,000 people to see if the internet, mobile devices, and social media services really were shortening attention spans as widely suspected. The results? On average, study participants could concentrate on one thing for just eight seconds. That’s down from 12 seconds as recently as the year 2000, and also one second less than the attention span of a typical goldfish.
There’s no question about it. In a world teeming with distractions, grabbing and holding a consumer’s attention is harder than ever—even for providers of flashy, colorful digital signage solutions. The endless parade of visual stimuli competing for your notice these days has eroded the eye-catching power of traditional signage deployments based on plain old rectangular, flat-panel displays.
“We are so inundated with information from our smartphones to our tablets, laptops, and most recently digital signage, that new shapes, sizes, and locations will be needed to emphasize a message and make it memorable,” says digital signage analyst Alan Brawn, of Brawn Consulting LLC, in Vista, Calif.
Signage vendors know it, too, and are responding with a wave of innovative new technologies designed to be all but un-ignorable. Though some are years away from mainstream status, leading-edge channel pros are exploring their potential already.
Jaw-Dropping and Budget-Busting
Much of today’s innovation, not surprisingly, centers around the part of a digital signage solution more responsible than anything (short of the content) for attracting and retaining a viewer’s gaze: the display.
OLED displays, for example, are one of several new technologies slowly making their way into the signage solution designer’s arsenal. Brighter and sharper than LCD panels, OLED models also come in larger sizes that enable signage specialists to create wall-filling solutions without assembling a mosaic of separate, smaller devices.
“It’s completely seamless,” says Gary Pinke, president of Ridgewood, N.J.-based signage provider Ten Foot Digital, of solutions built with giant OLED displays, adding that such systems are becoming steadily more common too.“The prices are coming down, so I’m seeing them being used in more creative places,” he says.
“Ultra-high-definition” (Ultra HD) 4K displays are gradually appearing in signage solutions now as well. Until recently, affordable high-resolution panels topped out at 65 inches, notes Hussain Ali, principal of Houston Dynamic Displays, a signage solution consultancy in Houston. Thanks to 4K technology, however, equally sharp products up to 98 inches have begun arriving in mounting numbers. Pricing for such products, moreover, is rapidly dropping into the range of merely high-def panels, and Ali believes their dazzling brightness and clarity can more than justify the extra cost in settings where image quality matters, such as museums.“[If] you’ve got the right content, it’s jaw-dropping,” he says.
Finding such content is neither cheap nor simple at present, though, and Pinke for one questions whether a typical SMB really needs the extra resolution a 4K display provides. “The distance people are viewing these at is just greater than you need 4K for,” he says. “The ROI just doesn’t quite cut it yet to do 4K versus HD.”
Pinke is one of many in the signage channel with similar doubts about the curved displays manufacturers have recently begun shipping. LG and Samsung are two of several vendors that showcased such products at this year’s Digital Signage Expo in February, but while they do make an impression, Pinke concedes, they’re also significantly pricier than flat panels and typically not as sharp.“The resolution on them is still a little loose,” he says.
On the other hand, curved displays open up an entirely new range of possibilities, Pinke observes, citing a restaurant he supports as an example. The owner wants to attach a display showing upcoming orders to a round column near a serving station. In the past, the only option would have been a flat panel that stuck out at both ends. Now Pinke can theoretically use a curved display that lies flat against the pillar instead.
Curved displays offer more than just practical advantages too. Last November, for example, LG Electronics rolled out what it called the world’s two largest OLED displays at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport. Composed of 140 55-inch curved panels, the two installations exert a visual impact that equally large flat displays can’t match.
According to Brawn, however, it’s too soon to know if solutions like that will prove to be more than just a novelty. “Only time will tell if they will become a trend, but they make great food for thought,” he says, noting that prices for curved displays will need to drop substantially before they become anything more than a sporadic presence in signage solutions, especially in the SMB market.
Interaction vs. Intrusion
One recent phenomenon that Brawn does expect to endure is the rise of proximity-based signage solutions capable of exchanging information with nearby smartphones. “This will not supplant traditional digital signage, but enhance it and it expand it beyond the big displays in a local area,” Brawn predicts.
Jason Ault agrees. “It’s a way to entice the customer to further interact with your brand,” says Ault, who is co-founder and COO of Coffman Media, a digital signage solution provider in Dublin, Ohio.
For example, he continues, retailers can automatically give shoppers one-click access to live chat assistance or in-depth product information based on their location in a store, while restaurant owners can automatically send digital menus to diners when they arrive at their table. In a different but equally compelling vein, hospitals, universities, and other organizations that use digital wayfinding solutions can automatically transfer step-by-step directions from a stationary display or kiosk to a visitor’s phone.
According to Ali, businesses can also gain valuable insights from proximity-based applications about purchasing habits, in-store traffic patterns, and more. “People are able to collect a lot of analytics,” he says, which they can then use to improve store layouts, product selection, and sales offers.
At present, most proximity-based signage solutions rely on miniature beacons that exchange information with mobile devices via Bluetooth using one of three dominant standards: Apple’s iBeacon, Google’s Eddystone, or the AltBeacon specification from Radius Networks Inc., of Washington D.C. All three have pros and cons. The great strength of solutions based on iBeacon, for example, is their ability to act on information stored in apps on a user’s smartphone, such as their shirt size or standard latte order. The big problem with solutions like that, though, is how intrusive they can appear.“Some folks do see them as kind of Big Brother,” Ault notes.
Businesses worried about such reactions should consider using Eddystone instead, he continues, as it lets solutions interact with users anonymously, and has the added advantage of being developer-friendly.“It’s adaptable [and] easy to implement,” Ault says, in part because it can connect with ordinary websites rather than mobile apps.
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