Research shows digital signage is more memorable, less annoying than other media
Some caveats to keep in mind
Like any research sponsored by a party with a vested interest in the outcome, these results need to be taken with a grain of salt. That's not to say that either OTX or SeeSaw intends to mislead the industry with this research. In fact, given how open they're being with the data (though I haven't seen it for myself yet), the firms are giving the industry a good (and rare) opportunity to audit itself. However, past experience being what it is, I'll continue to approach all sponsored research cautiously :)
Additionally, there are some things that I'll need to learn more about before deciding how reliable these results are. My first question surrounds the methodology of using online surveys to collect data. This approach is cheap and fast, so it's easy to see why research groups love it. However, people aren't always who they say they are online, and I'd be interested to learn what kind of techniques OTX uses to verify that the 13 year-old girl respondent isn't actually a 55 year-old man, for example. Along the same lines, the respondents indicated that they spend a lot of time online -- 60% said they used the Internet at least 20 hours a week, which is about twice the national average. I thus wonder if the selected group is really representative of the typical US consumer today. I'm sure that Internet usage will continue to increase in this country, and I'd normally have no reason to think that higher Internet usage causes different shopping behavior, but in this particular case 30% of respondents also indicated that they make an online purchase at least once a month, which is also higher than average. Thus, I wonder if the respondent group is simply less likely to be annoyed by out-of-home media because they see less of it, or if they naturally decouple it from the purchase process. On the flip side, they might be more aggravated by Internet ads because they spend more time online.
One final point of concern is that it's hard to say what people were really thinking of when asked about "digital signage". Despite OTX's definition, which intentionally skewed to indoor digital signs (by my reading, anyway), it's definitely possible that readers also lumped in roadside electronic billboards. While these are technically digital signs, they operate under very different conditions and address a very different audience than indoor signs. One could easily see how this might alter people's impressions of what was eye-catching and memorable. While I don't know if there were added controls to weed out answers clearly leaning towards indoor or outdoor signage, it's something I kept in mind while reading the results.
Content from Research shows digital signage is more memorable, less annoying than other media provided by WireSpring. Copyright © 2000-2007 WireSpring Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.Author: Bill Gerba on 2007-10-30 14:55:50