Digital Signage – Going large

“Moving from flagship only to full deployment needs careful planning, but ActiVia makes it easy and the rewards great.”

Maximize In-Store Marketing

Whether searching for new, improved ways to enrich the customer experience or a more efficient medium to generate sales uplift, a digital signage network is the ultimate solution. Digital signage is quickly becoming the most powerful way to enhance the in-store experience, providing a more compelling and high-impact message. With digital signage, retail marketers have the power to promote key messages at the point where spontaneous purchase decisions are made.

Dynamic visual messages can be adapted to changing market conditions. If promotional priorities change, content and messaging can quickly be altered. Digital signage also eliminates time delay between customer exposure to a specific message and the ability to purchase a specific product. This unique, state-of-the-art digital media is reaching numerous audiences and assisting businesses as they shift away from traditional mass mediums where consumers quickly filter out advertising.

As technology continues to evolve, digital signage plays an integral role in delivering fast, efficient retail and brand communications. A digital signage network:

• Delivers dynamic, targeted messages at the point of sale
• Builds brand awareness; improves trade dress
• Heightens perceived quality
• Boosts customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Increases sales of products and services
• Enhances the customer experience
• Persuades merchandise selection
• Influences consumer behavior and impulse buying
• Easily adapts to changing market conditions
• Educates consumers
• Facilitates the sale of complex products
• Improves employee productivity
• Ensures centrally managed, brand-compliant messages
• Eliminates costs associated with printed, static signage

The challenge to deploy large scale

The potential benefits of digital signage cause many retailers to explore it.  However there are many pilots of digital signage that have not yet evolved to full scale deployment.  This is often for two main reasons:

• Detailed measurement to create a strong financial case
• Infrastructure limitations.

Measurement

Introducing a new medium into the marketing mix requires detailed and strong evidence of performance and benefit before enterprise wide deployment.  The use of integrated audience measurement and traffic analysis give retailers the missing answers.

Audience measurement and traffic analysis give a detailed answer of what the real impact is from digital signage.  ActiVia for Media by STRATACACHE has integrated both of these powerful tools to give retailers a complete view of how customers respond to media in the store.  Who saw what?  What did they do?  When combined with other store data such as EPOS a detailed quantitative analysis can be done to give a business case that withstands any scrutiny.

Large scale deployment

Often enterprises overlook the challenges associated with distributing large media files to hundreds or thousands of edge locations.  Yet at the core of any digital signage network is the enabling technology's content distribution engine and device management capabilities.  It is easy to manage content to a few sites but get this wrong and at large scale deployment IT networks can suffer, impacting core applications and creating a poor user experiences that stops users wanting to update content which impacts the performance of digital signage.

Content distribution is where ActiVia outperforms!

With roots in content distribution, the solution's patented robust distribution engine has proven to perform exceptionally within the most highly distributed network environments.

ActiVia can easily grow to thousands of locations powering multiple digital displays - up to 250,000 per instance of ActiVia.  The magnitude of the network does not affect performance or change the core system. ActiVia is highly scalable, reliably distributing and delivering content while dependably managing and reporting on external devices within the network.

Many of the largest enterprise deployments use ActiVia to ensure smooth operation and easy control of content across complex store hierarchies.

Taking Digital Signage to the next level

STRATACACHE has invested and developed in the potential for retailers to use digital signage to maximum effect.  This is where we work with retailers to integrate the ActiVia digital signage with audience measurement, traffic analysis and interactive retail merchandising such a touch or movement of products to create real time dynamic content talking directly to the individual customer.  This is an exciting development that is bespoke per customer, but creates a step up in compelling customer experience and sustainable retailer return.

The STRATACACHE Difference

STRATACACHE's award-winning ActiVia for Media is a highly optimized, web-accessible solution for powerful digital marketing that combines a patented content delivery engine with state-of-the-art digital broadcasting technology.  ActiVia for Media manages the digital signage lifecycle for playlist creation, distribution, and monitoring of digital signage networks containing up to 250,000 concurrent devices. With ActiVia for Media, marketing executives can centrally deliver real-time targeted messages to specific locations based on store promotions and inventory availability.

Reliability, efficiency, and superior quality are the foundation on which STRATACACHE builds its products and services.

STRATACACHE focuses on the software with dedicated development resources, providing users with an advanced solution that has been continually tested and proven to be the best end-to-end solution for highly distributed enterprise environments.

Retail Case Study

Challenge

One of the world's largest wireless retailers wanted to create the consummate in-store experience.  The concept called for themed zones of one or two digital signs each in order to attract the customers' attention while highlighting product offerings, cool new stuff and timely promotional offers.

Solution

The retailer's strategy was to leverage digital media to drive themed areas within these Experience Stores utilizing STRATACACHE's ActiVia for Media digital signage software.  The ActiVia for Media software architecture gave the wireless retailer the flexibility to use any local media player and operating system, which made it easy to add digital signs to existing guided selling kiosks.

Result

The Experience Store consisted of ten zones with guided selling kiosks driving content (games, mobile productivity, and ringtones) onto flat screen displays.  The guided selling kiosks include a touchscreen self-service device with the portrait-mounted digital sign hanging behind.  In addition, three displays located in the central part of the store highlight new product offerings.  The wireless retailer's CEO liked the concept and execution so much that he has endorsed broader use of this technology in all stores.