ENTERTAINING THE ATTAINMENT OF INFOTAINMENT

Story: Gaye Steel

Gaye is an experienced marketing professional, having launched her career in marketing in FMCG working for a multinational Reckitt & Colman for 10 years, followed by stints at McDonald’s (as National Marketing Manager), Telstra and Church & Dwight. Gaye is now relishing the challenges of agency life in her role as Marketing Director for GuihenJones (retail communications agency). She is also an accomplished Academic Lecturer in Marketing & Advertising.

The tax office – long queues, confusing forms, uncomfortable seats and even more uncomfortable waiting. Yet one ancient and simple piece of digital signage has for years played a pivotal role in ensuring waiting doesn’t turn in to all out war in government offices, banks, hospitals and waiting rooms the world over. The digital number displays that correspond to tickets taken at the entrance, give visitors some idea of how long they’ll actually have to wait, rather than leaving it to their stress-inducing imaginations to grossly over-estimate. And here in 2014, it’s education that is driving digital signage’s growth across the world.

Digital signage doesn’t all have to be about price points, product shots and persuasion. Like all the best modern advertising and marketing, some of the best digital signage is simply what I call ‘education through entertainment’. That’s why digital signage is seeing huge growth outside the retail sector. Visitor attractions, information points and even entire cities are taking a leaf out of the books of some of the world’s biggest brands and creating spectacular digital signage installations that educate people using fun, interesting and captivating forms of messaging.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE (TIMES) SQUARE

For years Manhattan’s Times Square has been a magnet for tourists who flock to take in the famous neon and LED digital signage that plasters all four corners of the area. While nothing quite matches Americans’ ability to go over the top and keep on going, they were, as always, ahead of the curve when it came to the possibilities digital signage produces. As downtown Hong Kong and London’s Piccadilly Circus have expanded their own miniature versions of Times Square over recent decades, others are now starting to catch up and are creating a new frontier for digital signage in public spaces both here in Australia and abroad.

Take Vivid Sydney for instance. The organisers turned to multiple and diverse forms of digital signage to transform some previously ignored parts of the city into a truly exceptional tool that not only brings people out during colder winter nights but also educates them about the vibrancy, diversity and ingenuity the city has to offer. Digital signage has helped create a fantastic advertisement for Sydney.

Further afield, Hawaii has started to see a new breakthrough in the use of projection mapping digital signage. A state with more swimming pools than people is the perfect place to be trialling digital signage onto the surface of hotel pools. Expect to see the clear blue water of hotel pools across the globe come to life over the next few years! But who’s doing it well right now?

As digital signage becomes more popular across the globe, those that use it are merging it with the latest technologies to create even more impressive installations. British Airways (and Ogilvy & Mather London) was recently showered with plaudits and awards for a game-changing piece of digital signage in the home of one of the world’s busiest airports. Rather than just telling anyone that happened to notice that B.A have ‘more flights to more destinations’, they showed them using real-time ads that made a little boy react whenever an actual plane flew over the billboard. Such sophisticated levels of integration with digital signage have never been seen before but they’ll definitely be seen again. Speaking of being seen, digital signage can also be used to see ourselves in an entirely new light.

In France, the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Paris, has installed a novel piece of digital signage they call a digital mirror. Utilising cutting edge MRI scans, X-rays and PET scans, they are able to ‘probe’ museum visitors. A massive 65-inch screen then generates high-resolution images of their bodies, complete with bones and organs. Viewers can then control the images displayed on the digital mirror using motion detection software similar to that found in the Microsoft Kinect. Another great example of creative digital signage that educates people in a completely different way, provides an enhanced experience, and is a lot of fun.

Non-promotional digital signage like this is at its best when it is being harnessed in this way to simply enhance the experience of visitors to all manner of attractions. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur were for six years the world’s tallest building. Anyone that’s been at the top of a building like this will tell you the novelty of the view can quickly wear off. So at the top of Asia’s twin towers, they have interactive digital kiosks that use augmented reality to bring visitors on an educational journey through the building’s design, development and it’s more obscure details. A lovely way to turn a quick, potentially boring visit into a novel experience that can even be shared by users on social media.

CREATIVITY COSTS NOTHING

Of course, it would be fantastic to have the budgets of British Airways or the popularity of the world’s tallest buildings but digital signage isn’t about how much money you spend, it’s about how much sense you make. If you can educate through entertainment you could turn a simple request for information into a journey of interactivity. Imagine you have a customer that wants to find out something as simple as your opening times. You could throw a hastily drawn scrap of paper in the front window. That would tell them what they need to know but then they might not even enter your premises. Now imagine you construct a simple digital kiosk inside the door. You could potentially turn one simple query into an entertaining 10-minute tour through your opening times, where they can find things, who they can talk to about other things and a host of other attention-grabbing activities that will engage them with your wider offering.

However, more often than not you don’t even have to have crazy money, frontier-breaking strategies or even complex ideas, you just have to have a little good old-fashioned creativity. Irish bookmaker Paddy Power used the digital signage advertising boards at the side of the country’s biggest football stadium to just display their logo during a scarcely-viewed football match. When they purposefully printed it upside down, they sent social media across the nation into meltdown and received unprecedented levels of exposure and PR without having to try very hard.

Got a few ideas of your own now? I wager 10-to-1 that you do!