Dynamic Digital Signage Comes of Age

Ai-Driven Advances in Automation, Made Possible by Navori

As the retail industry continues to grapple with COVID-induced changes in customer expectations, staff availability, distribution, and in-store revenue, one of the most important corporate imperatives is ‘do more with less. digital signage, with its noticeability, targetability and flexibility has always been a powerful platform to help retailers extract more value from their stores. Now, thanks to Ai and advances in automation, there are exciting new realities for dynamic digital signage that can literally replace humans. The most exciting advancements fall into three categories:  Addressable, Adaptive, and Accountable. Here is how they each break down.

Addressable

To put this into context, let’s first unpack Addressable TV advertising, which is the ability to show different ads to different households while they are watching the same program. With the help of addressable advertising, advertisers can move beyond large-scale traditional TV ad buys and focus on showing only the ads likely to have the most resonance to the individual households, thus creating more potential value for the advertiser. It’s direct marketing 101: the more a message supports a viewer’s likes and interests, the more likely it is to create a measurable business impact.

Addressable digital signage is the same idea but inside physical venues. Digital signage has always been a killer medium for being able to target a message by location, daypart, and the viewing zone of the store. However, three key things coming together have created yet another exciting layer of targetability for in-store networks: the CMS, artificial intelligence (or Ai), and computer vision cameras.

With advanced dynamic signage, computer vision sits on a webcam to detect and react in real time to the viewing audience. The result? That contextual relevance we’ve all been talking about. Using tagging and the viewer’s biometric data, content is targeted to match the viewer’s most likely interest level. The software can also be used to modify a playlist’s content dynamically, trigger content instantly, or perform in-depth analytics of the audience to measure dwell times and detect a viewer’s attention. Further, using Navori’s APIs, our QL software can integrate with any third-party software or hardware, including motion sensors, temperature sensors, iBeacons, RFID tags, license plate readers, and many other devices, to create a fully orchestrated guest experience.

When it first emerged, automation was really about integrating a live data feed such as weather, social media, or inventory with the software, all content that is updated in real-time via the API feeding it to the screen. Then, the idea of ‘scenarios’ showed up. The concept is also rather simple–the user specifies fields of value that say, “if this condition is met, play this content” and, based on what’s happening, the playlist auto-populates against the rules in real time.

Adaptive

Navori enhanced this yet further in 2021 when they created the concept of adaptive content. This happens when the actual data feeds are filtered with the ‘if then’ rules the network owner specifies. This concept is also called ‘conditional’ triggering, and it’s great for integrated data feeds such as:

• Emergency notifications and alerts (CAP etc.)
• Weather, traffic, and news-based alerts
• Conditional media playback
• Data-driven promotions
• Inventory management and alerts
• Restaurant/QSR order confirmation

Accountable

Digital signage software is now an accepted, respected tool in the marketing toolkit, but one thing has vexed it for close to two decades, and that’s the disparity between digital signage software and marketing analytics. Historically, the software has driven messaging and delivery, and any measurement tools were tracking customer behavior or audience measurement. This is a huge issue, as all digital media vehicles today have real-time analytics humming in the background–except, that is, ours. Ask any marketer or business owner and one thing will surely resonate, and that’s “we fund well what we measure well.” Thankfully, this is changing, and Ai is the jettison.

Navori’s Aquaji venue analytics solution uses computer vision to count unique visitors and gather demographic data, length of stay, wait time and attention span KPIs over segmented time slots spanning from hours to months. With it, retailers can better understand shopper habits and profiles, create new opportunities for growth and drive profitability through stronger visitor engagement. The benefits to operations from this kind of a business intelligence ecosystem are also vast. Not only can it help understand and anticipate store traffic flow and traffic patterns, but, when paired, with our QL digital software, it can autonomously trigger the right content for the shopper and make adjustments based on programmed scenarios and live camera feeds.

There are some established intelligent in-store analytics solutions out there, but Aquaji follows three years of Navori Labs research and development in applied artificial intelligence. It is a homegrown solution that combines the latest mathematical models of computer vision, which improves the accuracy rate for detection from the standard 60 percent to 95 percent.

It empowers retailers with a more interactive and fully integrated solution and, with its API, can also send audience information to programmatic platforms to help advertisers optimize their content and digital ad placement decisions. Even more game changing, it can give them access to the in-store data to feed their internal business intelligence platforms and data science systems for deeper analysis. Given the explosion of “Retail Media”, this kind of feature has the ability to significantly increase a retail network’s advertising rates as well as make them the top option for competitive spending.

Conclusions

In summary, Ai-powered dynamic digital signage is real, here, and ready for deployment. Navori has the only solution that seamlessly knits together an advanced CMS with a proprietary, industry-leading in-store intelligence solution, making it the most scalable and flexible option to take advantage of this new flavor of marketing automation. Talk to us about how we can put it to work for your store.