In the ever-evolving world of advertising, data-driven insights have become the backbone of every successful campaign. And with the significant developments in digital signage and out-of-home (OOH) advertising, businesses now have an unprecedented opportunity to gather valuable information about their audiences that were previously impossible.

By harnessing insights, analytics, audience detection, and real-time personalizations, brands now have the power to not only create an enhanced in-store experience but they can also leverage such data to make more informed in-store design decisions, ultimately leading to a more impactful and targeted advertising strategy.

Understanding the Audience

To really validate a brand’s understanding of its in-store audience, it must first have the ability to capture relevant data and gain insights into their behaviors, preferences, and demographics. By leveraging advanced analytics tools and audience detection technologies, businesses can answer crucial questions: What are the audience’s interests? Where are they going? What are they doing? What content resonates with them? These insights enable brands to align their campaigns to their audiences preferences as shown in the data, ultimately leading to considerably higher conversions. For us it’s about utilising data to understand audience behaviours in greater detail, including what they’re most interested in, and repurposing this insight to create more personalised, targeted content that resonates.

Enhancing the Audience Experience

By utilizing the insights gained from audience data, brands can deliver personalized and targeted content that enhances the audience’s experience. Digital signage allows for dynamic campaign delivery, enabling real-time content updates based on audience behavior. For example, if the data suggests that a particular demographic prefers a specific product, the signage can alter to display relevant content, promotions, or recommendations in real-time based on that information. This personalization creates a more engaging and relevant experience for the audience, increasing the likelihood of conversions and brand loyalty.

Informing Store and Content Design

Shopper and audience insights can significantly impact store design and layout. By understanding footfall patterns and audience behaviors within physical spaces, brands can optimize their store layouts to guide customers towards key areas or products. Heatmapping and dwell time analysis can highlight popular areas and interactions, enabling businesses to strategically position digital signage displays for maximum impact.

Similarly, content design can be fine-tuned based on audience preferences. By analyzing the effectiveness of different types of content, brands can create compelling visuals and messages that resonate with the audience. A data-driven approach allows for continuous improvement, as insights provide valuable feedback on what works and what might need some adjustment.

Real-Time Insights and Programmatic Advertising

Combining real-time insights with programmatic advertising takes campaign effectiveness to a whole new level. Programmatic platforms use algorithms and data to automate the buying and selling of ad inventory. By integrating shopper insights and audience detection smarts, brands can dynamically adjust their advertising displays based on the evidence provided by the data. This ensures that ads are delivered to the most effective locations with the highest footfall and engagement, maximizing the campaign’s reach and impact.

Moving from the Guess Economy to the Evidence Economy

Sarah Parkes from Talon rightly emphasized the shift from the “Guess Economy” to the “Evidence Economy” in OOH advertising. In the past, advertisers had to rely on assumptions and generalizations about the audience’s whereabouts. However, with the availability of data and insights, brands can now make informed decisions about where to place their digital signage based on concrete evidence.

XEN incorporates AIR

XEN, for those unfamiliar, is Ground Support Lab’s revolutionary software platform, offering AIR capabilities – this being Analytics, Intelligence and Reporting. This out-of-the-box functionality provided by our XEN platform, offers class leading reporting onto rich interactive data dashboards that clearly and effectively visualises audience engagement, interactions, dwell times, preferences and behaviours. Our clients benefiting from AIR insights are able to dynamically personalise the experience for shoppers, as well as understand their target audience demographic and behaviours and to make more informed in-store decisions for both marketers and visual merchandisers alike.

You can find out more about XEN and its capabilities here or for a full demonstration, you can reach out to the Ground Support Labs team here.

Is your network uptime not quite where you need it to be? And service response times longer than ideal? 

Unfortunately, this scenario is not uncommon. Many digital signage and digital out-of-home networks are facing significant downtimes, especially since the COVID pandemic, and this is often caused by unreliable network stability and the hassle of getting it back up and running again, especially when remote management is not an option. 

These scenarios often result in high service call out costs where it’s not uncommon for network operators to send out a technician to physically troubleshoot an endpoint in an already busy schedule. These “truck rolls” are not only costly but can also lead to huge delays in resolving the issue – possibly even a matter of months, ultimately leading to underperforming networks that simply aren’t optimizing their advertising revenue potential. Aside from the financial and operational challenges, it’s also important to acknowledge the environmental impact of truck rolls in the context of network troubleshooting. These on-site service visits not only incur significant costs and delays but also contribute towards their carbon footprint, posing environmental concerns.

This begs the question, what if the issue could have been resolved remotely? This is where XEN comes in. XEN is Ground Support Lab’s software platform that helps achieve stability and connectivity for digital signage and digital out-of-home networks. With XEN’s comprehensive suite of tools, our team of technicians are able to remotely monitor, manage and troubleshoot networks on behalf of operators, eliminating the need for any onsite troubleshooting to even take place. This not only saves time and money but also leads to quicker issue resolution, resulting in less downtime for the entire network. 

After learning about the capabilities of the XEN platform, we were recently approached by a national DOOH network that was impressed by XEN’s KPIs, with an average response time of 6 minutes, paired with an average resolution time of 1.5 hours. Following a network assessment and a reengineering phase of hardware and technology, we were able to successfully migrate their existing network over to our XEN platform. Since then, response times moved from days to minutes, and resolve times moved from weeks to days. With XEN NOC, truck rolls were reduced by an impressive 60%, with GSL taking complete accountability of network stability. 

Network stability, particularly in the digital-out-of-home space, is at an all time low, partially due to the significant growth of this sector coming out of Covid. The good news is, GSL’s network uptime is well above 95% consistently across our entire network. And with this consistent level of stability and uptime, our clients are able to focus their attention on expansion plans and upgrades, all of which is easily doable as the XEN platform also allows for easy scalability and expansion. 

If this pain-point sounds all too familiar, you can learn more about XEN, the industry’s most comprehensive technology management platform, right here: https://www.groundsupportlabs.com/xen/. For more information, or to speak to a member of the GSL team, reach out to us at talktech@groundsupportlabs.com.

As energy bills sky-rocket, and as net-zero fast approaches, many businesses are starting to think about how to reduce costs and protect the environment and yet still engage audiences and shoppers with high performing Digital Signage and other Consumer Engagement Technologies. At GSL we have worked tirelessly to develop GSL XEN, the leading technology platform that offers full remote control and monitoring of all DOOH, Digital Signage, LCD, LED Displays and other Retail Technologies.  Using our platform, environmentally aware and cost-conscious brands are able to make sure that screens are automatically turned off at night, that hardware systems are continuously monitored and remote controlled, and that your campaigns or ads are delivered when and where it matters most to you audience. GSL XEN – the high performance technology platform for both NEW and EXISTING installations. The benefits of putting the GSL XEN Platform at the heart of your strategy are proven to benefit brands with reduced service calls, reduced downtime, and reduced energy bills using our smart power controls.