Posted by Lisa Hochgraf
Last week I had the pleasure of getting out of my home office (in the basement) and having lunch with Sharon Kloceck-Ibbotson, creative service team leader for Kiosk & Display. The company is based in Atlanta, but Sharon's located here in Rochester, N.Y. (Ironically, I met Sharon last fall while in the swine flu line with our children--and that meeting was a factor in the post "Screen Time: When is it Welcome?")
In that earlier post, I mentioned that a former boss of mine had posted to Facebook something to the effect of "Do I really have to watch TV while I pump gas?" Sharon's response to that would be, "Absolutely not." In fact, she suggested to me yeserday that showing CNN on the screens in a CU's branch lobby does nothing to support the CU's brand.
Instead, Sharon has a vision for how digital screens and kiosks should support a CU's market image. She sees today's digital screens as a place not for CNN and not just for advertisements, but also as a community information place--a place where people can find out what's the big event in town this weekend. And at the event, what time is the frog jumping contest?
Once members are seeing useful content, advertisements become a manageable addition. Being an editor, this made me think of magazines. If the content is really good, people pick them up and read them -- and then they also see the ads. Sharon recommends to her clients that they include guidelines for their "animation" brand in their overall brand guide.
So how does one measure the ROI of having a content-advertising campaign on digital signs in your branch (or oustide, if having a very bright display works in your location)? Sharon says some CUs have used the signs to sell tickets and others to promote T-shirts. So the number of tickets and T-shirts distributed gets you close. Sharon recommends considering some sign-only promotions with measurables like the tickets or T-shirts to really gauge whether the screens are pushing the traffic.
Oh and did you know that a digital signage/kiosk campaign can tie in directly with your CU's social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter? That was news to me, too--and I'm inspired to learn more about the capabilities of digital displays. They're clearly way more than just TV screens these days.
What cool stuff do you do with digital signs in your branches?
