How To Hear With Your Eyes

The colorful world of sound.

Christian at Just Out-of-Home recently posted an article about audio on OOH content, and I applaud his post because he is correct: This is one of those topics of OOH that seems to be ignored when thinking about the message.

Instead of replying to Christian’s post, I would like to give you my guidelines on audio, the same guidelines I give to every content provider on Best Buy’s network.

Our main channel, the HD program, resides in the home theater department for the most part. It is modulated throughout the store, so other areas my have the appropriate connection to access the channel. But it has a visual reach beyond the physical department space.

In a retail environment, even in a home theater department, the television wall is usually tuned to the closed circuit network channel. An effective presentation is designed to give the viewer the opportunity to compare TVs, not necessarily compare audio. (If the customer wants to learn about audio, he or she can visit a studio room with the receivers and speaker sets.)

In the case of audio, I suggest that the audio on any content only complement what is shown on the screen. It should not, under any circumstances, be considered a vital method of information.

There are two reasons for this:

The first is the store control of the audio. We have a standard operating procedure. But, we can’t keep them from altering the audio for any number of reasons. As Christian noted, the employee(s) may be bored with the program, or there may be other TVs tuned to something else that an employee really wants to watch; or, combined with the rest of the store ambiance, it may just be too noisy.

The second reason is that viewers of the program may not be standing right in front of the screen and therefore will not hear it. Our HD program is tailored for the home theater department, but it has visual reach across the store. If you’re more than 30 feet away, you won’t hear it anyway.

As a provider, you have the opportunity to speak to a set of traffic that doesn’t step foot in the department, so don’t limit yourself to only those standing within a few feet.

This is also a great point of education for the creative producers and agencies. The agency perspective, as correctly pointed out by Christian, is that digital signage “is TV” and is akin to the creative mediums utilized by broadcast.

I always tell providers to Best Buy’s network to watch their content with the audio turned off. If any part of the message is missing, they need to redo their spot. How it is reconfigured is case-by-case, depending on the desired message. But this way you can be sure that the audience got the message, and nothing was lost.

As a post script, I have seen technology that automatically changes the audio volume in a local setting depending on noise. For example, the louder the noise around you, the louder the audio from the TV, to make sure you get the message. This is worth investigating for your venue, but I caution against taking too much control away from the employee. It’s not ideal for them to be altering the programming in any sense, but their control over the ambient factors (lighting, TV, sound, temperature, etc.) gives them a tool to create an individual experience for each customer if they so desire. I would recommend bringing your employees in and talking about these types of control before implementing. You may be surprised to hear what they have to say.

By the way, the speakers in the photo above are a do-it-yourself project, courtesy of Instructables.