On April 12, Nielsen Research released results of a study on the “Fourth Screen,” designed to bring awareness to the general Out-of-Home audience and the potential for exposure.

In the report, they cite that during the last four months of 2009, “adults 18 years or older were exposed to 237 million video ads per month in the ten location-based video networks included in The Nielsen Company’s inaugural ‘Fourth Screen Network Audience Report.’”

Their breakdown of ad exposures by network is as follows:

Source: Nielsen.com

The press release further states that, “For example, the C3 average audience for a prime time broadcast TV commercial was three million viewers age 18+ in October 2009. During that same period, video ad exposures to NCM’s and Screenvision’s movie theater networks combined for an average 61.7 million, meaning that it took about 20 primetime ads to reach the same audience as a typical month-long advertising flight on both movie theater networks.”

Okay. Fair enough. 61.7 million exposures on two networks in one month. Not too shabby. But let’s snoop around your TV dial, shall we?

I found that the ratings from October 10, 2009 had a total of 68.9 million viewers (ages 18+) over a single night with an average of 4.6 million viewers over 14 broadcast programs. And that was only five networks (CBS, NBC, CW, ABC, FOX). I have no idea if October 10 was the big night in October, but that’s one night, not a whole month. I also have no idea if those viewers were watching commercials.

The C3 measurement is a measurement of the broadcast commercial time plus three days on the DVR (hence the “C3″). So let’s assume that the three million Nielsen states is over a four-day period. Nielsen has no idea if these people are watching the commercials, either. And last time I checked, four days doesn’t equal 31 days.

Time To Get All Murky Up In This
Let’s play with some statistics. Let’s assume those October 10 numbers were consistent and those programs ran four times in a month (or four weeks of four day C3-style exposures). Now you’re looking at 275.6 million expressions in a month, against NCM’s and Screenvision’s collective 61.7 million expressions per month.

Going back to that one night, let’s divide NCM/Screenvision’s total by four. You get 15.1 million, compared to broadcast’s 68.9 million.

Step back for a moment. I said that it was 68.9 million viewers for one night. Perhaps Nielsen is saying that over 31 nights, the average number of exposures was three million a night. And maybe they’re throwing more networks in there, like PBS and QVC and the Disney Channel. Okay. But then that would force me to take the 61.7 million and divide that by 31, right? If so, the nightly number of exposures for NCM and Screenvision would collectively be 1.99 million. That’s over a million less than broadcast. Right? So broadcast wins.

Hey, let’s have some more fun. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) claims there were 39,717 total cinema screens in operation in 2009. According to NCM and Screenvision, they collectively account for 31,800 screens, or about 80% of the total number of screens.

I found 62 additional national networks on my own cable programming. That means that the five networks only make up only 7% of my total TV lineup. And that doesn’t include any HD channels or any premium channels (like HBO). That 7% would shrink to less than 2% if I could add in the extra 261 available channels.

Before you argue that those are cable channels and not over-the-air broadcast, I found 39 channels that claim to have access to at least four million households in the U.S., although some of them are not national. I used the 4 million mark as a middle ground between Nielsen’s 3 million, and my 4.6 million. In this case, the five networks make up 11% of the available broadcast channels.

But those numbers aren’t nearly fun enough. So let’s stick with the cable, shall we? I found those on Wikipedia, and everything we read there is 100% correct, correct?

So let’s quickly recap with my statistics:

61.7 million exposures a month over 80% of the cinema screens in the U.S.
68.9 million exposures in one night over 7% of the broadcast channels in the U.S.

At 275 million expressions a month, that beats the 10 total location-based networks by 38.2 million exposures. So I have proven unquestionably, undoubtedly, indisputably, and clearly, that broadcast is still the best way to expose an audience to a commercial.

Performance. Night after night.

Let’s spin it a little more: Nielsen claims that 114 million homes have at least one TV set. Let’s assume that every single set was on only once per day for one program. You would have 114 million potential views per day, or 3.42 billion potential views per month. By comparison, NCM and Screenvision together see approximately 1.18 billion moviegoers a year, or only about 98 million moviegoers a month.

Keep spinning: Take that 4.6 million viewers from October 10, 2009, and multiply that over 31 days. Now you’re ate 142.6 million viewers. Yep, that’s still more than the movies. Heck, take Nielsen’s “three million” average. In October, that would be 93 million exposures, only six million shy of the movies.

But wait. Hold on! Most television stations run 24/7. Do most cinemas? If that’s the case, then…oh forget it. You get the point.

A Nice Figure Always Has Verbosity.
So let’s bicker about verbiage. Nielsen makes the claim that this is the “Fourth Screen” report, indicating that the Fourth Screen is the Out-of-Home sector. According to Nielsen, the first three screens are TV, Internet, and Mobile. However, most in the digital signage industry seen cinema, TV, and computers as the first three screens. At this point, some believe that mobile is part of the fourth screen of Out-of-Home, while some think mobile is the fourth screen with the rest of OOH making up the 5th screen. Under this believe, cinema doesn’t belong in OOH category, correct? So the chart above would lose that 61.7 million exposures. TV keeps looking better, doesn’t it?

To make matters worse, the paper is highlighted in an article on AdAge on April 14, 2009. The article freely mixes the term “expression” with the term “impression.”

An expression is someone seeing an ad. An impression is that person remembering it. And those two terms are not interchangeable, not at all by measurement standards. If you think they are, do this: Go to the local movie theater and count how many people are there before the commercials and trailers start. Those are the people “exposed” to the commercials. After the movie, ask all of them to make a list of all the commercials they remember seeing. Here is what you will notice: Those who remember seeing ads are “impressions.” Those who were impressed will never be 100% of the audience. And those who were impressed are the true currency through which the value of a network is determined. Oh, those who were impressed are also the most difficult to measure.

To be fair, the Nielsen press release does not use the term “impression.”

This is not an indictment of any network or Nielsen. I’m all for figuring out the right way to measure audiences and determine value. I take full responsibility for butchering the statistics and adding in others to make my case. Under no circumstances does this make me an authority. But I bet I made a convincing argument, or at least confused you enough to question what you are reading from Nielsen. You can play with statistics in any number of ways that benefit your side of the story. And that’s dangerous when talking about an industry that is so nascent with understanding the true value of an impression. It’s easy to rally around numbers. That doesn’t mean the numbers are accurate or, in some cases, real. Context is everything.

Now, go buy “How To Lie With Statistics” and really see the other side of the number. I’m going to take some aspirin because my head hurts. A lot.

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Awaiting entrance into the trade show. I'm third row, second from left.

Another Digital Signage Exposition has come and gone. Last year I spent all my time in the sessions. This year, I spent all my time on the floor. Instead of giving you the top five things I learned (as was my habit with shows I attended last year), I will just drop some thoughts on you. Take ‘em or leave ‘em. (Or hold ‘em or fold ‘em, as Mr. Rogers would have you do if you’re the gambling sort.)

The industry is selling to the wrong audience and doesn’t know it.
The real audience for the exhibitors was upstairs in the conference sessions. The conflicting schedules kept many of them from diving deep into the trade show floor. And the buyers that walked the floor had more questions than answers after leaving. I know. I ran into two of them.

The sessions were well attended…
I did the opening keynote session and a final session of the conference, and both were well attended. I heard most sessions had good crowds.

…but there are too many of them.
Day One had three full day seminars, a half day seminar, and a half-day tour of Vegas. Days two and three had 43 sessions. This is too much, and I’m certain there is a lot of redundancy. I hope that over the next 11 months, the DSE will find a more efficient way to make sure everyone has the opportunity to learn, network, and explore without having to decide between one session or another.

The DSF was on people’s minds…
One of the interim DSF board members asked me if I thought it was the right thing to do.  It is, if you take this opportunity to do what the industry needs. If not, the DSF and the DSA will battle themselves into apathy while the NRF, InfoComm, and other shows continue to lure away the exhibitors and experts.

…but not on all minds.
One executive told me, “The companies in there [the trade show] couldn’t care less about these boards. They care about landing clients and buyers.” Ouch. But I see his point.

#dse2010 was pretty cool…
Many screens throughout the show floor displayed the Twitter hashtag tweets, and it’s really great to see so many engaged with a community tool to spread the cheer of the show. There were over 1,200 tweets.

…but not very cool
So we all tweeted. Big deal. The DSE promoted that session attendees could use Twitter to ask questions of the session moderators and panelists before the conference. I was in two sessions and never got a question. Did anyone else? I doubt it. Was anyone not at DSE really “following” what was going on? Twitter is here and will be a great tool for communication, but we’re trying too hard to jam this into the ecosystem without allowing it to grow organically.

Good Rumor.
There is a deal for PRN on paper in the range of 80 million. That’s a song compared to what Thompson paid for them, but I believe PRN is doing a lot of good stuff. They are refining their business model, breaking apart their bundled services, and partnering with key companies to offer better solutions. What I mean is: They ain’t Walmart’s bitch anymore. I hope that continues. There are good people there working hard.

Bad Rumor.
One service provider told me his company learned they lost a bid for a client to their competitor. They heard it from their competitor. Bad form, folks.

Everyone is busy…
Everyone I asked said they were busy. And many that I spoke with said they had the resources (read: money and people) to make traction in 2010. Let’s hope that’s true.

…so don’t waste their time.
One guy wrote to me and asked me to meet with him. He wanted to talk to me about some “new retail initiatives” his company was working on. I was excited to hear this news and made it a point to connect with this gentleman. After shaking hands, he proceeded to tell me how drunk he got the night before. Then he walked away from me. That was the meeting. Oh, and he did this in front of his CEO. Classy.

Shoes, Socks, and Business Cards
Adrian Cotterill, of DailyDOOH.com fame, has a small list of suggestions for your next show visit.

Want to read more? Head over to these blogs and get more first-hand accounts of the show. Lots to read, but all of it worthwhile.

Dave Haynes, Sixteen-Nine
DSE Impressions…So Far
More DSE Impressions

Mike Cearley, 11th Screen
2nd (and last) Official Session of the Day #40
Cutting Through The Clutter at DSE 2010
Top 5 Moments of DSE 2010

Adrian Cotterill, DailyDOOH.com
#dse2010 – The Gossip

David Weinfeld, DS Insights
Thoughts from Digital Signage Expo 2010

Ken Goldberg, Broad Thinking. Narrowcasting
Themes from DSE

Finally
The UMA Motorcoach Expo was taking place at the same time as our little shin-dig at the Convention Center. I snuck into their show and checked out a few of their rides. There was a huge banner that said, “We’ll see you next year in Tampa!” I don’t know about you folks, but I’m liberating one of those moving condos and going on a road trip to Tampa next year. Right now you should be hearing the theme song to Vacation.

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Black is the new green.

Last Tuesday before Thanksgiving, James Bickers asked for my opinion on Black Friday, given my experience working for a retail giant. He used a couple of the quotes in an article he wrote about the souring of the public on the notion of Black Friday (a great article, by the way), but I thought it would be fun to reproduce the whole e-mail here and follow up since last Friday:

Within Best Buy, we never really did much from a corporate level regarding [digital signage] network or store design. The stores themselves and their immediate territory/district managers handled a lot of the noise. We helped out where we could, and we built a circular that was to go out and we were all told very clearly that the deals were confidential and should not be leaked. More on that below.

Overall, I took two things from my experience:

1. Best Buy (and other retailers) let the customers make a bigger deal out of than it really was. Corporate definitely paid attention, but the customers themselves are what drives the advertising. Nothing says “Black Friday” better than video of customers waiting all night outside your store, eagerly anticipating that one gift they have given up hours of their sleep to nab at a low, low price. No single product for any price can match that imagery.

2. The harder we worked to create an environment where we were not supposed to talk about it (the “leaked deals”), the more we seemed to see the deals leak. Again, you’re playing into the hands of the customer on purpose. By leaking deals, you get them to wait in line at your store. Once in line, they stay there. They won’t give up their number in line for another deal anywhere else. They have made the commitment.

Over my time with Best Buy and since, I have seen the customer change because it is no longer about the deal, it is about the event. That’s why customers are not seeing the deals. When you see news stories leading up to Black Friday about teams of women and men who build game plans on attacking certain stores (like a military exercise!), you begin to see that the stores have less power over the event than the customers do. Waiting in line is now fun to [do]. Retailers, Best Buy included, simply play into that. It doesn’t really matter what you put on sale or how much inventory you have. If you can get a line of people out your store, you’ll get sales. And, if you don’t get what you waited in line all night to get, you’re probably going to buy something else. There’s no way you invest all that time and walk away empty-handed.

Thanksgiving morning, I passed by the local Best Buy around 9:00 a.m. I saw a line of people about 50 long or so, complete with tents, chairs, and perhaps a little tailgating going on at the cars parked nearby. They were already in line for the store to open over 18 hours from that time. Thanksgiving night, I watched the news and saw footage of a mall south of Minneapolis where there were thousands of people out shopping at 5:00 a.m. One shopper said, “It just something you should experience once in your lifetime.”

There’s that word: Experience.

We’ll see the results of Cyber Monday later this week, but these two days are clearly less about finances and money and more about a cultural event. Some retailers are reporting a modest increase from last year. However, the National Retail Federation still believes the overall numbers will be down. Did all these retailers move their bottom line into the black? Hardly. But, they don’t need Black Friday any more like they used to because so many of them have been pushing deep discounts around campaigns for a long time now. The margins on products are so thin; the retailer must push low prices all year long to remain with the pack.

The only thing black about the Friday after Thanksgiving is the night sky that everyone shivers under waiting for the store to open.

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Am I breaking the law if I just can't watch?

I flew back from San Diego last week on United Airlines. (I know…I hate it when I have to go from Minneapolis to San Diego in November to meet with a client. Darnshootheck). United utilizes digital screens that drop from the overhead-bin heavens to provide the flight safety regulations, something we’re so accustomed to ignoring when the flight attendants give us the song and dance.

One might think that the application of video could be a more compelling form of communication. However, the flight safety video left way too much to be desired, and I cannot understand why United would not (or could not?) find a more attractive way to make the point. The actors were stiff as boards, the animations were pedestrian and unimpressive, and the running time felt like 20 minutes.

Federal law requires that we are informed of the safety measures every time we board a plane. But, like all other forms of communication, we are numb to the message when there is nothing unique about it. Granted, there is not much you can do with informing people about flight safety; the message itself is important stuff. However, using a new medium for the message does give you flexibility to modify and refresh the variables of delivery so that people do pay attention.

Off the top of my head, I could name five ways to make this much more compelling.

In an industry that is regularly vilified by consumers, and in a situation where that consumer is about as captive as possible, airlines can leverage this opportunity to present a positive impression.

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Honk if yer heading to No Name!

Recently an article popped up on DigitalSignageToday.com, where several industry veterans and experts were asked to define the industry. This is not the first time this has come up, and I reckon this will continue for some time.

I personally know several of the experts mentioned in the article, and it’s easy to see why they were chosen to comment, but I think we can find better ways to spend our time than worrying about “defining” our industry.

I had a client one day ask me why we (we as an industry) call it Digital Out-of-Home. I gave him the boilerplate answer that it was a catch-all phrase to cover the industry of electronic messaging that you find outside of your home, but that there were several disciplines within it that had more direct titles. His response was that he always thought Digital Out-of-Home meant it was electronic messaging that originated from inside the home, like Digital Coming Out-from-the-inside-of-the-Home, not that it originated outside of the home.

Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, was quoted in The New York Times:

“I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too…People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”

Industry perception will be defined by the client, not by the expert. The only person in the room who really needs to understand is the person writing the check. And there’s a great chance that each client is different in needs and goals. If he wants to call it Digital Out-of-Home, he can. If he wants to call it digital signage, he can. If he wants to call it Little Bo Peep…well…I guess he can. What matters is whether or not he gets it. If he does, he pays us.

DOOH? Digital Signage? Those names work just fine. Let’s embrace them and start giving clients a terrific experience.

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