The IGA stores will feature 40-46” digital signage screens (2 to 8 per store), which will have the potential to be seen by 5 million+ grocer shoppers weekly. Custom built computers will have advertisements and content beamed to each strategically placed screen in store, via its 3G Mobile Broadband platform.

Brett Weinberg, Managing Partner of PDSN, spoke with DailyDOH about their project this week, “This digital signage network, involving some 500 IGA supermarkets Australia wide, provides marketers with an alternative audience to the two leading chains of Coles and Woolworths/ Safeway”.

IGA’s digital rollout will be conducted nationally through VenueMedia, a Sydney based technology company.

Deployment aims to fit 250 stores in Q1 2010, with possibly the same number of stores in Q2. VenueMedia was also responsible for fitting 400 pubs and clubs in 2008 and 2009.

Australia is a market that is already ripe with Retail Media opportunities (see previous story here). In an interview with The Australian back in June, Sir Martin Sorrell bracketed Australia with the fast-rising ‘emerging’ economies, rather than the hidebound industrial and political systems typified by Western Europe.

PDSN, who have developed the overall concept and negotiated the 2,000 screen placement with major IGA store owners, is currently in discussions with leading FMCG companies to lock up key advertiser categories. The deal has been five years in the making, due to the stores being individually owned.

The IGA distributors have a clean-store attitude, thus the added impact of the 40” screens. The network employs landscape screens in the same 16:9 ratio as the traditional television screen, which poses a challenge with customer’s inability to relax in-store in the same way that they might in front of the television in the comfort of their own home.

Weinberg states “We see in-store digital signage as a frequency medium, and our offer to marketers of a 15 second spot every 10-15 minutes is in keeping with this”. PDSN will “accept any advertising creative format, downloaded into a custom box”.

The PDSN team members apparently come from a marketing background, which becomes quite evident when we discuss the details behind the web-based software platform that PDSN is working with. “We are not in a position to say who this is at the moment”, maintains Weinberg.

Approximately 5% of IGA stores will be two-screen stores, mainly in the smaller format X-Press stores. Only a very few of the larger stores are due for eight screens, as this would tend to be an imposition on the shopper environment.

In-store shopper research (AC Nielsen Asia Pacific Shopper Trends) indicates that 70% of grocer shoppers’ purchasing decisions are made in store.

In a move similar to SPAR in the UK, IGA’s offering will have significant appeal to marketers because of its ability to influence shoppers’ choice of brands.

According to PDSN, IGA has a 20% share of the grocery market, making it a strong third force in the market. PDSN also comments that there is not a great difference behaviourally between shoppers at the three major Australian chains.

The involvement of content is an interesting one, in line with the average IGA customer’s dwell time of 30 minutes in-store. PDSN’s proposed recipe for the network is a rolling loop ratio involving 50% advertising: 50% content.

A deal with News Limited will provide 80 news stories each day including weather, sport (Australian Rules in the south and Rugby League in the north), traffic, police and fire authorities, plus 4 minutes per hour for the local retailer to promote local specials, via specially designed templates.

“Speed is not a major consideration to our operation as material is downloaded as needed and backed up in a Media Player for replay. We aren’t streaming content, and so reliability of the ISP is our major consideration”, stated Weinberg.

Another challenge to accepting the traditional video format is the absence of sound with the signage network. “Whilst sound is likely to be 10% of the cost, it poses 90% of the problems”, Weinberg comments, “Sound raises an issue of the public licensing of music and there are already radio deals in-store”.

One question posed with such ventures is; do such in-store opportunities cannibalise out-of-home revenues or do they simply add another level with a marketer’s ability to target a consumer’s path to purchase?

“The effectiveness of our medium is measurable at the cash register, not in TARP’s, CPM’s, readership, as with most other media options. Marketers have supported static cardboard POS in supermarkets for a number of years because it has a positive impact on branding and on sales. Our digital signage offers all this, plus the strategic advantages of immediately updating product, price, and material across the whole network – something that an army of reps couldn’t achieve. Consequently, we do see it affecting other media opportunities”, said Weinberg.

So, when does the interactivity begin?

“At present, our focus is to provide the basic offering of a digital signage retail network, providing solid footfall Australia-wide”, said Weinberg. “Bolt-ons such as SMS, blutooth or other new media are being considered down the track”.

Paul McBeth, General Manager of Marketing at APN Outdoor was able to pass comment on the opportunities that lay in Australia, “Australia compares well to other countries with its digital out-of-home environments. The digital opportunities at Airports and Shopping Centres are of a similar quality to international markets, whilst there is an increasing emphasis on digital roadside billboards.”

Australian Outdoor media revenues were worth AUD$ 453.8m in 2008, the Australian DOOH industry is taking advantage of its valuable position with consumers’ journey to retail and with three of the top five Australian advertisers being in the retail industry the Australian DOOH market looks to be good business.

The industry is rich with opportunities for Australian marketers with digital offerings such as:-

• Adshel (largest mobile handset network)
• APN Outdoor (Australia’s first digital mega-structure)
• DAT Media (instore media)
• Executive Channel (office network)
• EYE (portrait and landscape digital network in airports, shopping centres and universities)
• Inlink (Office Tower Media Company)
• Octupus Media (roadside digital)
• oOh! Media (shopping centres)
• Prime Digital Media (in store networks)
• Torch Media (pharmacy and alcohol retail)
• Yeah Point (consumer supply chain solutions).

“Australia has seen up to 15% growth in innovative offerings at retail with a rise in the number of clients using these products. With the current economic uncertainty, there is an understandable flight towards immediate return on investment – hence the growth of retail outdoor.” McBeth mentioned.

In July 2009, the Australian Outdoor media industry released half yearly figures showing a 13.5% fall for the period (PDF report here)

Despite it being the first drop in outdoor revenue in six years, the result does compare favourably with outdoor markets in the UK (down 19% in Q1 2009) and the US (down 18% in Q1 2009).

A persuasive endorsement of the effectiveness of Outdoor media comes from the continued international growth in advertising revenue. In 2007, 95% of the UK’s top 100 advertisers used Outdoor compared to 83% in 1998.

In Australia, Outdoor media has experienced the continued growth due to its ability to offer marketers cost effective audience exposure (mass or niche audiences), valuable branding opportunities and all whilst remaining complimentary to other mediums.

At AUD$ 453.8m, Australian Outdoor media revenues are 3% of Australian media advertising revenues (AUD$ 13.7 billion) in 2008 (source: CEASA).

Over the next several months, Australia’s Outdoor Media Association (OMA) is set to release Australia’s first industry-wide audience measurement tool.

Covering five capital cities, MOVE (measurement of outdoor visibility in exposure) is a web-based reach and frequency planning tool, providing a more accurate level of measurement by determining the ‘likelihood-to-see’ of outdoor signage, rather than traditional ‘opportunity-to-see’.

MOVE is allegedly a world first in that it will provide audience measurement data for all main outdoor formats including roadside, transport (railway stations, airports, etc) and shopping centres. It will also be the first time in Australia that media buyers will have direct access to accurate and measurable data on outdoor media campaigns.

MOVE is owned by the OMA and its five largest members: APN Outdoor, EYE, Adshel, oOh! Media and JCDecaux.

MOVE has been built by a consortium of Australian and international research companies, including Veitch Lister Consulting (transport planning and modelling) and Simon Cooper Associates, the world’s leading research expert of visibility of outdoor media. Cooper was the architect of the UK’s Postar system with the assistance of the Australian researcher, Dr Paul Barber.

Yet to be released, but word on the Hunter-Valley and Mornington Peninsula grapevines is MOVE has definite merit and is another feather in Cooper’s and Barber’s cap.

International companies should be watching the Australian industry with interest due to the size of the Australian population (21.9m) and the interactivity influences presenting themselves here. According to Bill Obermeier (Chairman at Myne – a digital marketing consultancy in Australia), Digital Media is not experimental any longer – it is now 100% mainstream.

It is also felt that ownership of 3G phones has achieved critical mass in Australia, with a current network of 10.6m 3G phones here (Telstra 5.2m, Optus 2.1m, 3 has 2m and Vodafone 1.3m).

“Consider, for instance, the following two examples of consumer media consumption,” said Obermeier, “The number of Australians who say they watch TV or Video on the Mobile (25%) is greater than the number of Australians who subscribe to a Magazine (23%). And the number of Australians who say they visit social networking sites (67%) is nearly double the number of Australians who read subscribe to a Newspaper (34%)”.

Obermeier’s opinion is that by mid-2010, Mobile Phone interactivity will be part of the consumer experience in malls, airports, at point of sale, even traditional outdoor media formats. Mobile marketing should be mainstream – examples of its value are:-

• Reading Rate: More than 90% for SMS/ MMS campaigns
• Click through rate: 2-10 times higher than the web
• Recall rate: More than 60%
• High pass-on: 20+%

Our first impression was that Wallflower made some big claims with their Value Proposition – ‘the most advanced digital signage software available‘ so we thought we’d dig a little deeper…

More functionality

On a promise of delivering more functionality than their competition, Wallflower are currently:

• installing their first IPTV enabled network (Wallflower TV)
• celebrating 12 months of Health TV network upgrade in NZ, with no outages due to network or software failures
• experiencing growth with their Navigator product, combining display route-finding information with targeted promotions
• measuring net OTS elements such as facial recognition of age group and gender
• looking into energy saving measures using proximity detectors that turn off displays when no viewers are present

Connectivity

Wallflower can also schedule all popular Windows format images as well as Flash, RSS Feeds, Web pages, Videos including AVI, MPEG-1 to 4, QuickTime and WMV, TV and Video, live input from Spreadsheets and Databases.

Wallflower Products

• Wallflower Lite – for simple installations like a bar where the owner develops their own media (Scheduler and Display are housed on same machine)
• Wallflower Network – used by organisations that have multiple displays (Scheduler and Display are on separate machines).
• Wallflower Navigator – for shopping mall or store operators who want to provide customers with navigating and informational kiosks
• Altiris Network Management – bandwidth management providing sophisticated multicasting and reliable delivery.
• Wallflower Detective – unique hardware device providing seamless integration of detection devices such as proximity detectors, micro switches or other technology to Wallflower, or other leading Digital Signage software packages.
• Wallflower Site Manager – constant automatic status monitoring of your displays and routers.

Resellers

• Australia – Activate Group, Corporate Initiatives Australia P/L & TOTAL CONCEPT PROJECTS (AUST) PTY LTD
• Canada – Actiads Network
• China – PuTek Limited
• Iceland – Blatton
• India – Nascosys Infotainment Pvt. Ltd.
• Middle East – Nascosys Infotainment Pvt. Ltd.
• New Zealand – Connect NZ, Dynamic Display, Gen-i & Videopro
• Poland – MASCD Group
• Russia – Nord Systems
• Scandinavia – Infotunnel AB
• Turkey – inIT Consultancy Services Ltd.
• UK – Clikingo New Media & Intelligent Earth Ltd

You will notice an absence of resellers in the US.

This is a network of screens located in the lobby area in some of New Zealands’ premium hotels.

The offering itself has been developed over the last 3 years and uses Scala IC5.

The Creative Agency was George Patterson Y&R, Melbourne and Michael Napolitano, Group Account Director at GPY&R told us “Yellow Pages could change their messaging to make it completely tactical, depending on various elements, for example what the weather was doing, or daily patterns of traffic congestion. In essence, this provided us with the opportunity to deliver dynamic, relevant and multi-dimensional advertising opportunities for our client”

The campaign objective was focused 100% on Digital Roadside and aimed to maximise reach and impact to adapt and localise messages in high-traffic areas – quite simply to cleverly demonstrate the sheer volume and relevance of Yellow Pages’® database!

The sites – all landmark digital displays targeting major roadside junctions in inner-city Melbourne allowed a creative message 10-15 seconds in length.

Michael Napolitano also told us “The media was recommended by OMD for its reach and cut-through, motorists had a level of interaction and it produced a better outcome for our client than that of static signage.”