Article

What is the future of digital engagement?

Last week's Digital Screenmedia Association Symposium in Dallas took a wide-ranging look at engagement and the technology of creating experiences for, and relationships with, consumers.

October 2, 2014

The recent Digital Screenmedia Association Symposium in Dallas brought together a wide spectrum of technology providers, end-users and brands to explore the connected experience.

The discussions were far-reaching — some touching directly upon digital signage and some somewhat more tangentially related to the medium — and provided both practical and high-level perspectives on improving consumer engagement via connected experiences.

Marketing and engagement strategies are in many cases transitioning from the old one-to-many approach to the new one-to-one strategies and relationship building. And whether it's through mobile and loyalty or digital signage experiences the way brands build relationships and learn about their customers is undergoing seismic shifts on an ongoing basis.

"We've gone from 'Mad Men' to 'math men,'" one speaker said at last week's event, in discussing how data-driven marketing has changed her brand's approach to market. "We count everything."

Looking at engagement

The symposium's opening session, "The Shopper and the Solution," looked at how the explosive growth of interconnected experiences has led to a new way of thinking about consumer engagement. Christina Moore, the senior manager of shopper insights at Frito-Lay North America, and Tom Nix, CEO of digital signage software provider Scala, opened the day's discussion by talking about the state of omnichannel experiences as seen through the eyes of PepsiCo-Frito-Lay and Scala.

Given the constant barrage of messaging and information most people are constantly under these days from all sources, engagement efforts must be targeted, Moore and Nix said. Sending someone who never uses coupons a coupon is waste of time; marketers have to engage people in the channels they, the people, prefer.

"I think that's the biggest challenge," Moore said. "Communicating is easy … connecting is hard."

In looking at the mountain of data available to engage those consumers, Moore said the difficulty lay in understanding which metrics matter. But collecting all the data available is paramount.

"We've gone from 'Mad Men' to 'math men,'" she said. "We count everything."

Looking ahead at the retail and shopping experiences of tomorrow, Moore said she saw a future in which brick-and-mortar stores would have the same physical footprint they do now, but with much smaller amounts of space devoted to inventory and more devoted to experience areas where shoppers can take cooking classes or learn how-to — while having their groceries delivered by Amazon.

"Our society has accepted that we're going to be our own inventory picker," she said, indicating she thinks that may not be true for much longer.

Engagement though digital experiences

The aesthetics of digital signage and designing spaces, whether it's interior design or architecture, are changing — and becoming more closely intertwined.

The idea behind digital signage is now in many cases as much about providing a digital experience as about advertising a sale or delivering a message. And design, specifically the design of a physical space, is becoming more and more about connecting people to place with experiences — experiences that can be provided or enhanced by digital signage.

A look at how the two can work, and in some cases already are working, together brought Justin Molloy, the director of education for The Society for Experiential Graphic Design, together with Matt Schmitt, the president and co-founder of in-store digital media solutions provider Reflect at the Symposium.

"We don't want to just throw technology at the wall," Schmitt said during the duo's presentation, "Connecting People to Place Through Digital Experiences," that looked at how digital signage can help create the built space as an integrated design element as much as bricks or mortar are. "[Designers] want to understand how it complements the environment."

Digital signage and screen media have changed, as have the perceptions of them by outsiders, Molloy said. They are becoming viewed by architects and designers as a key part of a tool kit for creating branded experiences, and have moved beyond being seen as useful primarily for wayfinding or dynamic messaging, he said.

"Where does the screen end and where does the drywall begin?" he asked. "The traditional silos that have existed for so long have blurred."

The SEGD is a collective that bills itself as a "global, multidisciplinary community of professionals who plan, design and build experiences that connect people to place," according to its website, and it includes a range of "graphic and information designers, fabricators, architects, exhibition designers, technology integrators, interaction designers, brand strategists, students, wayfinding specialists, teachers and others who have a hand in shaping content-rich, experiential spaces."

"People are creating experiences that connect people to place," Molloy said. "They're creating that relationship between content and space."

(Click here to read a more in-depth look at this session from Digital Signage Today.)

The technology of engagement

In "The Technology of Consumer Engagement," experts looked at how engagement is more than just a screen, but the seamless experience provided by screens spread over different channels and locations working together. Scott Silverstein, the global technical marketing manager for digital communications solutions at Arrow Electronics, led a panel discussion with Greg Clore, vice president of information technology at Dave & Buster's Inc., and Tom LaPlante, CIO for TopGolf.

One of the key ideas explored in this session was the idea of offering customers as many avenues of engagement as possible, rather than trying to limit them to one approach or screen — and allowing and enabling them to pick which way to interact back with them.

"Our customers should never have to stand in line to give us money," Clore said.

Who are you engaging?

The next session, "Defining the Connected Consumer," looked more at analytics and gathering information about consumers in order to better understand them and market back to them.

Manolo Almagro, the SVP and managing director of digital and retail technologies for TPN Retail, led a panel discussion with Matt McCoy, the COO and co-founder of Scanalytics; Mike Cearley, the SVP and senior partner for global social strategy at Fleischman-Hillard; and Renee Adams, director of CRM for Radio Shack.

Cearley made a potent point, ironically, about how critical it is for brands to know their own story first before trying to know their consumers' stories.

"It's much easier to tell your story across any channel if you know what it is," he said, pointing to brands such as Nike, Red Bull and GoPro that have well-defined identities and stories to tell.

Cearley also provided a key insight when the panel was asked "How do you take data sets and turn them into insights?" His initial two-word answer was, "Smart people."

"We get overwhelmed with data because we've never had this much before … and it's only going to get more expansive," he said. "We're going to need smart people who can create a signal or music out of the noise and synthesize data."

Omnichannel is a bad idea

In the last full session, "The Future of Engagement," designed to pull the day's discussions together, Chute Gerdeman Chief Experience Officer Jim Crawford and Two West Chief Executive Officer Ethan Whitehill engaged in a lively discussion of the future of the connected store with Margot Myers, the director of global marketing and communications for the Platt Retail Institute.

And the topic again turned to telling stories. "Every store has a story," Whitehill said. "How do you tell that story with technology? How do we enhance that story for the shopper?"

Most retail still happens though brick-and-mortar stores, the panel said, in large part because the in-store experience still provides a sense of community and meaning. Shoppers shop for both utility and meaning, which brick and mortar provides like no other, they said.

"You do it because of the task, and the treat," Whitehill said. "Brick and mortar delivers that better than any other experience."

The biggest challenges facing retail technology and technologists are lack of imagination and lack of meaning, Crawford said. "They're just tools," he said. "We lack the discernment that can pull everything together."

Later in the discussion Crawford offered this pointed observation about the discussion about omnichannel that has taken over retail and customer engagement. "Omnichannel is a buzzword; it's the latest evolution of a bad idea. Channels are fundamentally the wrong way to think about the world."

Innovation and execution

To wrap things up at the end of the day, Ron Bowers, the SVP of business development for in-store merchandising solution and kiosk provider Frank Mayer and Associates, offered a look at "What Do We Do Now?"

Bowers said that, in order for a retail engagement strategy to be successful, the interests of the brand marketer, the retailer and the customer have to be in balance — "digital merchandising is just a tool."

"The best technology is the technology that falls away and lets the product come through," he said. "Innovation is only as good as the execution of it."

Many of the best moments of last week's Symposium were caught live on Twitter; scroll through them below:

#dsasymp14 Tweets