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How can big data drive digital signage?

Digital signage can help answer the value proposition of big data by driving action, sharing information and tearing down silos with data.

December 10, 2014 by Christopher Hall — w, t

In today's world, nearly everything — from your car to your mobile phone to the loyalty card you scan at a cash register to sensors on devices you pick up — creates data. This data can be used to help create personalized and engaging digital signage experiences and empower decision making.

Digital Signage Today and digital signage software provider Omnivex Corp. recently held a webinar looking at the intersection of "big data" and digital signage, "Emerging Technologies: Data, Data, Data Everywhere."

The webinar, led by Omnivex CEO and Director of Software Development Doug Bannister, looked at: 

• The types of sources and devices that are generating data;
• How to harness that data to empower and engage people; and
• The pros and cons of using data from all of these new sources and devices.

Bannister started by citing Gartner research indicating the growing digitalization of core business processes, products and services and the prediction that businesses will soon be accessing big data services through intermediary data broker services for contextualization of the data.

"The bottom line is that businesses need to figure out what to do with all this data, and how to drive action with it, and how to gain value from it," he said.

He then outlined the rest of the webinar to come, noting that he planned to look at what the term big data actually means; the evolution of data on signs; types of data sources for big data; and real-world examples of the intersection of big data and digital signage.

"[Big data] is a popular term used to describe essentially the exponential growth and availability of data," he said, before launching into descriptions of how the changing world has led to the era of big data.

The data from someone's home phone, for instance, used to amount to basically their number, their address and their current bill, and that was about it, he said. Now, though, people's phones are data goldmines, from their GPS systems to their social media to their mobile apps. Formerly mundane physical items such as rail cars and plane engines today also have become data rich resources, he said.

And retailers and others are taking all the data from all those data sources and analyzing it to reveal patterns and associations, he said, noting the well-known case of Target's algorithm showing that pregnant women tended to buy certain items and the retailer revealing a teen pregnancy to a surprised parent. And he cited another example: Walmart's weather analysis has shown that when hurricanes threaten, sales of strawberry Pop-Tarts increase 500-1,000 percent in the path of the storm.

Big data has a long history of representation on digital signs, Bannister said, starting with the early stock displays on Bloomberg Terminals. But it has evolved significantly since then, from stock tickers and weather information on digital signage displays to changing languages on airport signage based on incoming flight data:

#bigdata on #digitalsignage real-world, airport flight boards change languages based on arrival data #omnivexbigdata pic.twitter.com/XdvnxpM3eN

— DigitalSignageToday (@DigSignageToday) December 4, 2014

And it has evolved even more since then and in a wide variety of ways, as shown by just a sampling of the real-world examples he cited:

How do you unlock 'dark data'? Hospital #digitalsignage put it in front of ppl who needed to see it #omnivexbigdata pic.twitter.com/KR9GtLvOVr

— DigitalSignageToday (@DigSignageToday) December 4, 2014

military base using #bigdata and #digitalsignage to show No-Go zones #omnivexbigdata pic.twitter.com/Xf4jyfoAYd

— DigitalSignageToday (@DigSignageToday) December 4, 2014

Bannister also offered up what he called "The Five Vs of Big Data": volume (the flood of data); variety (the types and sources of data); velocity (the speed of data updates); veracity (the accuracy or "truthfulness" of the data); and value (what can be accomplished with the data). The first four get most of the attention, but it's the last one that is key, according to Bannister.

"Unless you can get value out of all this ... all the rest of it is kind of pointless," which is why he's excited about digital signage and big data, he said. "In the digital signage world we have a great answer for that value: We can drive actions with data; we can drive behavior with data; we can drive culture with data; we can tear down silos between different departments; we can share information; we can boost sales; we can do all kinds of really cool things with digital signage and data."

To watch the entire webinar, access the free, on-demand version here.

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