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Use video games, news to inspire your digital signage designs
One way to boost digital signage engagement is to utilize both news and entertainment in your content.
July 19, 2019 by Sean Matthews — President & CEO, Visix, Inc.
This is part two of a series looking at using pop culture to inspire your digital signage design. Click here for part one. Part two will look at how to use video games, news, sports and trends to inform your designs.
Video games are now the number one form of entertainment in the U.S., in terms of sales, eclipsing even movies. In 2018, gaming made $116 billion, streaming TV made $105 billion, films in the cinema made $41 billion and digital music made $17 billion. One to engage your audience is to ask your audience what games they play with a short survey online or face-to-face, or even using paper surveys placed near digital signs.
Sports is a type of entertainment, and team loyalties sometimes run very, very deep. This can be used to gain interest in your digital signage messages – acknowledging recent wins, displaying current standings, etc. If you have a large core of fans for a particular team, you'll get them excited simply by mentioning that team, or a player, or a recent win.
Stay in the know
News items are great at drawing attention, sometimes in a bad way due to divisive politics. Because politics can be tricky, the safest thing to do is simply have news snippets as part of your layout, which will draw attention to the screens. Choose headline news from a fairly neutral source and you'll reach the widest possible audience. And there are subscription services that have already curated and crafted news content to be neutral and widely appealing, so much of the work’s been done for you.
Keeping up on tech releases, slang, trending hashtags and internet jokes is also pretty straightforward. If someone on your team doesn’t already do this for themselves, a few quick internet searches will yield lots and lots of source material for you to use.
Take advantage of trends
The point is that people now spend a lot of time online, being exposed to all sorts of things, and you can leverage pop culture to create content and engage viewers. In the U.S., Americans spend an average of 24 hours per week online, and if you include other types of screen interactions (like watching the latest Netflix series), they spend 10 hours a day in front of a screen. And that's outside of work. That's a lot of content they're exposed to. And they're choosing to see it, actively engage and interact with it. Why not tap into that potential?
Activating your audience’s interests can be incredibly effective for getting your content noticed. Using pop culture on your digital signs almost guarantees people will look at your screens more often and for longer. They're also more likely to talk about what they see there with others, further expanding the effectiveness of your messages.
Disclaimer: We are NOT telling you to use copyrighted imagery. Make sure you have the right to use any content you put up on your screens.
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