Digital Signage Club Packs

From the grocery aisle: “When you buy BIG with a Club Pack, you stock up on popular ingredients. Satisfy any crowd. Club-sized savings at double or triple the recipe!”

Sounds like a bargain, except that advertisers planning a party (er…campaign) these days are increasingly focused on reaching highly targeted audiences. It’s not about buying in bulk as cheaply as possible… it’s about reaching, and more importantly paying to reach, only a specific audience.

This has interesting implications for DOOH, especially considering the common practice of charging more for spot/regional buys versus run-of-network.

This isn’t a practice unique to digital signage. After all, who hasn’t complained about the premium for purchasing a single chicken breast over the value-priced club pack? Still, advertisers are increasingly challenging the notion that they have to pay a surcharge per location if they don’t buy all the screens that a digital network offers.

Sure, there are practical challenges to running a DOOH network:hardware is expensive, audience traffic is variable. Selling every screen in the network means that the “star locations” subsidize the “problem locations”, and the business model balances.

Here’s the catch-22. As an industry, our entire value proposition to advertisers is that DOOH offers a kind of direct communication that traditional media can’t offer with their bulk buys. Why pay a cost-per-impression fee for an TV/print ad that is relevant to only a fraction of impressed audience? Advertise on digital signage and speak directly to your precise consumer demographic! Except that you have to buy every screen in the network… even if that screen is in an area that isn’t geographically or demographically relevant to the advertiser. Hmmmm……

This is actually a golden opportunity for networks. There is no better way to increase your appeal to national brands and advertisers than to remove the financial penalty for buying selected venues instead of the entire network. There is also no better way to get free advice on how to improve your network’s financial yield. For a technologically adept network, the cost of delivering part of the network is the same as delivering the entire network. By agreeing to a spot/regional buy, however, the network gets valuable feedback on which of its venues are truly marketable. One venue not selling well? No problem… move the screen and player to a location your advertisers have indicated with their hard-earned dollars that they actually want. Several venues selling well? Great… there’s your bank-able blueprint for network expansion.