As popular as e-commerce has become, about 80 percent of retail transactions still take place in the real world, at the store.
“Every retailer, including some of the largest on the planet, see more foot traffic than they do digital traffic by a very large factor,” noted Hans Fischmann, VP and GM of the nCountR platform by RR Donnelley. So, “if you’re trying to reach consumers before they make their purchase decisions, the best place to do that is physically in stores. Now the question is, how do you deliver messages to them?”
Speaking to Jan Meade of The Shelby Report at Groceryshop 2024 in Las Vegas, Fischmann provided an answer to that question: digital signage in the store aisles.
“What we’ve built is the nCountR platform, which brings enterprise-grade capability to deploying screens – the software that runs on the screens and the hardware that actually is displaying the message. [The signage is] consistent and at a standard that it meets the expectations of some of the largest players on the planet. We then deliver advertising on behalf of brands to those screens.”
Retailers also can display their own messaging on the screens, perhaps promoting private brands or deals linked to the selling season.
Studies have shown that in-store signage lifts sales, and “digital signage actually has a little bit of an edge – maybe it’s the color or the moving or whatever it might be,” Fischmann said. “We know that, minimally, there’s a 10 to 15 percent sales lift as a result of digital signage in stores.”
But could those numbers be even higher if ad campaigns could be modified in close to real time? To find out, nCountR recently did a study with two private label products – cookies and coffee – for a retail customer.
“For their private label cookies, month over month, we increased sales 30 percent. For their private label coffee, we increased it 24 percent. We know that the capabilities that we brought to bear, not just deploying the digital signage but all the things around it, help us to do a better job on moving products,” Fischmann said.
“All of the things around it” can include print, television and/or radio ads, search-and-display digital advertising, podcast advertising, mobile advertising, etc.
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Fischmann said the nCountR platform is designed to increase revenue through not only higher product sales and digital ads but also through monetizing the transaction data that comes out of the retailer’s POS system.
“Every retailer has information that comes out of their POS system, but you use it for analysis; it doesn’t have an intrinsic value directly attributable to it. When appended to advertising, it does,” said Fischmann, who has nearly 20 years of experience in generating revenue through media channels.
The nCountR platform utilizes Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in the store that show what is and isn’t working, he said. “We provide that basically in real time, same day, which allows for brands to modify their messages, to change their campaigns, to actually have stewardship over their media.
“Our goal is to provide solutions for advertisers. The way that we do that is by working with the retailers. And, of course, the retailers benefit from it. … It takes money to capitalize this, to put it inside of stores, to get it installed, to maintain it. By bringing advertising demand against that technology, it allows us to kind of break that cycle, and that’s really the key difference of what we’re doing.”
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