Playlist

The screen above the fresh counter plays the same loop in the morning as in the evening, for the shopper with a shopping list as for the commuter with an after-work basket, and it shows the item that has been sold out since noon. Footfall, zone, stock and time of day change hourly, the playlist in the content management system does not. Cortex reads these four variables at the same cadence as promotion and price data and sell-through, and gives the screen what it lacks, namely the situation in which it currently hangs.

After shopping, only a third of customers remember any promotional activity at all, displays at the shelf and secondary placements are consciously noticed by twelve and thirteen percent respectively, according to a customer path study in a German supermarket with a thousand observed shopping trips. Anyone who expects boring advertising from a screen stops looking, research calls this display blindness. Marketing budget that runs in a fixed loop thus buys playouts and not views.

Situation

Footfall in the store is distributed unevenly, the main routes along the edge and through the middle carry it, only a few enter the individual aisles. Cortex reads the live footfall per zone, the dwell time in front of the screen, the stock of the advertised item and the time of day, along with the promotion calendar, price and sell-through. Every screen thus gets a picture of its situation, who is standing in front of it right now, what is on the shelf next to it and what is selling in this hour.

That the situation changes the impact has been measured. Across 237 campaigns and thirty million customers, digital signage increases the purchase probability for the featured product by 8.1 percent, and the effect is stronger on weekends, later in the day, in a full store and when the screen hangs close to the advertised product. The content for the empty Tuesday morning is therefore different from the content for the full Saturday, and Cortex knows both.

Playout

The signal becomes a rule for which content runs on which screen in which hour. Stock excludes what is not available, footfall determines which zone currently has reach, and the time of day which message fits. The screens and their system remain, whether Samsung, LG webOS, BrightSign or Grassfish. Cortex controls them via their interfaces, decides the content per screen and hour and logs every playout.

The central campaign remains central, it only gets the hour and the zone in which it works locally. What was played for a supplier is in the log with screen, time and footfall and can be proven. Cortex thus replaces neither the CMS nor campaign planning, but gives both the in-store situation they previously lacked.

Impact

A promotional area attracts views and remains without receipts, or it sells, and no one can say how much of that was the screen. Cortex tracks two metrics per area, the conversion rate, meaning the share of passers-by who buy, and the view-to-purchase conversion, the share of views that lead to a purchase. How wide the range is, the same customer path study shows, because advertised items reached a conversion rate of 17.1 percent during the promotion and 10.1 percent in weeks without a promotion.

The impact stands side by side per screen, per zone and per hour, location by location, and every measured playout yields the rule for the next one. Across the network, it becomes clear which content works everywhere and which only here, which zone has reach and which only a screen. The screens are already hanging, a majority of retailers in the German-speaking region use digital signage, 39 percent across all stores, and the incremental revenue comes from this infrastructure and from budget that has already been spent.