Digital Signage and Effective Branding

While most people are familiar with digital signage and its use in advertising around shopping malls and retail stores, the medium’s greatest strength isn’t in advertising at all, but branding.

Advertising is essentially content designed to sell something, whether its hamburgers or holidays, while branding is different, it’s about raising awareness of a particular company or product, not to sell something but to ingrain the company in the consciousness.

"Branded totem"

Branding is the reason companies sponsor sporting events. While products are rarely advertised in sport, the manufacturers of products pay huge sums of money to have their name emblazoned on shirts and around stadia. This help generates brand awareness, and “brands” the company name in people’s memory.

Branding is an effective means of generating trust. The more often people see a brand name, and the more authoritative or trusted the location they see it, the more likely people will turn to that brand when they need something.

Digital signage is ideal for generating brand awareness. People don’t view outdoor screens in the same way they view TV, unless the audience is captive. At best, a digital signage display gets a few seconds of a person’s attention while they are passing by, less for outdoor digital signage. While many digital signs are employed for advertising, any content on a digital signage display needs to be brief and to the point. There isn’t the time to provide television style advertisements on a digital signage display, but there is time to get brand messaging across.

Company names, logos and strap lines are ideal content for digital signage. By using screens to display branding information, around a store or at the entrance, it helps to build up brand awareness, implanting the brand on people’s memory—the more people see a brand name, the more likely the brand will remain with them.

And it’s not only the screen that branding can be displayed on. Some digital signage displays, especially the kiosks and totem style display, often have plain enclosures, which is a wasted opportunity. Branded digital signage totems provide an extra opportunity to display branding information on the enclosure itself, as well as the screen.