One of the guidelines Mike will cover in his book is what he calls the “5 As of digital content.” He has kindly allowed us to reprint them below:

Appropriate, Attractive, Affordable, Adaptable, Assembled

For digital signage content to be successful it must be appropriate. Customers should see relevant content on the screens — based on the right time, day, place, and location.

Content must be attractive. The brands that are participating want the content to look good, to be pleasing to the eye and ear. Customers have enough visual clutter in their lives.

Digital content should be appealing, not a distraction. Most retailers do not have the resources to create a network with both appropriate AND attractive content. Therefore it must also be affordable.

Retailers are not media companies. They sell products. A digital signage network cannot be a negative drag on their resources. The pressures of the first three A’s compel signage networks to ensure that the creative is adaptable. The content must be flexible enough to be used in a variety of ways and approaches while still being relevant. The only way to do this is by assembling content using technology. Retailers should look for technical solutions that can produce a wealth of sharp-looking, relevant content at a low cost. This is the future of digital signage content.

We’re definitely in a moment of transition. A moment where an old media system is dying and a new media system is being born. An era when spectatorial culture is giving way to a participatory culture.

So begins this video thoughtpiece by Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program:

Although Jenkins describes the political and educational implications of this media shift, the thrust of his message should not be lost upon us marketers. If you develop content for digital signage, you need to realize that the rules are changing. Visual language is changing. What people find interesting and credible is also changing. And quite possibly, peoples’ desire to influence and affect the content they see in malls, train stations and banks is going to change as well.

Questions abound:

• As participatory culture continues to grow online (and in the increasingly interrelated realm of mobile), how will it begin affect the content we produce for our clients?
• How will user-generated content become part of — or even drive — commercial content?
• How will our content-creation tools need to change?
• How does this fit with the trend toward individualized (i.e., Minority Report) digital signage content?

Please tell us your thoughts! This could be a whole conference unto itself (or at least a meaty panel discussion).

Even if you don’t market on the Web, you can use the Web to learn more about what your customers want and what they think of your bank. And you can use this data to inform your marketing plans and even the wording you use within your marketing content. Best of all, unlike real focus groups, these research tools won’t cost you a dime.

If you use Google for searches, then you’re probably familiar with the “sponsored links” that show up at the top and in the right column of the search results page. These are ads that are purchased by advertisers and appear based on the words you entered into your search.

What’s hot on the Web could be hot in your branch
Google provides these advertisers with its Keyword Tool, which allows them (and you!) to find out which topics are currently hot with consumers. Type in “mortgage” and see how many searches are being conducted on the word mortgage and any phrases that include the word mortgage. To see how popular a keyword is in your region, just add your locality (e.g., Boston + mortgage).

Below is a list showing the number of searches that were conducted for different bank-related searches in March of 2009. Do you see anything surprising in this list? Does it make you wonder what kind of promotion you could do that involves mortgage calculators?

Bank related Google searches, March 2009

Google offers some other market-research tools that you might find helpful:

• Google Trends – Enter a keyword and see a graph of its historical popularity to present, as well as key news events that have affected search volume.
• Google Hot Trends – An up-to-the-minute rundown of the world’s most popular searches. Click any term in the list for historical search data.
• Google Insights for Search – Similar to Google Trends, this tool lets you narrow your search by region, time period, category and other criteria. This tool would be handy for a marketer who works across multiple states. Did you notice in the table above how popular the keyword “mortgage calculator” is? Using Google Insights, you can get granular, as in this example, which shows that for the last 90 days, people in Helena, Montana, and Bend, Oregon have conducted the most searches on this keyword.
• Google Zeitgeist - At the end of each year, Google compiles its search data to determine what were the most popular searches worldwide and in each country. Other trend fast-rising search trends. For example, look how the term “Layaway” skyrocketed in popularity last year.

Next installment: Using Twitter and social media to fuel your offline marketing

Marketers often struggle to keep pace with their digital signage network’s daily demand for up-to-date and relevant content. Data-driven content is one way to “feed the beast.”

What is data-driven messaging?
By “data-driven” we mean content that is automatically assembled or updated based on external business rules or data sources.

Data-driven spots
Spots that are data-driven are automatically refreshed based on incoming data feeds. Most often, the spot is a template with specific elements that are affected by the incoming data are text and visuals, like the temperature and weather graphics in the example above.

Examples of data-driven content include:

• News, weather or stock market updates fed by RSS or XML feeds
• Directional messaging (such as arrows or aisle numbers) fed by store plan-o-grams
• Calls to action that are updated based on time of day (a countdown clock, for example)
• Message backdrops fed by postal codes (for example, skylines or local monuments)

Data-driven playlists
Playlists can also be data-driven. Examples include:

• Using individual store performance results to choose the right spot among a pool of product spots designed for this purpose.
• Matching loop length to traffic-flow data based on predefined business rules

User-generated data-driven playlists
Data-driven playlists can also be updated based on local user interactions versus centrally established business rules. For instance, if an interactive kiosk is registering widespread interest in a particular topic, screens elsewhere in the store may be updated with content loops more strongly weighted toward that theme.

The benefits of data-driven content

• Enables a very high-frequency of message refresh
• Integrates “outside-world” information for a more entertaining and engaging content loop
• Improves message relevance and timeliness — fully leveraging the power of multimedia messaging over static paper-based P.O.S. communications
• Reduces daily management attention while ensuring messaging is closely aligned to business priorities
• Reduces production costs by creating spots “on the fly” with a library of visual assets, versus commissioning agency production of each individual spot

Important considerations
Not all content management systems (CMS) manage data-driven content with ease. As you evaluate your CMS, here are some questions to ask:

• Is the CMS restricted to video playback? If so, each iteration of content will need to be specifically rendered up-front, minimizing flexibility and cost savings that might normally be associated with data-driven content.
• Does the CMS play common multimedia types in native format? If not, the spots may act more like video spots in the file-conversion process, losing some or all of their original ability to ingest (and update) based on external data feeds.
• Does the CMS player have the necessary processing capability to manage “on-the-fly” store-level assembly of content?
• Does the CMS permit rules-based scheduling?
• Does the CMS manage interactive content? If so, does it have the ability to instantly monitor interactive results and use those findings to update playlists?