A Q&A with PRN’s Jonathan Rosen.
Walk into some retail stores today and you’ll be greeted with digital screens that feel alive—weather-responsive messaging, locally relevant content, fun and eye-grabbing content. Down the block is another retailer with snazzy digital screens, but they’re displaying stale promotions, poorly placed where shoppers barely notice them, or their view blocked by paper banners or standing displays.
The gap isn’t just striking. It points to a fundamental disconnect, one based on three common mistakes that retailers make in their digital signage strategy, according to Jonathan Rosen, Global EVP at PRN, a STRATACACHE company. We caught up with Jonathan to get his insights into what retailers are still getting wrong—and his best advice for stepping up their digital signage game.
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: What are the biggest mistakes retailers make when it comes to in-store signage?
There are three that come to mind, and the first one is “mindset.” Retailers need to stop thinking they’re just putting up signage. They’re media owners, and brands absolutely notice when you act like one.
Media is something that’s meant to move and engage and be meaningful to a consumer. If retailers really start to think about the hooks—the things that consumers really care about at any given moment—they’ll realize a store is full of all these signals. Retailers need to really lean into the media part of retail media—they’re a brand with stories to tell, and they have a specific audience in a specific location.
Take one of our clients at PRN—a leading health and wellness retailer. They’re very sophisticated about how they think about waiting areas where people dwell, what their mindset is in that location, and what messaging might serve them best. They know quite a bit about their local shoppers for each individual store. So they’re doing hyper-local targeting. If it’s raining outside, it’s speaking to cold and flu. If it’s a sunny summer day, it’s speaking to sun care.
Q: Once they adopt a media-owner mindset, what’s the next common mistake they need to avoid?
They need to think of their digital strategy in terms of quality, not quantity. It’s not about adding more screens. Placement, staff awareness, and content updates matter more than inundating shoppers with content every three feet.
Placement needs to be thoughtful. You have different zones in the store: Areas that people can see almost through the entire shopping trip. Areas that are at shelf level and areas at checkout. It’s about the right screens in the right place with the right message. Most retailers don’t want to have their store feel like Times Square, so you have to be judicious and very sensitive to what shoppers most need.
And your strategy can’t be set-it-and-forget-it. Staff need to be attuned to what’s running on your screens to keep content fresh and to catch any technical issues with them.
Q: A broken in-store digital screen that goes unnoticed is definitely a misstep. And the third mistake that retailers need to avoid?
Not measuring the impact of their digital signage. If you’re not tracking and analyzing metrics—views, footfall, sales lift—you’re just guessing. Measure, measure, measure.
Some of that is due to privacy concerns, but in the past few years there’s been great progress on data measurement that aggregates anonymized data to protect privacy.
The biggest breakthrough now is the availability of very low-cost sensors that allow you to understand when a human being is near something. Another is tags that can be put on carts and baskets that allow pathing to be much more understood.
Between understanding where a person is in the store, understanding what they bought through their loyalty information, and understanding their relationship to where they were in relationship to a screen—those three data points can be brought together to form a very robust understanding of how media is behaving in a space.
Q: Any other big-picture advice that could help retailers get the best ROI from their digital signage?
Signage, when it’s working at its best, plants a seed or triggers an impulse or closes a consideration, turns it into a sale. It can do that through common triggers that are hooks that have motivated people in marketplaces forever. Namely, “This is something that’s new. This is something that costs less than you thought. This is something that’s particularly useful today and this is something that is likely on your mind right now.”
A store is a thing to be experienced. Everyone knows physical stores aren’t going away. These are places where we gather and experience things, and having relevant content that is tied to that experience—if retailers think about their space in a more abstract way as a medium, it’s explosive. It’s really a powerful mindset when retailers start to embrace what it means to be a media company.
At the end of the day, if a sign doesn’t have a purpose or it doesn’t have utility for a shopper, it’s just going to be ignored. It’s got to have a reason for being. It’s got to have some usefulness. And ultimately it has to connect with the consumer and give them the shopping experience they want—and deserve.
