Mexico. It is almost ten o'clock in the morning in the Palenque and Monte Albán rooms. Some attendees of the 8th Forum are waiting for the opening of the doors to the commercial area to see what the Mexican DS industry has to offer them. Exhibitors are fine-tuning the last details in their stands and leaving everything ready with their screens and tables, brochures and USB sticks where their entire catalog of products and services is.
When the doors open the smell of coffee is already in the exhibition area, the stands begin to receive the first visitors and conversations flow as fast as business cards changing from hand to hand. The screens arranged with the program of the day give a preview of what has been prepared for everyone: four presentations with industry experts talking from content, to why we can not have a metric in our country.
Some visitors notice that there is something new about the structure of the exhibition area. It is a room of 6x3 meters with a door to the side right in front of the café, so there is no way not to see it. Some approach with their cup in hand and a couple of cookies in the other ready to read what the screen in front of that room announces: manufacturer sessions. Those responsible for bringing this area to life are Kolo, Novotech and Compusof. All of them will be having meetings with those interested in their products and what they can offer them as potential customers.
Continuing through the commercial area, there is the entrance to the conference room where everything is ready to receive the speakers, starting with the Keynote that Cristian Mecalco presents for 15 minutes. He tells us that "the best time to talk to a consumer is when he has the money in his hand, ready to pay for a product," and that is the time that could best define the DS's recall role in a retail and anywhere else where payments are made for products or services. On the importance of the DS in our country, its prognosis is completely positive.
But a forecast is not enough to understand all the challenges we face, starting with the obvious problems in the content created for the screens, so Boris Dellafontana is the one who begins the chair on the different formats of content creation, why use and not use a certain type of format in content to create content for digital signage. Understanding this point has become one of the biggest challenges for content creators in Mexico, more difficult than understanding technical and numerical issues such as metrics and data that we receive from cameras that are installed with software that measures even the slightest flicker of those who are in front of the screen.
But what to do with all that data is the issue that Carlos Viniegra presented and that he undoubtedly made very clear when he said that "it is not about accumulating data, but knowing how to rank them, know what to do with them and use them in favor of our goal". The accumulation of data demands an expert who analyzes them, hierarchizes them and allows them to optimize the operation of our network, from the content and time of guideline, to knowing how to include the internet of things to the consumer environment.
After the data collected and interpretation we have to look at the person responsible for the existence of the same: the users. This was Paul Flanigan's theme, "the connected user." But connected to what and how we can understand it. Well, just listen to Paul's explanation that could be summed up in an everyday picture: How many people see around them with their eyes on a screen whatever device it is? It is very easy to answer this. We are all part of that digital fauna. However, screens on DS need to understand much better the human being they have in front of their ads. Cameras will definitely objectively deliver what they capture, however the human factor is what we have simply forgotten by investing in the technological factor.
This is the user we want to understand. Later we will have the video of Paul's presentation on our Vimeo channel.
And achieving this sum of information, between data collected and our user will understand, we have the last presentation with Antonio Maza who in a few words does not say that the impossibility of achieving an exact methodology of audience measurement is because we have not understood anything of the real process by which we began to measure. It sounds strange, but he's absolutely right when he utters the phrase "enriching information means deleting data." When "less data" results in hierarchical and valuable "more information," we are actually achieving something in measurement analysis. And this is the biggest challenge that Antonio Maza poses to us in his presentation: the more data we have "enriching" our samples, the further we will be from obtaining what we are really looking for.
This is roughly what I learned at the 8th #digitalsignage Forum in Mexico.
*Text written by Cristian Mecalco of Kolo Academy.
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