While browsing through the March issue of Marketing magazine, an interesting article, Screen Captures, caught my attention. The author, Marketing Media Editor Chris Powell, explored the promising possibilities of Digital Sign Advertising or, as he put it, Digital Signage 2.0.

Digital monitors that deploy personalized and situation-specific ads may seem like a futuristic notion in this day and age, yet the next generation of digital signage is utilizing modern technology to bring consumers and marketers together in a manner that was once impossible.

Today, most digital signage show a series of ads in a video loop (usually action-focused and attention-grabbing ads with rotating products, vibrant scenery, and flashy colors). They have already been installed in retail stores, highways, airports, and even sports bars. But Powell talks about a future in which these digital display units utilize technology like radio frequency identification (RFID)-activated by a tiny chip embedded in the product packaging-to serve up product-specific messaging.

He calls it the digital signage equivalent of the Internet click-through. Some retails stores, like Rogers Wireless, already feature plasma screens with touch-screen functionality that sit above a shelf. These displays are equipped with a motion sensor, so that when a store customer grabs a product from the shelf, the display triggers a message inviting consumers to touch the screen to obtain more information on the selected product.

Lyle Bunn, a strategy architect of St. Joseph Communications, predicts Digital Sign Advertising will be a $3.4 billion industry by 2009, adding that many network operators and suppliers believe that adding web functionality and interactivity to displays will help it take off.

A U.S. white paper (“The disruptive effect of the Internet and mobile phones on out-of-home digital media) also notes that the digital

signage of the future will be based on an interactive web-based model with mobile devices facilitating the conversation. “The future success and differentiation of out-of-home signage networks will depend on their ability to attract, interact with and react to consumers in the moment,” the paper states. “What comes with this new technology is the ability to measure consumer interactions.”

The emerging trend of digital sign advertising can be likened to that of the established method of online advertising, in which advertisers may upload ads through a software interface and choose their placements in many different locations.

As consumers become more mobile, the importance of adding out-of-home digital media, such as digital signage, to the marketing mix is crucial for brands to stay afloat. Out-of-home digital media is an effective advertising media and is becoming a major component of advertisers media mix, much like the Internet is today.