Minimum Five To 10 Screens Recommended To Reach A Target Audience: Research

May 2, 2023 by Dave Haynes

The Swiss adtech firm Adtrac has released research that tries to get a handle on how many digital signage or digital out of home screens are needed for messaging or ads to reach a target audience and have an impact.

The company ran three sets of tests over the past year, and concluded from that work that a campaign needs at least five screens, and 10 or more is better. Logic suggests the more screens the better, but I suppose this gives people who plan messaging or ad campaigns a better sense of minimal reach and breadth.

From Adtrac …

In this post, we explore the impact of screen selection on tracking variations and provide insights on how to optimize your campaign success. To this end, we analyzed variations in measured tracking per day of the week between consecutive weeks on different sensor subsets within a given network.

Editor: I had to ask for a definition of trackings. I was told by company co-founder Benjamin Wey: “Trackings describes the number of people and time spent in front of the sensors. If you trigger an “impression” (play-out) during a tracking, you get a “contact” which is a measured impact of a video on an audience member.”

For each experiment, a random subset of all available screens (with sensors) in a given network was selected and analyzed, e.g. 20 random screens out of 100 available. By calculating the average number of trackings per day of the week and their standard deviation, we obtain a metric for variation (standard deviation divided by mean).

The experiments were repeated many (10,000) times, each time selecting a different large random subset of the network.

Finally, the average of the variation in the trackings was plotted across all experiments with the same subset (see Figures 1-3).

In other words, if 16 different experiments were performed, each selecting 20 random screens, then the average of the variation of the trackings was plotted for the 16 experiments.

As expected, the variations of trackings (and contacts) decreases as the number of screens used increases: The more screens used, the lower the spread of trackings and thus contacts achieved for your campaign.

In summary, using a larger number of screens (>10) can help minimize variation in predicted contacts and allow you to plan the campaign with more reliable and accurate estimates. Therefore, we recommend to plan a campaign with at least 5 screens.

This thing has me in rapid-eye-blink, bubbles-on-lips mode, so I won’t even take a stab at an opinion or insight. You can read more about the work, and look over some charts here.

I don’t know what the chart above or other ones mean, but somebody will …