Digital Signage Central

A few months back, I posted about consumers’ resistance to digital signage, pointing up the issue that oftentimes what marketers see as dazzling is often construed by end user eyeballs as glaring, particularly among a Connected Class to whom (as one commenter eloquently put it, “loud noises mean “panic” and surprising movement means “danger, get away”).

The topic riled up a great group of industry folks as well as end users, and the discussion quickly branched off into sub-conversations about user experience, design decisions, industry best practices, and the OOH signage landscape at large. Audience aside, these threads converged exactly where the discussion started: the difficulty of escaping the mediated public perception of digital signage.

What do I mean by this?

Well, when’s the last time you read an article about a cutting-edge DS installation without a reference (or four) to Minority Report, Children of Men, or some other Orwellian dystopia?

Case in point: The London Olympics are installing gigantic 400″ (yep) digital screens in 60 UK cities, making quite certain that no passer-by escapes one oversized moment of Olympic glory. The article’s main call-out box (which I can’t link to because it’s from *GASP* a print newspaper) is entirely too predictable: “This project is sponsored by George Orwell and his Big Brother.”

So what do we have here? This is Olympics Coverage. No gyrating content (take that as you will), no flashing-blinking-dancing Coke cans, no accosting copy… and the dystopian references still push their way to the forefront.