By Milena Miller

Sporting venues have been using displays for a while now, to showcase the scores and capture big plays. Some venues, however, are beginning to look at other ways to use digital signage to build up fan engagement and excitement. They can do this with dynamic social media content, better analytics and clearly defined objectives.

Dynamic social media

Jonathan Gudai, CEO of Adomni, pointed out in an interview with Digital Signage Today that teams and sports venues aren’t just putting their logos or game schedules on billboards anymore. They are using dynamic social media content, such as the Vegas Golden Knights, a professional hockey team based in Las Vegas.

“The Vegas Golden Knights placed advertisements all around town. They tied the content to their Twitter feed,” Gudai said. He pointed out that the middle portion of the outdoor displays were populated with fan tweets in real time.

“We are always looking for creative, innovate ways to connect with our fans and reach new audiences. With the amount of interest surrounding the Golden Knights during the Stanley Cup Final we felt it was a great opportunity to launch a DOOH campaign to further raise our visibility,” Eric Tosi, vice president, communications and content, Golden Knights, said in an interview. “We were pleased with the results and the traction the campaign demonstrated. Our @GoldenKnights twitter account has been a popular follow and has demonstrated tremendous growth and engagement since we launched.”

This type of dynamic content can help drive more fan engagement, especially since everyone is already using social media, Gudai said.

Connecting with fans and advertisers through analytics

Many digital signage operators are starting to use more advanced analytics platforms to gather “audience intelligence,” according to Gudai.

Companies now have the ability to, “put cameras facing outwards, measuring age, emotions, gender in a quantitative way,” Gudai said. They can then use this information to deliver more targeted advertisements and content, or even display dynamic content that responds to a customer’s demographics.

Advertisers can use this information to truly understand who their audience is, and how to reach them, much like with digital advertisements on social media. In fact, Gudai points out that by using this type of analytics, DOOH advertisements networks can compete more effectively with Facebook or Google advertisements.

That being said, all these tools won’t matter if your sporting venue or company doesn’t have clear objectives in place.

Clear objectives

Tosi emphasized the importance of having clear objectives in mind before running a DOOH campaign. The Golden Knights, for example, ran the social media campaign to boost fan engagement and social media followers during the Stanley Cup.

“Have defined goals in mind in terms of the results you are trying to achieve. Build the campaign around a relevant event in your marketplace that your business is associated with to make it even more relevant,” Tosi said.

Debbie DeWitt, marketing communications manager at Visix, Inc., pointed out in a blog that it’s important to look at the overall communications goals rather than just a pure return on investment.

“Focus on specific goals for individual communications or campaigns by looking at qualitative feedback, behavioral changes and business outcomes. Borrow ideas that come from measuring internal communications, where professionals use SMART objectives, KPIs and other tools,” DeWitt wrote in the blog.