Sochi onscreen: The Olympic-sized opportunity for digital signage users

I remember Nagano in 1998, where coworkers stumbled into the office after near-sleepless nights staying up to watch Canadian hockey players take the ice in Japan. I remember Vancouver in 2010, when system administrators feared that employees watching the video streams online would max out the bandwidth on their corporate networks. This time, I think, will be different, because even though the 2014 Winter Olympics are taking place in far-off Sochi, they will be almost completely surrounding us, almost everywhere.

Even in the short time since the 2012 Winter Olympics in London, the number of screens infiltrating everyday life has grown enormously. This includes not only traditional digital signage and large-scale video walls and monitors but the screens on mobile devices like smart phones and tablets. This has created an enormous appetite for content, for which the 2014 Winter Olympics offers a compelling, if limited, solution. (As I write these words, for example, I’m sitting in a coffee shop just outside a large bank which is broadcasting the opening ceremonies in Sochi to people waiting in line.)

Anyone walking down the average street in a major city, a mall or even a lot of office buildings can expect to see Olympics 2014 content shown (and reshown) on whatever digital signage real estate is available. Firms like Screenfeed are making this easier than ever by offering three different feeds of footage including medal results, athlete profiles and news to its customer base. It’s perhaps only natural that organizations would use something as universally popular as the Winter Olympics to demonstrate and perhaps even test the power of the digital signage they’ve deployed.

The risk is over-saturation — that, once the Sochi Olympics are over, those passing by the same digital displays will no longer stop, gather in clusters and engage with the technology for an extended period of time. Even as the Games go on, will anyone stick around long enough to take in any of the other, more business-oriented content that those signs and video walls are supposed to show? If the Winter Olympics becomes the digital signage equivalent of wallpaper, will anything else stand out, before the medals are won or afterwards?

Canadian researchers in interactive display should explore what this kind of phenomenon has on human attention spans and the capacity to capture it. Oddly enough, the situation reminds me of something that ended just as the 2014 Winter Olympics began: Jay Leno’s version of The Tonight Show. As some might remember, Leno’s program wasn’t gaining traction until he secured an interview with actor Hugh Grant in 1995 during some major controversy. Naturally, that night saw sky-high ratings, but Leno continued to maintain a lead for years to come. In an interview much later, I remember him saying (and I’m paraphrasing), “I’d like to think that when people tuned in that night, they realized it was worth sticking around.”

Anyone innovating with digital signage should work hard to achieve a similar effect. This is one of those moments when the world will be watching, and looking for places to watch. Fulfilling that basic need is one thing, but doing it in a way that gives them a reason to return? That’s going for the gold.