Look at a typical fast food restaurant or cafe. Somewhere behind the counter there will be a menu displayed. In the worst cases, these might be a very amateur list, sometimes even handwritten. Usually, there will be sign written boards. They are drab, tedious, and functional. They show what customers can buy and what the prices are - in the worse cases they prices have been crossed out and new prices written beside the old.

What sort of marketing is this? What kind of image does this give the customer of the business looking for a place to eat?

Slightly more upmarket places, use backlit displays to give their signage a more professional look. They at least replace the actual sign panels every so often, when they want to promote new menu items or change their prices. But they are still boring marketing. They are totally static, with no dynamism.

More recently technology has helped the humble menu board. Digital menu boards offer exciting new ways to target your customers and provide adaptable signs that change to meet their needs.

So what are digital menu boards? In their simplest form, they are electronic screens that provide information to the consumer. The restaurant operator can update the display relatively easily, even from their couch at home if necessary. They are electronic menu signs at eating places, which show the food menu electronically, along with any other messages the operator wants to display. They can be altered to display the list of foods available at particular times (for instance it would only take a flick of a switch to change them from displaying a breakfast menu to a lunch menu).

How Can Digital Menu Boards Help Marketers?

Digital menu boards allow restaurants to combine product promotion with full-motion video and quickly changed content.

Smart tvs can become adjustable, bright, menu boards that change at the blink of an eyelid.

Operators can update prices remotely, and they can seamlessly add or remove menu items. They attract customers, eliminate printing costs, and adapt to a situation relatively quickly and easily.

Restaurateurs can incorporate such things as automatic product pricing updates, direct from their electronic POS systems.

Digital menu boards can be combined with point-of-sale and inventory information to promote high-margin dishes or to run short-term specials on promotion or overstocked items. They can show what’s in stock (and avoid showing what isn’t). Operators can drop a promotion immediately when the stock of the promoted item is exhausted.

You can show dynamic content targeted at customers at the most suitable times, changing the focus of what is displayed depending on which customers are there at any particular point in time.

The operator can remotely monitor and change the display depending on the circumstances, e.g. you can easily display custom messages at set points of time.

You could even automate and accelerate the food ordering process by connecting interactive kiosks with digital menu boards. This could reduce personnel costs.

How Can You Use Facial Detection With Digital Menu Boards?

Digital menu boards themselves are an exciting development in point of sale marketing. However, you can go one step further. You can ramp your entire marketing effort up to a higher level of digital intelligence.

Imagine having a digital menu board equipped with a camera which counts the number of individuals in the vicinity, to measure potential exposure. You could gather information about the age and gender of people present.

Imagine how you could modify the menus displayed to highlight those items that would most interest the people who are physically in front of the screen at any moment in time.

You could also gather information such as the age and gender of individuals who look at particular ads incorporated in your digital menu board, and how long the ad holds their attention.

If you have multiple digital menu boards with cameras integrated you can easily determine where the customers' eyes actually focus. To which boards do the customers give most of their attention? Precisely where do the customers actually look? With that information, you could choose how to best allocate your valuable screen real estate.

What Useful Analytics Can I Gather From These Boards?

Operators can segment the day into as many parts as they choose, incorporating analytics to increase the effectiveness of their content. Why have totally restrictive hours defined for breakfast if your analytics suggests that there is a sizeable demand for breakfast dishes outside those set times? The analytics could provide you with evidence as to when particular menu items are of interest to people. For instance, people's focus could well be on quick-eating items at lunch, salads and healthy items in the early afternoon, snacks and high energy items straight after school. If your analytics provides you with this data, then your menus could focus on the high-interest products at their best-selling times.

You might find from using these boards that interest in cooked products increases on chilly Monday mornings. You could, therefore, target promotions to improve these sales further.

The technology now available can provide raw data which you can analyze to provide all kinds of useful information to marketers and restaurant operators. For example, facial detection software could help in determining the best location for maximum audience exposure. It could analyze consumer demographics based on the time of day or day of the week, the gender and age of the customers, as well as gauging customer reaction to changing displays. You can truly customise your menus to reflect the people actually present, and provide appropriate upsells for those particular people.

In the case of any ads in the displays (as distinct from the menu displays themselves), you can analyse factors such as dwell time (the amount of time spent lingering near an ad), number of people who look at the display, and length of time spent looking at the actual ad. These analytics are useful to advertisers because they let them know how well their ad is working, and whether it is eye-catching and targeted enough. Above all else, you know who is taking the time to look at the menu board.

If you have access to data about your regulars, it is possible to tailor menus (particularly in drive-throughs) to focus on the products that those customers have ordered in the past. It would be useful to have the ability to enable loyalty plans using cameras and smartphones, or other forms of known customer ID, such as RFID connectors to numberplates.

If you provide pictures of menu items ordered at the drive-through, confirmation can happen more rapidly. Also, providing images of upsell items that you know would pique the interest of any particular customer is likely to maximize the order value.

Digital Signage Today sees that there are real possibilities for uses of analytics-driven digital merchandising in drive-throughs.

What Good Could They Do For Me?

It is vital that if you are a firm thinking about these marketing possibilities you need to first work out what your primary objective is before you spend any money on new technology. Don’t just introduce new technology for the sake of being high-tech. Have a good reason for going that way. If you are considering this type of investment, look at the return on your particular objectives, rather than necessarily a return on investment. Is your aim to use these boards to increase sales, to increase spending per customer (by showing more suitable menus for the actual people present), to reduce wait times, perhaps some other goal?

You could begin measuring the impact of a digital menu board system, by conducting basic tests comparing a restaurant outfitted with digital menu boards with one using static menu boards. You simply promote a particular menu item on the digital menu board over a number of weeks, comparing sales figures with those of the store that uses static menu boards. Look for any obvious trends.

You could then add in digital cameras and start to look at the analytics produced. At this point, you could run a variety of promotional content to evaluate the effectiveness of one over the other. Do a number of A/B tests.

You could track the effects of external factors such as weather, the day of the week or the time of day. Live data feeds can allow managers to adjust their marketing messages in real time, aiming to affect customers’ decisions, boost sales figures and reduce waste.

Digital menu boards that provide analytics and enable easy, quick changes to be made, regularly provide a far better return, than static unchanging boards. This benefit occurs because the content is intelligent and takes into consideration the immediate environment and influences on the target customer. If, for example, the data illustrates that greater purchase numbers occur for a particular drink or side dish when promoted beside a core menu item, apply variations on this promotional tactic more regularly to increase overall order value.

Are There Any Limitations?

There is a danger that restaurant managers try to use up every square inch of their board (because they feel have paid for it). It is possible to display too much information on a digital menu board. The aim is to get customers through the order process as quickly as possible, so you don’t want customers getting bogged down in screens that are too information-centric. The content you display has to be impactful and meaningful.

There are some technical limitations for facial detection. Variable lighting, particularly in an outdoor setting could cause difficulties in picking up accurate results. As useful as the technology could be at the drive-through, the results may not yet be consistent enough to be practical.

Age groups are still relatively broad, which might have an impact on the analysis of fast food restaurants who focus on children and teenagers. A 5-year-old's tastes are very different from a 10-year-old's, but they are lumped in the same age grouping by the software. Also, most software cannot yet identify race or ethnicity, despite the fact that this information could be of great use for marketing purposes.

Clearly, facial-detection software only categorises consumers by outward appearance, so it relies on general assumptions, rather than actual information unique to particular people. It is not going to know if a particular customer is gluten-intolerant for instance.

Conclusion

Advertisers can finally receive feedback from out-of-home advertising. They can use this to tailor the message based on who is looking at it - both the actual items highlighted in the menu, and any other ads or messages displayed.

The demographic data collected by this type of software is unbiased. Measurements are more accurate than comparative data gathered by such methods as surveys, which rely on the truthfulness and accuracy of the people filling them out.

One feature of a menu board is that the people looking at it have probably already made the decision to eat at that restaurant. Therefore, the likelihood of someone looking seriously at a digital menu board is higher than the probability of someone taking notice of most other types of digital signage. The purpose of one that integrates facial detection and cameras is clearly to increase the spending of those people who are already there. It aims to ensure that as many customers as possible see products they like, and as such will spend more than they otherwise would have.

Restaurant owners and their marketers should be excited about the possibilities that interactive digital menu boards offer them, particularly for targeted upselling.