SMS Run RSS Trivia On Digital Signage

Just about every digital signage software company has the ability to insert an RSS feed as a ticker on their screens. All a third party company would have to do is create RSS feeds that a digital signage network would subscribe to. You would have a myriad of different feeds. Each feed will be have trivia questions on a specific subject. Each subject will have multiple questions. Example subjects follow.

Doctor/Dentist trivia questions: obviously for signs in doctors and dentists offices

Sports Trivia: for sports bars etc.

Car trivia: for a DMV or car show.

Food trivia: hospitality or grocery etc.

The list could go on and on. The point is that each feed will have multiple questions that have a theme for the venue the digital sign is in. Now, as I was thinking about this, I thought to myself: How is this thing going to work because we won’t give the answers on the screen. They’ll have to text in their answers to see if they’re correct and the returning SMS will give the answer to them if they get it wrong. And, of course an ad will be attached at the bottom of the return text message.

Here’s where things get tricky. Each question will be unique and will need to be identified when the person is texting in. In addition, each screen will be unique and will need to be identified so we can specifically target and hone the return texts. So, here’s how it works. We use ADJECTIVES and VERBS together as a key phrase. The adjective will identify the screen and the verb will tell us what question is being answered by the text that is coming in.

For instance, on the RSS feed the question might be displayed for 30 seconds or one minute, “Who won the 1945 world series? Text ‘fuzzy bunny’ + your answer to 98765 to win.” The keyword “fuzzy” identifies the screen’s specific address or location (e.g. Pizza Hut on the corner of 3200 S. State). The word “bunny” identifies the question the person is answering. In this case the question is “who won the world series?” And the precise keyword that identifies that question with the server is “bunny.” So, when they text in their answer, attached to those two keywords, we know where they are and what question they are attempting to answer. We’ll send back a response that could either appear as:

“Yay, correct. Congrats. Sponsered by Pfizer.com. Go to Pfizer.com to get a free subscription to Viagra”

Or

“You suck, the answer is XYZ. Try again. By the way stop by our snack bar for $1 off smoothies for trying.”

Now, here’s another interesting tid bit. You don’t have to do any integration whatsoever. We just have to convince signage hosts to subscribe to an RSS feed that will be displayed on their screen. They will be encouraged, either by a partner or an online digital signage portal of another company to come to your site and generate their own RSS feed. They’ll give the SMS digital signage company the location of their screen, the type of business (and thus the type of trivia they’d like to see displayed based on the targeted audience) And they’ll be a canned list of trivia questions used, each being displayed at 30 second or minute intervals in a loop. However, the difference is that the questions will have different keyword ADJECTIVE S for the different screens. The VERBS would be the same based on the specific questions. For instance:

The keyword or VERB “dog” would always be tied to “How many people are alive on planet earth?”

The keyword ADJECTIVE “happy” would be tied to Desert Sun tanning on 3rd Avenue.

So, all you need to do is create an RSS generator for a website. All it would really be generating is an ADJECTIVE to attach to very specific screen location. The verbs would already be assigned to all the questions in a database. Signage hosts can come on and once they give us their locations, you’d create a specific RSS feed tailored to them. This way you can sell to advertisers based on location as well as other demographics. No software integration with any digital signage companies necessary. Just a simple and separate RSS generator program that allows for unique TaggBacks.

For each genre of RSS feed, you could have 40 questions each rotating about once an hour or so, giving people enough time to think and text in their answers. Also, we only have to have about 15 genres so a total of about 600 trivia questions should do.

This way, you don’t to integrate software plugins etc. All you have to do is get each sign content manager to have an incentive to place a trivia RSS on his screen. This is the easy part. A rev share with text message responses or advertising space on returning texts could do the trick. As it becomes more scalable, monetizing it should not be a problem whatsoever.

This may be a bit confusing, but I believe it would be a great way to engage audiences that have longer dweller times with their digital signage without too much effort on the part of the company creating the system. I’ve thought about doing it with our system, but we currently don’t have the time.