Digital signage is an exquisite tool that can help achieve pretty much any goal for your business. Although not primarily designed for this, it is also an awesome tool for building an ambiance within any establishment. In this article, we’ll explore a few possibilities and share some tips on creating the perfect ambiance with digital signage.
Use digital signage as lighting
Of course, a display may not be the perfect lamp to do your work under, so don’t take this approach too literally. Instead, treat digital signage as ambient lighting which can vaguely illuminate an area and cast shadows to create dimension. Indeed, shadows can be a great asset to use to provide depth and richness inside your business. This is especially important in establishments which focus on entertainment and the comfort factor.
Cafes, bars, restaurants, or hotel lobbies all want to generate a certain vibe with digital signage. It helps when carefully placed in locations where it won’t be in the way or be an eyesore to patrons. We wrote a detailed article on using digital signage in cafes to get that perfect setup.
Build dimension
Continuing on the topic of lighting, there are so many possibilities and products available today to create dimension. For a start, be sure to adjust the brightness of your displays so that it matches the overall light in the area. Automatic adjustment is even better. Furthermore, blend the lights around your displays to match them. You can do this with LED lights or similar decorations on the back of displays. They add depth and visually distance the display from the wall. This provides a soft frame for the display and at the same time blends it with the surroundings.
The placement of displays is also important, especially when you want to highlight specific parts of the establishment. The bar, for instance, is always the brightest place in the room. You can build dimension here by using displays as part of that illumination. Advertisements or promotions would fit in well here as well.
Be mindful of content brightness
This is a broad guideline. In this instance it refers to the lighting power of your displays. Be aware how much light every piece of your content will cast on the room. You may have an ad featuring darker colors. And then, suddenly, out comes a nearly all-white visual with an announcement for the patron. These types of sharp transitions are great at catching attention, but they can quickly get annoying, especially in darker spaces. Outdoors, it’s not as big of a problem, even at night. But indoors, where you want to create a balanced ambiance with your digital signage, these sharp flashes can really become distracting and ruin the mood.
A uniform setup of content helps a lot in this regard where the color scheme is mostly the same, ideally complementing your corporate identity colors. In case of extreme changes in the brightness of the content, fading or smoother transitions can soften the blow.
Build ambiance with digital signage through decoration
We’ve talked about the physical presence of display lights to build a mood. With all that in mind, we can focus on more specific content uses. Depending on what ambiance you want to build with digital signage, find appealing visuals to match it and deploy them on your displays. A winter wonderland, a summer vacation, or a love-focused theme for Valentine’s Day are all excellent choices to incorporate in your displays.
We used bars and cafes as examples, but this also applies to other businesses such as retail stores, hotel lobbies, dentist offices, etc. It all depends on what ambiance you feel your customers and clients will appreciate and embrace. For example, a dentist’s office might benefit from a bit of entertainment such as fun-fact videos on oral hygiene. Similarly, place a crackling fire in a hotel lobby. Play car manufacturing videos at a car dealership, or showcase some fun cooking tips in a bakery. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Brainstorm! Think up the content unique to your line of business and build an ambiance around it. There’s the entirety of the internet available for you to collect some stunning visuals for this purpose. Get going!
Ambiance is not an exclusive purpose
You can amp up the ambiance factor to the extreme and really transport your consumers to a different location. Or you can balance your displays and create comfortable surroundings without sacrificing the other purposes of your digital signage. Yes, you can replace all your promotional content with beautiful waterfalls or sunshine, but you can also retain your existing content while adding an extra visual to the background or around your messaging.
The examples we discussed above are, of course, specific cases. A bar or a cafe thrives on the atmosphere they create. For other businesses, ambiance is not necessarily a priority. Fortunately, with digital signage, you don’t have to sacrifice other important purposes of your digital signage to achieve it!