Here is the number that should worry anyone with a digital signage budget: a shopper gives a screen two or three seconds. That is the entire window. Every content decision, every placement negotiation, every media rate card ultimately depends on what happens in that sliver of time — and until recently, nobody measured it. Footfall counters told you 40,000 people walked past a screen last month. They said nothing about whether a single one of them turned their head.
That gap has shaped the economics of the entire category. When media companies sell signage inventory on estimated impressions, buyers apply a discount for uncertainty. When retailers review their screen network at budget time, it sits in the cost column because nobody can show what it earned. When mall operators price advertising space, they price it on proximity to traffic, not on proven viewership — which means their best-performing locations are almost certainly underpriced and their worst are quietly overcharging advertisers who will eventually notice.
This is where the conversation has moved with Vemco's View Direction sensor technology. Instead of counting bodies, it detects the direction a person is facing and looking, and measures how many seconds a shopper holds their gaze toward a screen — capturing even a brief glance. That distinction between passing and looking is the whole game, and it breaks down into four measurable dimensions:
Notice what this structure does. Reach is the metric advertisers already understand from every other media channel. View Direction and Attention Duration are the metrics that make signage comparable to digital advertising, where viewability and dwell are standard currency. Comparison is the metric that makes the network itself improvable. Most signage operators have never had any of the four.
Traditional footfall counting was never wrong — it was incomplete. Knowing that a corridor carries heavy traffic tells you a screen there has potential exposure. It does not tell you whether the screen is mounted too high, angled against the natural walking direction, running content with text too small to read in three seconds, or simply positioned at a point where shoppers are looking at wayfinding signs instead. All four of those failure modes produce identical footfall numbers and wildly different attention numbers.
Here is something implementers learn quickly once attention data starts flowing: the highest-traffic location is frequently not the highest-attention location. Screens near escalators and entrances often score enormous reach and dismal view rates, because people in transit zones are managing their movement, not scanning for content. Meanwhile a screen beside a queue, a seating area, or a decision point — where do I turn, which floor is that store on — can pull attention durations several times longer from a fraction of the traffic. Without direction and duration data, operators keep paying premium placement costs for transit-zone screens that nobody looks at, and keep underinvesting in the dwell zones that actually work. The data does not just validate the network; it usually rearranges it.
For media and signage companies, the immediate value is in the sales conversation. Proving audience value with hard data changes the negotiation from "trust our traffic estimate" to "here is measured reach and here is the share of that audience that actually looked." That is language a media buyer's attribution model can accept. It also protects rates: when an advertiser questions performance, you can respond with attention data per campaign per location rather than a defensive traffic report. Some inventory will measure worse than the estimates it was sold on — accept that early, because repricing weak locations honestly is what makes premium pricing on strong locations credible.
For mall operators, attention measurement turns advertising space into a properly priced asset class. Instead of flat rates by zone, you can price on demonstrated viewership — and demonstrate it to advertisers with the same confidence a website shows viewable impressions. Because View Direction runs on an open API and flows into the same platform as Vemco's footfall and tenant analytics, alongside VemCount and VemTenant, attention data sits next to the traffic and tenant performance data operators already use. That matters practically: you can correlate screen attention with the footfall of adjacent tenants, which is exactly the kind of evidence that supports both media pricing and leasing conversations.
For retailers, the question shifts from "should we have screens" to "which screens, where, showing what." Window displays are a good example — they represent prime physical real estate, and most retailers have no idea whether theirs stop anyone. Measuring how many passers-by turn toward the window, and for how long, finally puts visual merchandising on the same evidential footing as an email campaign. Inside the store, comparing content variants against attention duration is a genuine A/B testing loop: run two creative versions across matched locations for two weeks each and let the seconds decide.
Attention metrics are only as trustworthy as the counting layer beneath them. Vemco commits to a contractual minimum of 96% counting accuracy, typically reaching 98–99% when conditions such as lighting, store layout and visitor behaviour allow. That phrasing is deliberate — anyone promising a flat guaranteed figure regardless of environment is telling you something about their sales process, not their sensors. Site conditions matter, and an honest vendor says so. If you are evaluating providers, ask how accuracy is defined, whether it is contractual, and what happens when a site underperforms the commitment.
You do not need to instrument every screen on day one. A pragmatic first phase covers three location types: your assumed best performer, your assumed worst, and one location you genuinely cannot classify. Run a full trading cycle, including at least one promotional peak, before drawing conclusions — attention behaviour on a quiet Tuesday and a Saturday sale event are different datasets. Then use the Comparison dimension to build an internal benchmark: what view rate and attention duration count as good for your venues, your formats, your audience. External benchmarks are a starting point; your own baseline is what you will actually manage against and, if you sell media, what you will eventually publish to advertisers.
Digital signage has spent two decades as the channel everyone believed in but nobody could prove. The measurement now exists. If you want to see what View Direction data would look like across your screens, windows or advertising inventory — and how it connects to the footfall and tenant analytics you may already run — talk to the Vemco Group team about a View Direction pilot and put real attention numbers behind your next rate card or budget review.