How Signage Supports an Ethos of 'Play' at a Beloved Book Retailer

Popular, Japanese mega bookstore, Village Vanguard, describes themselves as “a bookstore where you can play.” Founded in 1986 and known for creating engaging, memorable, and interactive shopping experiences for their tech savvy customers, Village Vanguard Corporation was eager to set a new standard for tech-based experiences for brick-and-mortar bookstores around the globe.

With a Retail Signage solution deployed on AITRIOS™, Village Vanguard sought to understand how many customers were taking advantage of in-store media displays advertising new items and special offers. They wanted to know which content their shoppers preferred the most, learning how to tailor these promotions in ways that would have better reception from their customer base.

Focused simply on viewership metrics, or how many and how long a person interacted with digital-signage, and how it tracked to the ad being run on screen, Village Vanguard found a way to create more-dynamic in-store content with only the use of metadata analysis on the edge, keeping their store’s cloud environments lean, and supporting their 412 employees* by keeping technical knowledge and maintenance light.

Our Tokyo-based team was eager to sit down for a meeting with Village Vanguard Corporation’s Ltd. Sales Planning Office Manager, Shuta Yato to learn about VV’s approach to technology in their brick-and-mortar stores.

Read the conversation, transcribed from Japanese, below.

Sony: What was the reason Village Vanguard started using digital signage in stores?

Yato: We started using digital signage in our stores to help customers of all ages learn more about Village Vanguard. The digital signage provides information on events at Village Vanguard stores, product introductions, special offers to customers, and other useful and enjoyable content.

AITRIOS-powered installation at their flagship store in Shibuya prefecture.

Sony: What is one of the most important elements of digital signage that you were hoping to improve with AITRIOS™?

Yato: For us to create content our customers will watch and enjoy, it's important to know what kinds of content interest them most. However, even with the signage in place, it was unclear if the content was being watched. Therefore, we needed more data on the viewership metrics of the signage.

Sony: What led you to choose AITRIOS to help you make these improvements in your digital signage approach?

Yato: Among the current signage viewership offerings available today, there are three points that led us to Sony's solution on AITRIOS™.

The first was the size of the camera.
Sony’s AITRIOS-enabled cameras are extremely small, so they’re less noticeable to customers on the sales floor and do not disrupt visibility of the sales floor for shoppers or employees.

The second reason was Sony’s advanced privacy measures.
Customers are more privacy-conscious than ever, as are we. Sony AITRIOS converts images to metadata at the camera, so there is no capturing of any information that can be used to identify the customer. This means we can obtain signage viewership ratings while respecting customer privacy.

Finally, we now have the information available to know if people are watching the signage content.
With the Sony AITRIOS solution, we can now understand how long their figure stands in front of the screen, increasing the credibility and verifying whether the viewers watched, which allows us to learn which content our customers like best.

Sony: Now that you’re starting to integrate AITRIOS more widely, what does this mean next for Village Vanguard?

Village Vanguard Corporation Co., Ltd. Sales Planning Office Manager, Shuta Yato

Yato: With the introduction of Sony AITRIOS to our business, we can conduct a variety of analyses, even beyond understanding our viewer content ratings. Now, based on the verification of these results with AITRIOS we can begin improving our content development for the greater enjoyment of our customers who shop in store.

*Based on VV provided employee data as of late 2023.